Whereas Robert Jay Lifton wrote in The Nazi Doctors (1986) about the psychological gymnastics Nazi doctors performed to rationalize their participation in the concentration camps, and Michael Kater provided a solid social history in Doctors under Hitler (1989), in Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany, Melissa Kravetz has written a history of the gendered language female physicians in organized medicine used to justify their potentially unladylike insistence on studying the human body and working outside the home. Female physicians in Germany in the 1920s through 1940s were begrudgingly tolerated by their male colleagues, even as their presence in clinics and hospitals was increasingly necessary due to the exclusion of non-Aryan practitioners from 1933 and the general shortage of labor during World War II. Throughout, they contended that German patients needed female doctors because girls had questions about their changing bodies that their mothers could not answer; women with marital problems such as fear of unwanted pregnancy would not open up to male practitioners; and physicians who were both wives and mothers understood how to attend to the health of the nation.

Over two and a half decades, female physicians manipulated German society's sexism, classism, and racism to their professional advantage. In her analysis of their “maternalist discourses” (4), Kravetz argues that women doctors individually and especially collectively—through the Bund Deutscher Ärztinnen (League of German Female Physicians, BDÄ)—accepted the limited area of responsibility conceded to them, namely “social welfare” positions caring for women and children, and then generated new spaces for themselves and new services for their patients. They did so by transforming their personal experiences in the domestic sphere into professional expertise in the public sphere. In the process, they attempted to replace supposed lower-class habits with cleanliness, order, and other upper-middle-class values. As Kravetz poignantly observes, “They were making professional gains on the backs—or the breasts—of other women” (175).

In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, the book is divided into five chapters according to the medical spaces into which female physicians were able to insert themselves. At marriage counseling centers, they dispensed birth control. In girls’ schools, they oversaw health and physical education. Some of their most overtly political work during the Weimar period was agitating for equal treatment of prostitutes and their clients in venereal disease clinics. Female physicians also promoted temperance with alcohol for reasons of eugenics and the alleviation of the misery of impoverished families. During the Third Reich, married women were initially barred from earning an income if their husbands were employed, but female physicians could volunteer with party organizations for women and girls. Finally, in the most original chapter, Kravetz recounts Dr. Marie-Elise Keyser's organizing efforts around the scarce “natural resource” of breast milk. This pioneering pediatrician opened the first breast milk collection facility in Magdeburg in 1919 and later coordinated donations Reich-wide from the clinic she and her husband ran in Erfurt.

In terms of actual practices, Kravetz finds continuity across the dividing line of January 30, 1933, insofar as many of those female physicians who were allowed to remain in medicine after the “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) of German society continued to work part-time in marriage counseling or racial hygiene clinics, with youth groups, and at breast milk collection facilities. What changed was that these professional women proved increasingly willing to capitalize on opportunities the National Socialist state provided them in order to claim that they were uniquely qualified to care for the health of the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). At best they (re)politicized their patients’ needs in terms of the needs of the Nazi Party and state, and at worst they opportunistically put their career prospects ahead of the good of (some of) their patients. What the Weimar state might have done for the health of all its citizens, the Third Reich was determined to do only for worthy Volksgenossen (Aryan comrades), as the government reached further into what was left of the private sphere after the institution of the welfare state during Weimar.

Sometimes Kravetz's focus on the physicians’ rhetoric and her reiteration of it obscures both the reality (a small number of actors in a few positions) and more granular details (such as specific birth control practices). Nevertheless, the book ends with a concise conclusion without the mild repetition that characterizes the earlier chapters. In her meticulous endnotes, Kravetz has done students and scholars of women, gender, and medicine in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century the great favor of summarizing the arguments of researchers writing in this field since the 1970s. Although Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany concentrates on the discursive practices of female physicians, it inspires the reader to consider what these women were willing to compromise in order to continue doing what they loved, felt called to do, and thought necessary for their patients and themselves. This volume deserves to be widely read and cited; it could be assigned to both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students.