History of the women’s movement: Between condescension and self-determination

In 2008, Stefanie Lohaus was one of the founders of the “Missy Magazine”, a popular, pop culture-inspired journalistic alternative to the long-established magazine “Emma” published by Alice Schwarzer. Today she only works there in an advisory capacity; since 2023 she has been part of the management team at the European Academy for Women in Politics and Business (EAF) in Berlin, a research and consulting institute for more diversity in leadership positions. Now Lohaus takes stock of feminist movements from a German perspective – and takes a calmly mediating position.

Your book sees itself as a historical reappraisal and at the same time as a trend-setting appeal. The author, born in 1978 and raised in Dinslaken in the Lower Rhine on the northern edge of the Ruhr area, repeatedly refers to her own experiences, which is why she often uses the first person form. The target group is a broad audience; Lohaus deliberately does not write in a scientific style. The numerous references to central works on women’s and gender politics at home and abroad make it clear how intensively the author has also combed through original sources.

Lohaus divides her cross-generational portrait somewhat schematically into five time periods: the 80s (“Whether we have children or not, we decide for ourselves”), the 90s (“Let it glitter, let it pop, sexism in the back”), the 2000s ( “What really pisses us off? The division into women and men”), the 2010s (“No means no, No means No, whoever says that, means it”) and the 2020s (“Your children will be like us, your children will become queer). The somewhat labored-sounding verse lines assigned to the respective decades are intended to show lines of development that document very different feminist movements.

Incomplete equality

Lohaus has a predominantly West German perspective, but in the chapter on the 1990s she focuses specifically on the situation in East Germany. Even before unification, “around a hundred informal women’s groups that were unwanted by the state” had emerged there. She roughly divides this movement into three currents: the “Women for Peace,” who primarily wanted to prevent the expansion of compulsory military service to women during the Cold War; Christian groups that addressed male dominance in theology and church; and finally lesbian women “who otherwise had little opportunity to develop their sexual identity, create publicity or even obtain information on the subject.”

The author names and acknowledges the partly better conditions for emancipation in the former GDR: the more liberal abortion law, the earlier legalization of homosexuality, comprehensive child care, the completely natural female participation in the workforce with its impact on the balance of power in private relationships, which should not be underestimated. With the collapse of socialism, according to Lohaus’ thesis, it became clear that “the equality decreed from above remained unfinished and role stereotypes were never really dissolved.” Literary works became an important outlet for criticism. Above all, Maxie Wander’s women’s protocols “Good morning, you beautiful” hit a nerve, dealing with taboo topics such as sexual and domestic violence: “Terms such as patriarchy or feminism were, however, left out.”

Less than a month after the opening of the Wall, the Independent Women’s Association was founded in the Berlin Volksbühne and ran together with the Green Party in the 1990 Volkskammer elections in order to represent its concerns in parliament. The alliance won eight mandates, but the UFV came away empty-handed when allocating the places on the list. The subsequent liquidation of the East German economy by the Treuhand hit female employees particularly hard, with many of them becoming unemployed. And the cooperation with the West German feminists also encountered obstacles. Some Eastern women felt that they were being treated condescendingly; goals and priorities differed significantly: in the West the focus was on more private issues such as sexual self-determination, while in the East the focus was primarily on preserving the emancipatory achievements of the GDR.

Mutual devaluation

In the old Federal Republic, demands for equality policy gradually became socially acceptable in the 1980s, and women began to conquer offices and institutions. Alice Schwarzer, who had once initiated the second wave of the feminist movement with her campaign against Paragraph 218, increasingly lost her charisma as a role model. Younger colleagues were looking for new paths, including Stefanie Lohaus. The response to the publication of “Missy,” the author remembers, was overwhelming. “The media coverage about us was almost always about the fact that we were new and that we were distancing ourselves from the old feminism.” She found this constant attribution to be “de-solidarizing,” “after all, it was clear to us that we had not reinvented the wheel.” In almost every interview back then she was asked about Schwarzer. “Our answers were like walking a tightrope; we weren’t pursuing a generational divide.”

But now there is a chasm running through the movement, especially when it comes to issues such as sex work or the rights of trans people. It runs – not only, but also – along age cohorts, separating early feminists from post or online feminists. In the queer scene in particular, the antipathy towards black people has become so entrenched that their undeniable contributions to women’s rights are hardly acknowledged in the gender discourse. On the one hand, this is due to latent xenophobic campaigns, which were revealed, for example, in their assessment and follow-up of the attacks on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. But “Emma’s” positions on prostitution and especially on identity politics also meet with strong contradiction.

The women’s movement, Lohaus states, is “the most successful movement of the 20th century” – because it adheres to the “democratic values ​​of self-determination, freedom and equality” that had previously been denied to the female gender: “Feminists were and are united in the effort to live these values ​​and make them reality. What separates them are questions about whose experiences should be at the center of the discussion. This is phrased diplomatically, but it somewhat obscures the deep-seated controversies that shape the debate today.

Schwarzer’s environment, influenced by the French icon Simone de Beauvoir, and the LGBTQ milieu, influenced by the American philosopher Judith Butler, hardly ever discuss each other anymore. Instead, they label each other with derogatory attributes. Terf, for example, stands for “Trans excluding radical feminists”, which was one of many labels used to attack the British “Harry Potter” author Joanne K. Rowling because she had insisted on the biological binary of the sexes in public statements. On the other hand, “Emma” rages constantly against an anything-goes mentality that supposedly allows people with penises to “invade” protected spaces such as women’s shelters or women’s saunas.

What is interesting from the perspective of the male author of this review is that the question of whether men can also contribute to feminist emancipation, which was once very fundamentally debated, at least in West Germany, has largely moved into the background. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the women’s and lesbian movement initially wanted to be among themselves for understandable reasons. To this day, gender policy discourses, especially in international networks and in the funding practices of the European Union, follow the one-sided motto “Gender means women”. This creates a vacuum that masculinists are trying to exploit. The “anti-feminist men’s rights movement,” which is particularly present in the echo chambers of the Internet, presents itself as a victim. She claims that men, not women, are now disadvantaged in almost every situation.

Even in the initial phase of the second women’s movement, it was of little help to devalue men as “social idiots”, as the self-flagellating author Volker Elis Pilgrim did – or as the Viennese feminists Cheryl Benard and Edit Schlaffer did in their smug complaint “Much Experienced, “understood nothing” as beings incapable of learning. You can only debate and cooperate on an equal level with someone who is not constantly bombarded with accusations. The gender political spectrum has expanded; Intersectional topics, but also gender dialogue-oriented self-representation of male interests, now have their own legitimacy. It’s good that authors like Stefanie Lohaus are contributing to a new openness here.

Stefanie Lohaus: Stronger than anger. How we became feminist and why it’s not enough. Suhrkamp, ​​272 pages, €20.