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East & West German Women
In May 1946, the Third Reich formally surrendered ushering in a new phase for women in Germany. Women were confronted with a loss of employment due to returning veterans and also pressured by society to return to domestic tasks leaving the realm of employment to men. The three decades following World War II brought resurgence, decline, then resurgence of family as women’s societal obligation, with economics and technology advances affecting women’s employment and role in society. Germany faced two differing situations in regards to women due to the east/west division of state. Women in the German Democratic Republic and in the Federal Republic of Germany, depending on the era, faced differing, yet intertwined issues with regards to employment, family life, and childrearing. The reunification in 1989, posed a wholly new set of problems for East German women.
With the end of World War II and thus the Nazi regime, women were poised to receive not only an increased political status, but also in a sense, more freedom. Yet, throughout the 1940’s, women were faced with reversals in their role within society. Wartime had bestowed upon them a necessity for survival without a patriarchal influence, and women had survived and protected their families during this time without support from their husbands. Women had difficulty at first counting on men to provide a sense of stability due to high male causalities and the length of time—nearly ten years—for all of the men to return from the front (Frevert 258). By 1947, women were gradually being removed from the workforce by returning men (Frevert 261). ...
The 1950’s plagued women with a return to the home movement sponsored by the government. Women in the FRG were encouraged to leave employment and focus on their husbands and children. ... For the women who were widowed during the war and had children, they were viewed with a sense of pity and disdain by society when they entered the workforce, even if it was for economic necessity. Societal norms viewed family as an obligatory social institution with women being conditioned to accept these developments (Kolinsky and Nickel 9). Women continued to work however for a variety of reasons and struggled to receive equal pay for equal work. With society placing on emphasis on family over employment, women were not likely to receive neither equal pay nor equal status within the workplace. Society dictated that women’s work was care in the home for family-an equivalent to the male breadwinner role (Kolinsky and Nickel 9). Women did not feel content with their self-definition resting on being a mother and wife, and those that worked felt a sense of identity related to their profession that working in the home was unable to provide.
When women in the GDR are viewed during the same time period, a different emphasis is placed on women in employment. The societal trend in the GDR focused on integrating women into the workforce (Kolinsky and Nickel 6-7). Women were encouraged to enter employment and several social policies were enacted within the government to assist women with achieving this goal. While the GDR emphasized women in employment, they also emphasized large families and encouraged women to have children. The GDR was not looking to advance women’s social standing through employment, but rather it was solving an employment crisis due to the headache mass emigration had caused the country’s leaders (Frevert 283).
The 1960’s to 1972 were dominated with the introduction of special degree programs for women, with a strong emphasis on improving their vocational qualifications (Kolinsky and Nickel 6-7). While governmental policy urgied women to enter the workforce full-time, they did not lose touch with the importance and necessity of the family structure. Women were afforded state subsidized childcare and given a generous maternity leave package. The governmental involvement in the family and employment policies allowed women to integrate family and employment. However, the emphasis placed on work and family left little time for the self-reflection of women in the GDR (Dodds and Allen-Thompson 18).
Women in the Federal Republic of Germany did not receive the same state sponsored assistance in the 1960’s as those in the east. Like in the 1950’s, women were encouraged to work within the home and provide a family environment at the expense of outside employment. Some women, despite the norms of society, selected to work outside of the home to provide the family with extra income. In West Germany during the sixties, technological advances also brought women into the workforce. ... Even with more females merging employment and family, it did not challenge the belief that women were best suited emotionally and biologically for motherhood (Kolinsky and Nickel 9).
While technology improved the lives of women in the FRG, it was not a factor of women’s lives in the GDR. ... Even if women had extra money in the GDR, there was often a lack of consumer items to buy. So while technology lightened women’s household workloads in the FRG, women in the GDR were balancing full-time employment and full-time family life. Both countries relied on different political structures and social policies toward women however the women faced similar problems ranging from societal views of women to equal pay to altering the paternalistic system. ... In July 1958, married women were finally guaranteed the right to paid employment outside of the home (Frevert 281). Despite this “right” women were only allowed to take up employment if it did not negatively affect their marriage and family obligations. The Christian Democratic government in the 1950’s enacted several measures to ease the burden of employment on women by providing paid maternity leave (Frevert 284). ...
Immediately after WWII ended, women formed various groups to call on the new government for equality of the sexes that had been denied under the Nazi regime. However, this movement was not particularly strong because of women’s concern regarding the day-to-day survival of their families. In order to ensure the family’s survival, women had virtually no time for political organization (Frevert 290). After the shock of WWII, society gradually returned to its hierarchy, which left women without a collective voice until the late 1960’s. ... Younger women were the driving force, often forming organizations while in college. ... Women were no longer concerned with equal rights nor with the feminine culture, but were convinced that the patriarchal form of work and family structure would be unable to function without the unpaid domestic labor of women (Frevert 292). ... There existed a raised social consciousness—a readiness to assimilate new ideas—that positively assisted the women’s movement. Women questioned the gender division in labor aiming for the transformation of female labor inside and outside the domestic sphere (Frevert 292). ... This issue allowed women from all walks of life to join in a united cause with the same result in mind for the first time within the movement.
Approximate Word count = 5832
Approximate Pages = 23.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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