Chloé Sautter-Léger Western Berlin, 2017
Jeanne mammen: fashioning the ‘neue frau’
Inspired by the mass-media portrayal of women and consumption of fashion in Berlin, Mammen’s paintings and illustrations reflect and challenge the discourse around gender and femininity in the Weimar era.
by Margaux Shraiman
T
he ‘Neue Frau’, or ‘New Woman’, of the Weimar era is distinguishable by her trademark cropped hair, intense makeup, independence, youth, sportiness, and metropolitan attitude, but she was above all -- a working woman. The ‘Neue Frau’ was situated at the intersection of fashion mass media, body culture, and socioeconomic changes for women during this time. Thus the ‘Neue Frau’ became a source of anxiety during the interwar years because she challenged traditional gender roles and destabilized patriarchal societal norms. They were often represented in media as obsequious followers of fashion, effectively emptying them of their political and social agency. The ‘Neue Frau’ became a consuming woman: empty-headed, superficial, and concerned with only surface-level mindless consumption of commodities. As a female artist frequenting Berlin’s ‘degenerate’ underground spaces at this time:
Jeanne Mammen was ideally situated to explore the “multifaceted nature of the ‘Neue Frau’ stereotype” and her work refutes the argument that women consumed mass media uncritically.1 Mammen’s own Weimar-era fashion illustrations demonstrate her “intimate familiarity with the marketable icon of the ‘Neue Frau’” while offering a social critique of urban gender roles by examining the relationships of the ‘Neue Frau’.2 Her work managed to visually reflect patriarchal critiques that viewed the modern women as bored and apathetic, without necessarily confirming this view. This paper will employ close visual analysis of a cross section of Jeanne Mammen’s Weimar-era works and contemporary fashion illustration, as well as an analysis of secondary sources in order to show that Mammen reclaimed the male dominated language of fashion in order to explore and contradict popular conceptions of the modern woman as a superficial
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