During Emmy Noether’s life women’s status in society was on the rise. Women in western countries were starting to fight their oppressors together. There was a volatile combination of a heavily Protestant and liberal population as well as a political system that lent itself to social change in a way that hadn’t been seen before. Women were starting to unify together and breakthroughs in technology only helped this sociological shift.
The technology at the time like the telephone and radio allowed for easier communication between people and it became that much easier for women to communicate with each other when throughout history women have been kept subservient partially because they were unable to organize. Communication methods before these inventions relied heavily on someone’s ability to read and write. Since women were so often barred from education they often could not read but with the telephone and radio working together no longer required physically being near each other. An organized group is much more difficult to monitor if the members are not forced to do all their planning in person.
Shifts in media also boosted women’s status. The movie theater, for instance, changed how common people consumed stories. Live performances like plays were too extravagant for people with little disposable income, like women with little to no say under the law where finances were concerned, were suddenly given a lens into their own lives. Women gained an outside perspective to how they were treated by society. This vision gave a clear view to women of how society sees them and gave them the ability to judge for themselves what life they wanted. The spread of the film industry gave marginalized groups insight into other ways of life.
During Emmy’s life, the changes and breakthroughs in technology gave women a voice in a way they didn’t have before. In Germany, the socialist-feminists had 141,000 female members in 1913. Bismarck even banned this political group fighting for women’s rights (Pugh 1997). The male vote could have done little to help women as the restrictive and oppressive government suppressed even male suffrage. What women in Germany needed was Germany’s defeat in World War I that overthrew their government.
