What we can learn and preserve from women’s emanicpation in the DDR
Florentine M. Sandoval
2 October 2024
The end of the DDR threw East German women back by an entire epoch. While the post-1989 women’s movement was still arguing about what was praiseworthy and what was condemnable about socialism, the debate was in fact already superfluous: The DDR’s laws no longer applied; there was to be no continuity with the socialist system in any area, including family and social policy. Bourgeois legality once again regulated family law. The penal code paragraphs from Germany’s imperial era were reimposed and defined access to abortions and consultations. Faced with an unprecedented privatisation and deindustrialisation of the East German economy, women either had to fear the contempt of new West German superiors or unemployment. They were often forced back into economic dependence on men. What was lost was a state and a society that had taken on the task of liberating women.
The revolutionary upheavals in socialist East Germany were so fundamental that the effects of the DDR’s gender equality policy can still be felt and measured more than 30 years after its end, be it in the higher level of women’s employment in the East, the higher density of nurseries or the 7% lower pay gap between men and women in the East, which is 19% in the West (as of 2023). Although many contradictions could not be eliminated during the DDR’s 40-year existence (e.g., housework and wages), much seems to have been lost when looking back from a present in which these contradictions persist in an intensified way under capitalist conditions.
Nevertheless, in the shadow that it casts from the past onto the present, the DDR continues to expose the West German successor society for its shortcomings and opens up a perspective that is often missing in feminist debates today. For what is different and special about the experience of the DDR compared to the feminist movement in the West and today is the role of social relations of production and mass mobilisation for the emancipation of women.
The declared aim of women’s policy in the DDR was to involve the broadest possible masses of women in the production process, which in turn was only possible because the social foundation for this was secured in the DDR. The strategy was based on the realisation – which had matured within the revolutionary workers’ movement over the 19th century – that the struggle for democratic, social, and economic rights for women was closely intertwined with the emancipation of the working class as a whole. The pioneers of the proletarian women’s movement, such as Clara Zetkin, emphasised that only a radical change in the conditions of production would create the conditions for women’s liberation, as their oppression and the patriarchal relationships and moral concepts that had developed over centuries were closely linked to the emergence of private property and firmly intertwined with capitalist production.
The historically progressive tendency of women’s access to labour, which in the capitalist economy inevitably produced special conditions of exploitation for women, was advanced through socialist relations in the DDR. The abolition of private property and the accompanying change in the nature of labour also changed the social position of women.
However, this could not be achieved without women’s own efforts. An example of one of the many mass initiatives through which women were mobilised for employment were the housewives’ brigades. In the 1950s, these collectives of non-employed women worked on projects that urgently needed labour power and were thus encouraged to take up permanent employment hereafter. The resulting conflicts with husbands revitalised the political debate about the social isolation of women in the domestic sphere, while participation in the production process and thus women’s economic independence was strengthened. Material incentives and awareness-raising worked together.
In turn, employment necessitated the development of a comprehensive childcare infrastructure and the reduction and better division of housework. These were processes that influenced each other and were interdependent. The socialist workplace also developed into a hub for women, in which social tasks were interwoven — cultural offerings, educational and childcare opportunities, and health care were organised through it. Here, women workers were able to become effective themselves, demand and assert their rights. The trade union women’s commissions helped to draw up and monitor the implementation of Frauenförderpläne (“plans for women’s promotion”), which were a collective instrument for the personal and professional development of the entire female workforce of a company. While productive labour became the most important driving force, reproductive labour remained the greatest obstacle to women’s emancipation.
40 years is an extremely short period of time. This fact must be taken into account when assessing the tasks and contradictions that remained unresolved until 1990. Despite technical innovations, partial socialisation of household responsiblities, and media appeals to men, reproductive work was largely left to women; wage differences persisted, not least because it was not possible to overcome the skills gap and also because women often did not reach management positions despite having the same qualifications; traditional role models in the family were still widespread, albeit far less pronounced in the younger generations, as studies by the DDR’s Central Institute for Youth Research (ZIJ) showed.
The daughters of the DDR’s policies grew up with a new image of women and had higher expectations of life, which could not always be fulfilled in the difficult reality of the final years. Although the connection between socialism and women’s liberation was decisively established and proven in the DDR, it was not possible to sufficiently build on the revolutionary energy of the early years.
In fact, important principles for gender equality were already laid down in the Soviet Occupation Zone (1945–1949), such as equal pay for equal work, equal educational opportunities, equal right to co-determination, etc., because for communists and socialists these were non-negotiable, elementary rights for women. However, the experiences in the DDR show that building fundamental structures that guarantee these rights is a complicated and lengthy task that cannot simply be imposed “from above”. Without the mass initiatives and democratic structures in East Germany, it would not have been possible to bring about the necessary change in mentality and win over social groups in favour of women’s emancipation. With brigade assemblies, women’s commissions and promotion plans etc., there were instruments to tackle this social tour de force in concrete terms. Whether these instruments were utilised depended on each individual; their usage was the rule, not the exception.
In times of growing poverty, precarisation, and the worldwide rollback of women’s rights, it is therefore worth reflecting on the opposite of the prevailing principle of individualisation, namely the mass mobilisation and social activation of women in the DDR. What was lost and what remained, what was unsolved and what was possible from 40 years of women’s policy and promotion in the DDR could be productively carried into today’s discussions and struggles for women’s equality if they are allowed to be. The women’s political goals of the DDR, both achieved and unachieved, could give orientation to a women’s movement that is often fragmented by viewing the liberation of women as a promise of individual relationships, rather than as a historical and societal task. This task is part of the legacy of the DDR.
