Ann Taylor Allen, who received her undergraduate degree at Bryn Mawr College and her doctoral degree at Columbia University, is a Professor of History at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany (1984); Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800-1914 (1991); Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma (2005); and Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (2008). She has published many articles on international feminist movements and on the history of the kindergarten in Germany and the United States, including a document project recently published in Women in Social Movements in the United States, an online resource edited by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar.One of her articles won an award from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2002. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has held three guest teaching positions in German universities.

Summary
Historians have said a great deal about feminists’ views of women-their nature, potential, aspirations etc.-but much less about their views of men. As feminists usually aimed to change some aspect of male behavior, however, their programs usually rested on some idea of masculinity. Who were men, how were they motivated, to what extent were they capable of/ willing to change their behavior? This lecture will look at these issues as they arose in feminists’ discussions of the family, and specifically the parental role of fathers, in the first half of the twentieth century. The examples will be taken from the works of the German Lily Braun, the Swedish Alva Myrdal, and the French Simone de Beauvoir.