International Women’s Day: Women in the GDR: Wanting to live as a whole person

When the GDR joined the Federal Republic of Germany, it quickly became apparent that women’s lives had changed more than men’s lives in the four decades of the GDR. The differences between Eastern women and Western women were great when they faced each other in 1990 and could have shaken hands.

Two figures were particularly striking at the time: Firstly, the proportion of all GDR women of the corresponding age who were employed and apprentices was over 90 percent. This means that full-time housewives almost no longer existed. At the time of accession, GDR women contributed more than 40 percent of household income (FRG women contributed less than 20 percent). Secondly, the mother rate in the GDR was over 90 percent at the end of the 1980s. This means that almost all women had at least one child at the end of their fertile phase. The “intentional” childlessness, especially among highly qualified women, which was complained about in all Western countries, did not exist in the GDR.

Surveys on children’s desire to have children in the 1970s and 1980s show that young people in the GDR fulfilled their individual wishes to have children to a large extent. And the majority of them were two children, without taking population policy requirements into account. It goes without saying that such a development requires public childcare. At the end of the 1980s, the care rate for three to six year olds was 95 percent and for children up to three years old it was 80 percent.

Nevertheless, the initial enthusiasm of the people of the GDR for the end of their state was great – for the D-Mark, for freedom of travel, for liberal democracy, for capitalist production relations… In April/May 1990, as various population surveys show, around 80 percent signaled their approval with the social upheavals, men and women alike.

That changed quickly – first and foremost among women, probably because the sudden onset of unemployment initially affected two-thirds of women and because social services in the company (childcare, shopping, lunch provision, etc.) were usually “handled” before the workplace. became. The younger ones reacted with a birth strike, and many also with migration to the western federal states. More than three million East Germans moved to the West after 1990 – as before the Wall was built, predominantly young and well-educated people, unlike before the Wall was built, predominantly women.

In the meantime, the migration has calmed down and East Germans have grown up who only know the GDR through stories. In a few years, the new, larger Federal Republic will be as old as the GDR became. It is all the more astonishing that traces of the GDR’s women’s policy can still be seen.

First, a look at the mother rate. In this regard, how do East Germans react to a society in which the need for public childcare (as highlighted again in the most recent government report on the status of German unification) significantly exceeds the supply? In 2022, only Thuringia achieved a care rate of 92 percent for three to six year olds. All other federal states, especially the western ones, are far away from the GDR level in this regard.

Nevertheless, “intentional” childlessness is more of a Western problem, at least so far. In 2018, the mother rate in the east was no longer 90 percent, but in Thuringia it was 87 and in Brandenburg 84 (the other eastern German states are in between), while the scale in the western countries extends from Saarland with 81 percent to Hamburg with 69 percent. However, the experts in demographic research are reluctant to make any trend statements on this topic. It is possible that childlessness will also increase in the East. With regard to the age of the mother at the birth of the first child (30 years and older), there are hardly any East-West differences. As a reminder: In the 1970s, GDR women were on average 22 years old (BRD women 25 years old) when their first child was born.

In contrast, there is a clear trend towards female employment. There are still almost no full-time housewives in the East. The federal government’s second equality report from 2017 states: “In contrast to the majority of women in West Germany, women in East Germany seem to reject the sole breadwinner arrangement.” It is true that they reject it and also seem to impress women in West Germany with it. A DIW study from 2020 found: “People socialized in the GDR who moved to West Germany probably influenced attitudes towards the compatibility of family and work in West Germany.”

That is why the employment rate (an indicator that did not exist in the GDR and which also includes the unemployed) of women in 2020 is 80 percent in the East and 77 percent in the West. It should be taken into account here that female employment (also a term that… did not exist in the GDR because the professional activity was not just about making a living) has different extents in East and West. In the West, more than 15 percent of employed women are currently employed in part-time jobs, and significantly less in the East. Nevertheless, the sole breadwinner arrangement is increasingly being rejected by women in West Germany, especially in the regions where East and West can meet directly.

The numbers and facts can be interpreted in different ways. For me, they contain a call to think critically again about the concept according to which 20th century socialism should function. The fact that the women’s question is part of the class question, as the works of Friedrich Engels and August Bebel suggest, cannot be proven based on the current figures on female “inclination to work.” Because we have capitalist class relations; also in the East, after the Treuhand privatized or liquidated more than 95 percent of the GDR’s public property.

But the women stick to the “radical claim they acquired under socialism to want to live as a whole human being,” as Christa Wolf wrote in 1977 with a view to Maxi Wander’s volume of minutes. As early as the 1980s, the Austrian-American historian and communist Gerda Lerner, who died in 2013, demonstrated “that Engels’s equation of gender relations with a ‘class antagonism’ was a dead end that prevented theorists (sic) from having an adequate understanding of it for a long time “Differences between class relations and gender relations have hindered”.

We now live in a warlike world that desperately needs a new utopia. A utopia that today cannot only refer to the labor movement, which must reflect the demands of all human rights movements and their connections.

Dr. Ursula Schröter is a mathematician and sociologist and has published numerous publications on socialist patriarchy, see also “Questions about the system question” in the magazine “Luxemburg” 4/2022.