In the struggle for increased educational and employment opportunities for women that took place in Europe and America during the second half of the nineteenth century, no profession was the subject of more controversy than medicine.1 Although the issues involved in this controversy were similar in most countries, the paths by which women eventually succeeded in entering the medical profession displayed an intriguing variety. In Britain and the United States, resistance from much of the medical establishment forced women to found independent medical schools for the training of female physicians. Women in France and Switzerland, in contrast, gained access to existing medical faculties in the 1860s; yet for many years very few French or Swiss women took advantage of the opportunities available. In both countries, Russian women generally comprised the largest number of female medical students during the period, especially in the years before 1873 and again between 1882 and 1897, when no courses were available to them inside Russia.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels emerged as socialist theoreticians of the first rank at a time when many of their rivals were still engaged in efforts to design visionary ideal societies. Although they did not hesitate to appropriate key concepts from some of the most original of these architects of the future, Marx and Engels were quite rightly convinced that one of their first tasks must be to still the siren song of the so-called utopian socialists if they hoped to build a politically effective movement. They therefore launched a polemic against the “systematic pendantry” and the “fanatical and superstitious belief[s]” of these builders of “castles in the air” which eventually proved so effective that many contemporary as well as later commentators denied, ignored, or at the very least vastly underestimated the significance of the millenarian appeal of Marxism itself.

In a pioneering work on the regional expansion of the Nazi party (NSDAP) in Schleswig-Holstein before 1933, Rudolf Heberle suggested that “if one wants to understand the reason for its final success, one should study the Nazi movement in its rural strongholds.”1 As early as 1928, the Nazi party could rely on rural strongholds, ranging from Schleswig-Holstein to Baden. The party received particularly firm support from small and medium-sized Protestant farmers. By July 1932 the NSDAP won over fifty percent of the popular vote, not only in the province of Schleswig-Holstein but also in many smaller rural Protestant electoral districts in Germany. Most historians have attributed this rural electoral swing to the NSDAP to a combination of factors which usually include the deterioration of the farmer's economic position, the farmer's alienation from the “Weimar System,” and the Nazi party's antiurban propaganda which appealed to “certain deep-seated resentments and sentiments.”2