Feminism in former East Germany

...Since spring 1990, women, often loosely associated with the UFV, have set up more than twentyfive centers, with employment advice and psychological counseling for overwhelmed and depressed women...

...The Past...

...In the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) women began meeting in their homes to discuss feminism almost ten years before the "Wende," the political transformation of fall 1989...

...It is likely to be the direction of further study, whereas women in the West now use other concepts...

...SPRING • 1992 • 155...

...Women are losing jobs and day care, facing for the first time employers who won't hire them if they are over forty or won't hire them if they have young children...

...The problems women faced in coping with the burdens of work and family, the contrast between ideology and reality, and contact with West German women and literature—all contributed to these developments...

...West Germany regards women from the East as "overemployed," in comparison to the 55 percent employment of West German women...

...There was a divorce rate of almost 40 percent, mostly initiated by women...

...Many women have no energy or desire for collective activities and organizations, of which they had enough in the GDR...

...It creates an opportunity for women who were active in the Socialist Unity party (SED), the GDR Communist party, to unlearn the hierarchical and centralized political styles they represented...

...The Elections...

...Immediately after the opening of the Berlin Wall, the Round Table, composed of thirty-nine representatives of all the opposition groups as well as the regular GDR parties, was formed as a national democratic institution...

...Jointly, these measures account for almost two and one-half to three million additional persons, more than twice as many as are officially unemployed...

...It is important for the journal not to portray men as "the enemy," as the ex-GDR charged was the case with the women's movement in the West...

...At women's centers women often discuss concrete ways to deal with problems, part of a mutual self-help tradition that already existed in the GDR...

...But women's problems today go beyond unmasking the ideology of the old GDR...

...It is in this context that the women's movement will develop...

...The failure of the UFV to get much political representation signaled the beginning of the end of this political phase...

...for example, in the writings of Ina Merkel, Hildegard Marie Nickel, and Irene Doelling...

...At the neighborhood level, they have become crisis management centers, helping women to deal with daily problems of life...

...The Public Sphere...

...One of the first acts of the UFV was to demonstrate with pots and pans at a meeting of the Round Table, demanding participation...

...Excluding men from UFV meetings was one of the major issues that outraged many GDR women, leaving them reluctant to work with the UFV...

...They engaged in parliamentary elections and debates and ran candidates in four electoral campaigns between March and December 1990...

...But since the Volkskammer had little legitimacy it rarely rejected the Round Table's proposals...

...Outside was a drab world of ideological control, one that required conformity...

...It was formed in order to be politically effective in the national transformation...

...Because of the political transformation, the focus is understandably not on personal matters but on economic issues and state social policy regarding women...

...The Round Table...

...The women's journal Ypsilon informs women of their rights and discusses issues of interest to women...

...Women are particularly interested in ecology because of serious environmental health problems, with many children having bronchitis, skin diseases, and so on...

...It was not the main focus of the pre-1989 stage, of small groups of women who got together to discuss forbidden feminist literature or, in the case of some academic women, supported each other in feminist research...

...People could not travel, follow their own path in consumption, join political organizations or private associations...

...Where the women's movement in the West was built in a milieu of relative economic plenty, feminism in the East is being built in a milieu of massive unemployment and the loss of abortion rights, day care, and other social entitlements...

...Women—who had children at quite a young age, on average at about twenty-two years old—also had a vested interest in protecting the family and the private sphere from interrogation, since the family provided the main avenue for self-expression, some happiness, and autonomy...

...The UFV demanded substantive equality (Gleichstellung), arguing that Gleichberechtigung, equal rights, which the GDR had advocated, was not enough...

...Although much smaller now, at its strongest point it had about three thousand members...

...Some groups were formed under the auspices of the church, including lesbian groups, and in opposition to proposals made in 1982 to draft women into the army...

...At first primarily advisory and critical of the old GDR, it soon achieved equal power in the Parliament, then quickly, and briefly, became the major power...

...Women are unlikely to challenge the structure of the family now, the only institution with some stability at this time of insecurity and unemployment...

...Its orientation toward decision making based on compromise and consensus, rather than the elaborate power strategies of political power, was amenable to women...

