oa Empire and gender in the ‘Navy City’

The article explores how imperial naval activity shaped conceptions of masculinity and femininity in the German naval port town of Wilhelmshaven at the turn of the twentieth century. In this period, discourses of empire and gender intersected with local dynamics, as the civic community increasingly identified as a ‘Navy City’. Male residents portrayed naval soldiers as embodiments of a reinvigorated German masculinity and appropriated this symbolism to define the city’s identity. Conversely, to affirm the soldiers’ supposed imperial virility and ‘German’ respectability, public discourse moreover projected complementary notions of femininity onto the women who interacted with the soldiers. This prompted Wilhelmshaven’s women to understand their own femininity in relation to Germany’s imperial expansion, sometimes along explicitly racial lines. Overall, the article argues that naval port towns were unique sites where abstract notions of empire and gender became tangible and localized through frequent interactions between the military and civilian spheres.