Figure 1.--Here we see an unidentified brother and sister fairly close in age, probably about 11-14 years old. The boy wears strap shoes with three-quater socks while his big sister wears oxfords with anklets. Clearly the strap shoe were not seen as a girl's shoe style at the time. The boys wears suspebnders anbd short pants. Notice that there are no belt loops on the pants. We know the snapshot was taken in 1931 because someone has written the date on the pohotograph. The children seem to be on a park outing. We are not sure what the buildings in the backgrouns are. They look like ruins of some sort.

The strap shoe was a common child's style in Germany. Both boys and girls commonly vwore them. This varied significantly over time. We still have limited information on the 19th century. We have much more detailed information on the 20th century. We see both boys and girls commonly wearing strap shoes in the early-20th century. During this period they appear to be a child's style with limited gender connotations. They vseem to be somewhat more popular with girls, but we see many boys wearing them, even some teenagers. The photographic record suggests that unlike America, there was no string gender connotations. We see images with all the children in the family wearing them and smetimes the girtls and other times the boys. They were commonly worn by boys when dressing up, but also for play and school. This genberal pattern was observable during the 1900s-20s as well as the early-30s. This changed dramatically in the mid-30s. Girls of all continued to wear them, but school age boys suddently stopped wearing them and we no longer see them in the 1940s. We are not entirely sure why boys stopped wearing them. We only think we can think is that they were discouraged in the Hitler Youth with its hyper-masculine ethos. We are unsure just how this message was transmitted toi the boys to cause such a rapid shift in gender conventions. We think tht they had been most common with middle-class and upper-class families and we see the decline of other class orirnted tules like the sailor suit.

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Created: 6:10 AM 8/26/2011
Last updated: 6:10 AM 8/26/2011