...In the open atmosphere of the period from November 1989 to January 1990, women were admitted...

...There are seventy women in local parliaments and one explicitly feminist UFV woman, Christina Schenk, is in the national Parliament, the Bundestag...

...They took positions on 154 • DISSENT democracy, ecology, peace, demilitarization, a multicultural society, and a nondominating relationship to nature...

...Some tried to open alternative day care centers and were jailed, their children harassed...

...Difference...

...They have to confront the forbidden topics of rape and violence...

...Consciousness-raising is culturally alien in a society that did not think psychologically, where one was not encouraged to express one's feelings, and in which one learned to think one thing and say another...

...From this conference came the Independent Women's Organization (UFV), which is still active...

...For example, in one women's institution, a woman was chosen by a committee to replace its retiring chairperson, but the general members could not nominate anyone and were limited to voting "yes" or "no," exactly as in the ex-GDR...

...Women's activities were also political in the narrow sense...

...Women need to learn their legal rights, how to take advantage of SPRING • 1992 • 153 available options, and how to change the laws where necessary...

...And, since it was women who were expected to care for children, it was women who took time from work and were discriminated against for doing so...

...On December 3, 1989, GDR women held the first public, non-party national meeting in a postcommunist country...

...The Office for the Equality of Women...

...But consciousness-raising will not be the methodology or emphasis of the ex-GDR women's movement...

...Since women worked in such numbers, men had to take on certain family chores, although in their "consciousness" they merely "helped...

...The ex-GDR women first created a general public sphere and discourse about women at the state level, during the period of transition, and only now are they beginning to create a separate women's public sphere, the opposite of developments in the West...

...The accomplishments of the Office for the Equality of Women include funding of women's centers, and houses for battered women, and warning women of the dangers of training in dead-end fields...

...Emancipation belonged in the productive sphere and did not require a transformation in the reproductive sphere, gender roles, and responsibility for housework or child care...

...The power of the Round Table is gone...

...No doubt, issues of male-female sexual and power relationships, which were taboo subjects in the GDR, will have to be explored, as well as women's sexuality, pornography, prostitution, and the refusal to recognize the existence of lesbians in the ex-GDR...

...In referring to their past, women frequently use the concept of patriarchy...

...Real unemployment is much more than the official figures show, more like 40 percent if one takes into account the extraordinary state measures Germany has introduced to dampen unemployment...

...Created by the Round Table, this Office was to exist in every public institution...

...Women made about 75 percent of men's wages, and contributed about 40 percent of family income...

...GDR women were not bound to the home, constrained by the demands of domesticity...

...Normalization, under the standards of former West Germany, is taking place...

...The UFV became the work group on the Social Charter in January 1990...

...Legally, the GDR Parliament, the Volkskammer, had to approve decisions made by the Round Table...

...The UFV was not a new social movement but an explicit feminist political movement...

...The women's movement in the ex-GDR brings to the fore the difference between East and West German women that has led to such tremendous hostility that the two virtually cannot speak or work together...

...They knew they could make it on their own and there was no stigma to being a single or divorced mother...

...Consciousness-raising will encourage women to recognize that there was inequality and discrimination in what was called "really existing socialism," whose state ideology claimed that the GDR had given women equality through full participation in the labor force...

...In an authoritarian society, the overriding power of the state distracted GDR women from the lesser power men had over them...

...East Germany is confronted by massive unemployment...

...Women's activities are necessarily political if they are to create an environment in which women can develop a democratic culture and personality, be active rather than depending on the "favors" of an authority...

...There was the official women's group, as in all "socialist" countries, the Democratic Women's Organization of Germany (DFD), which transmitted the party line defining women's activities in terms of cooking and knitting classes...

...From fall 1989 to spring 1990, several women's 152 • DISSENT groups came into being, including the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) at Humboldt University in East Berlin...

...Both the Social Charter and the draft of a new constitution had as central issues support for abortion on demand, and for continued day care, and the creation of the Office for the Equality of Women...

...This inequity originates in employment patterns created by the GDR's patriarchal emancipation...

...Women were segregated into a narrow spectrum of jobs with vertical segregation...

...A tormenting process is underway with the opening of Stasi files...

