The discrepancy between civic equality of women and men on the one hand and manifold - partly obvious, partly subtle - inequalities between the sexes on the other has shaped the history of democracy in the Weimar Republic and in the Federal Republic. The conflicts over the order of German society resulting from such contradictions and their significance for the transformation of democracy are the focus of the joint project "Democracy and Gender". In a diachronic approach from the Weimar Republic to the 1990s, the project examines the history of democracy from a gender perspective. Democracy is understood as a social practice that is expanded and limited, reinterpreted and changed in everyday interactions.

Since fall 2022, the Gerda Henkel Foundation has been funding the collaborative project, in which the IfZ, the Chair of Transnational History of the 19th Century at the Ruhr University Bochum, and the Chair of Modern History at the University of Bayreuth are participating. It emerged from the working group "Democracy and Gender" based at the IfZ and is integrated into its structures. Thematically, the project concentrates on three thematic areas in which conflictual negotiations about democracy and gender emerge particularly vividly:

1. Eva Oberloskamp is working on the postdoctoral project "Democracy and Gender Orders in Rural Areas of the Weimar Republic" at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and is simultaneously taking on the leadership of the collaborative project.
2. Benedikt Breisacher is working on "Antifeminism in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1950s to 1990s" in his dissertation project at the University of Bayreuth (supervised by Prof. Dr. Isabel Heinemann and Prof. Dr. Kirsten Heinsohn/Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg).
3. Faruk Güler analyzes in his dissertation project at the Ruhr-University Bochum "Transnational Politics in the Diaspora: Exiles in the Federal Republic between 1967 and 1989" (Supervision by Prof. Dr. Sandra Maß).