Women’s emancipation – How the East is changing the West

He left no doubt: “The unification of two equal states is not taking place here,” said Wolfgang Schäuble, who played a key role in negotiating the Unification Treaty was involved, 1990. There was talk of “catch-up modernization” in East Germany, which meant the liquidation of “superfluous” institutions, the privatization or liquidation of 97 percent of the state-owned enterprises (VEB), and the conversion of the GDR’s free state education and health care system on Western standards and radical elite exchange was meant. In one area, however, it was not possible to turn back the wheel of history: women’s emancipation.

In 1992, Heiner Geißler, a CDU politician who still had a social streak, spoke approvingly of an “equality advantage” in the East. Not everything was bad in the GDR, he boldly concluded. Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything was fine for women in the second German state. Between “Appearance and Being” was the title of Ursula Schröder’s review of an event organized by the Helle Panke educational association in Berlin.

At the Eighth Party Congress of the SED in June 1971, equality in the GDR was announced as having been achieved. A bit hasty, although equality is not only constitutionally enshrined and the new family law of 1965 was women-friendly. Since the mid-1970s there have been no longer any gender differences in the professional qualifications of women and men in the GDR. The high rate of female employment and motherhood at the same time was thanks to the state childcare offers. In the GDR, women contributed 47 percent of household income, in the Federal Republic it was 18 percent. 90 percent of East German women used kindergartens and 80 percent used crèches and after-school care centers. 90 percent of women in the GDR were mothers, which, according to the sociologist, could not be topped, considering a certain percentage of unwanted childlessness.

A striking difference to the West was that GDR citizens had their first child in their early 20s. The West had the most bizarre explanations for this early motherhood: young people in the workers’ and farmers’ state used the “child lever” to get an apartment. The marriage loan could have been “childrened off”. Other Western experts blamed the lack of alternatives for young people, such as foreign travel or state coercion, for early motherhood in the GDR. Ursula Schröter calls such interpretations “unbelievable.”

Although the housing and social program approved at the 8th Party Congress was intended to counteract the declining birth rate after the baby boom of the 1960s in East and West, and three children per family were considered desirable, the majority of GDR women only wanted two children a survey at the time revealed. It is interesting that the desire to have children was greatest among female farmers, followed by academic women, but much lower among female workers. Women’s self-confident decisions for or against having children were encouraged by the fact that from 1972 onwards, abortion was legal in the GDR “if a woman wants it”. The Eastern women did not want to let this right be taken away from them in 1990. At numerous demonstrations and rallies they expressed their willingness not to accept the criminal paragraph that still exists in the Federal Republic.

However, the reason for the deletion of 218 in the GDR was – this must be honest – a campaign by women in the Federal Republic: “We have an abortion!”, Confessions of 374 women in “Stern” in 1971, initiated by Alice Schwarzer. Inge Lange, candidate of the Politburo and head of the women’s department of the Central Committee of the SED, and her fellow campaigners succeeded in convincing the closed group of men in the highest body of the “leading party” in the state that abortions should be exempt from punishment in order not to be overtaken by the class enemy and to be able to present itself as a more progressive German state. The coup succeeded. And implemented a demand of the KPD from the times of the Weimar Republic. It’s strange that communists in power were able to forget what their much-heralded role models like Clara Zetkin and Edwin Hoernle had fought passionately about in the Reichstag decades before. Or the doctor and writer Friedrich Wolf, who was celebrated in the GDR and who used his punishment abortion The accusatory drama “Cyankali” caused a stir in 1929.

The high number of divorces can also be seen as an indication of the greater emancipation of GDR women. While it was 14.2 percent in 1960, it was 30.8 percent in 1985 and 47 percent at the end of the GDR. Reorientation after a failed marriage is revealing. At the beginning of the 1970s, divorced men preferred a younger and less qualified (sic!) woman as their new partner and, conversely, women preferred an older and more highly qualified man. Relationships on equal terms did not develop automatically in the GDR either. In this respect, the “Spiegel” was not entirely wrong in 1969, albeit in the typical manner of “old white men” when it wrote: “The professionally successful spouses provoke inferiority complexes in their husbands.” A few months earlier there was a conference of the Academy of Sciences In the GDR, it was regretfully stated: “Out of consideration for their spouse… some women shy away from taking on greater responsibility and a higher social position than their husband.” Patriarchal structures continued to have an effect in the GDR. Men also have to change if equality is to succeed.

But what about women’s emancipation after 1990? East German women, who were affected much more than men by mass unemployment because the light and textile industries in particular were lost, did not respond by returning to housewife status. The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) recorded: “Due to immigration from the former GDR in the early 1990s, reunification also had an impact on the labor market behavior and norms of West Germans.” Compatibility of work and family also became more important for West German women. And the Westman learned more.

According to solid studies, support for egalitarian gender roles is more pronounced in the East than in the West. Women’s employment here is secured by a closer-knit childcare network, with Thuringia approaching the GDR level at over 91 percent. In general, all East German federal states are more exemplary in this regard than the West German ones. Again, it has to be said, because after 1990, kindergartens and crèches were initially closed en masse. West German ignorance. Justified with ideological indoctrination, alleged “educational dictatorship”. It took a while before the minds of West German decision-makers understood the usefulness of such institutions. Not least due to pressure from the Eastern women. In the meantime, ALLBUS, a general population survey of the social sciences that has been carried out every two years in the Federal Republic of Germany since the early 1980s, has confirmed: “It is actually good for a child if the mother works and does not just take care of the household.”

Eastern women reacted to their sudden forced unemployment in the mid-1990s with a birth strike – demographically a catastrophe after the mass exodus from the GDR in the summer of 1989 and the relocation of tens of thousands of qualified young people, many of them women, in the 1990s due to a lack of work in the wake of the de-industrialization of East Germany. There is now less childlessness in the East than in the West, with the least in Thuringia. In the East, people marry less and children born out of wedlock are more common than in the West. However, since 2020, there have been only minor differences between East and West when it comes to female employment. Ursula Schröder noted a “contagion effect,” who can also be seen as an example of an emancipated Eastern woman. The Leipzig native studied mathematics and worked in the IT department of a VEB before she moved to Berlin and completed her dissertation there in order to devote herself to sociology from then on. GDR women were also significantly more present in scientific and technical professions than their West German counterparts.

Conclusion of Ursula Schröter’s presentation and the lively discussion in Helle Panke: Something remains of the GDR in united Germany. And this is thanks to the Eastern women.