...On February 5, 1990, Tatiana Boehm of the UFV became Minister without Portfolio in the transitional Modrow government of the GDR, indicating the UFV's political strength...

...Almost five hundred women are active in the newly created Offices for the Equality of Women...

...They function as a branch of a social democratic state concerned with preventing a collective nervous breakdown by women...

...One of the major theoretical questions will be how GDR women interpret their past—whether or not they were emancipated...

...They need support against despair and self-blame...

...Only 35 percent of women receive some of these benefits, and this contributes to women's higher unemployment figures...

...Where Theory Enters What is feminist theory...

...Women are hit harder than men, and account for a constantly increasing percentage of the unemployed-59.3 percent at the end of August 1991...

...Revealing personal matters does not go over well in a police state...

...As a new institution of participatory democracy, the Round Table did not need to know the intricacies of all the elaborate structures from which women had been excluded...

...Consciousness-raising, when it does occur, is just as likely to discuss problems common to men and women, for example, their disturbing submission to authoritarianism, their complicity with the former system, if only in the form of passive acquiescence or of having been active in the SED, perhaps even in the Staatssicherheit (the "Stasi"—the secret police...

...Christine Schenck has written, "Feminism is not limited to the woman's question but is a critique of patriarchy and a concept of society in one...

...It was passed by the Volkskammer on March 7, 1990...

...We shall see if women will deal with this any differently from men...

...Its motto was, Ohne Frauen ist kein Staat zu machen (a state cannot be made without women...

...People are finding that friends, relatives, and husbands were in the Stasi...

...The Family and Sexuality When women in the GDR do not discuss certain issues important to feminist movements in the West, it is not because they are blind to these problems...

...The major activities of the Round Table included the dissolution of the state security police, the formation of an Office for the Equality of Women in every community of more than ten thousand, a kind of expanded Equal Opportunities Office, and the writing of a Social Charter that was to supplement state economic agreements for the reunification process...

...Women have to expose the "hidden" and undiscussed problems that combined paid work, childrearing, and housework, and stop thinking it was their personal failing if they couldn't do it all...

...Women in the GDR had different problems from those of middle-class white women in the United States...

...The official unemployment rate was 12.1 percent at the end of August, but women's unemployment rate has been 2 to 5 percent higher than men's every month, 14.6 percent for women and 9.6 percent for men...

...Women were concentrated in a few spheres, just those hardest hit by the transition to the market...

...Selfdisclosure to reveal common features of oppression was a suspect activity, recalling the obligatory collective activities in which everyone was required to speak his or her own mind, so long as they said what the state wanted...

...In one issue it interviewed men, presenting images of sensitive, responsible men...

...the Offices for the Equality of Women are weakened, although there are still many women in these offices committed to retaining day care and employment for women...

...Consciousness-Raising Consciousness-raising seeks to undermine the ideology that assigned women a subordinate role...

...After 1950 women had what could be called "patriarchal emancipation," decided by the state with little consultation from women...

...These women will focus on how child care can be socially organized so as not to have this effect...

...This movement participated in several ways...

...Women in the ex-GDR were concentrated in lower-level positions and thus are the first fired...

...A lot of Western feminist theory has concerned itself with the former, but the tentative theory that women in the East have presented (as in the Manifesto of the UFV written by Ina Merkel) was more in the direction of the latter...

...Is it theory about women or theory about society from the women's perspective...

...However, there are still active women, and we shall see how their movement develops...

...They were more independent economically...

...The state provided jobs, day care, and other entitlements, making women less dependent on individual male support...

...The issue of abortion is being debated in the Parliament, with the likelihood that within a year the East German women's right to abortion in the first three months will be restricted and counseling made obligatory before an abortion...

...Because it was mostly men who were in the secret police, this creates problems for women: if the man did not tell his wife, deception was the basis of their relationship, and if he did, then she was compromised...

...Women now have to decide what role ex-SED members are to play in their current organizations...

...They argued for selfdetermined abortion, quotas, protection of children and youth, and the creation of a social and economic parliament with representatives from different interest groups...

...Others, like "Women against Violence" in Weimar, were concerned with rape and other aspects of violence...