Interrupted Emancipation: Women and Work in East Germany

A New Beginning

The period following World War II in Germany was marked by destruction, hunger, shortages, and the spread of disease. Women accounted for 60 per cent of the German population, and a considerable number of men were wounded, permanently unable to work, or still prisoners of war.¹ Out of pure necessity and the will to survive, women joined forces to support each other, removing rubble all while caring for children, the elderly, the traumatised and wounded. In the wake of the war, anti-fascist women’s committees were formed, mostly headed by social democrats and communists. As non-partisan interest groups at the municipal level in the Soviet Occupation Zone (the part of Germany under the administration of the USSR), these committees took on important social welfare tasks such as setting up sewing and laundry rooms, providing meals through communal kitchens, and offering medical and psychological support to women.²

Discussions within the anti-fascist women’s committees, in consultation with the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), led to the formation of the Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany (DFD) in 1947, which would become a driving force of anti-fascist democratic reconstruction spanning across both East and West Germany before being banned in the latter in 1957. At the DFD’s founding congress, delegate Käthe Kern from the Socialist Unity Party (SED) emphasised the importance of this mass organisation of women, which, she said, would allow ‘a large number of women with no political party affiliation to participate in the democratic development of Germany’.³ Mass political education and cultural work became decisive fields of action in an ideological struggle that set out to impart a new set of values, of which gender equality was a key component. The DFD also played a key role in enshrining equality in the German Democratic Republic’s Constitution (1949) and in drafting new laws that furthered women’s emancipation, such as the Family Code, which codified the new social relations that were developing under socialism.

In the countryside, land reform carried out between 1945 and 1948 ended the centuries-long servitude of female farmers and agricultural workers as they were given land that was expropriated by large landowners. In 1952, cooperative farming emerged, fundamentally changing farmers’ living conditions by establishing fixed working hours, a stable income, and paid holidays that were codified in the agreements made by each cooperative and reinforced by the DDR’s labour code.⁴ The cooperative movement sought to transform hierarchies in the countryside, with new arrangements – such as providing childcare – to supplant ‘outdated ideas and habits’, as the DFD put it.⁵ Peasant women, who historically had the least rights in the countryside and perhaps stood to gain the most, played a decisive role in this movement.

The new laws reflect the radical democratic agenda pursued by the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in the post-war period. Women self-confidently played an active and leading role in building a socialist women’s movement that pushed these reforms into law and sought to rebuild society. This new beginning in the DDR was also a political revival that sought to overcome undemocratic and bourgeois conditions and guarantee equal participation in the production process, paving the way for a new social role for women.

Women’s lives vastly improved during the DDR’s forty years of existence in areas such as self-determination, reproductive rights, and access to affordable, quality childcare and healthcare. Their participation in the production process played a crucial role in achieving these rights, with the socialist workplace anchoring these transformations.⁶ In this dossier, the Zetkin Forum for Social Research, International Research Centre DDR (IF DDR), and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research look at the history and unfinished work of women’s emancipation in the DDR. Despite the less than favourable conditions following the dissolution of the DDR in 1990, this process continues in the present and offers valuable lessons for contemporary struggles.

Legal Equality

New laws and regulations enacted in the DDR replaced bourgeois property and family laws. This took place on various fronts: economically through the expropriation of large corporations and landholdings; legally through the gradual abolition of bourgeois laws; and ideologically through the dismantling of bourgeois moral values. In stark contrast to West Germany, where the supremacy of men was protected by law until the late 1970s – which, for instance, allowed husbands to object to their wife taking up employment – women in the DDR were directly involved in drafting, implementing, and enforcing laws that abolished their subordination.

The Family Code, adopted in 1965, is a result of these efforts. Based on an understanding of the family as ‘the smallest cell of society’, the Family Code established the rights and duties of women, men, and children as equal members of society, both within and outside of marriage.⁷ As the preamble states:

With the development of socialism in the German Democratic Republic, family relationships of a new kind emerge. Creative work free from exploitation, the comradely relationships between people based on it, and the equal status of women in all areas of life and the educational opportunities for all citizens are important prerequisites for strengthening the family and making it long-lasting and happy. … It is the task of the Family Code to promote the development of family relationships in socialist society.⁸

The Family Code provided advances in a range of measures, such as making it easier to get a divorce and equitably sharing property at the time of the divorce.⁹ It also furthered women’s emancipation by mandating that ‘both spouses bear their share in raising and caring for children and running the household’ and that ‘[t]he relationships between spouses must be designed in such a way that women can combine their professional and social activities with motherhood’.¹⁰ Although marriage continued to be a life-long commitment, it could also be ended at any time without consequences since ‘the factors that in bourgeois society exert an external compulsion to maintain an unhealthy marriage [had] largely been overcome’.¹¹ This was also reflected in the divorce and marriage rates: while the number of marriages per capita in the DDR was similar to or at times even higher than in Christian-conservative West Germany, the DDR had one of the highest divorce rates in the world, 60 per cent of which were filed by women.¹²

Furthermore, social reproductive labour that had been largely unremunerated and often invisible became socially managed through free crèches, kindergartens, maternity advice centres, and polyclinics.¹³ The Act on the Protection of Mothers and Children and the Rights of Women (1950), for instance, required mass organisations and production enterprises to set up day care centres, laundromats, and sewing rooms.¹⁴

As Hilde Benjamin, the DDR’s minister of justice from 1953 to 1967, explained, it was essential that laws not only provide a framework to guarantee and enforce social rights, but that they also ‘achieve further progress in the development of socialist consciousness’.¹⁵ The DDR’s policies did this in a number of ways, such as by socialising childcare and elder care and thereby allowing citizens of the DDR more time to take an active role in building a socialist society.

As a result of this social shift, women increasingly demanded better opportunities for family planning. With the passing of the Act on the Termination of Pregnancy in 1972, for the first time German women could decide whether or not they wanted to have an abortion within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. No motive was required, no assessment prescribed.
The West German press warned that such measures would lead to the ‘destruction of the family’. This did not take place. Instead, the DDR’s policy measures increased the freedom of women, such as by providing grants to assist in the early period of childcare and fully paid maternity leave for 6 months. This was in addition to parental leave for both mothers and fathers for up to 12 months with a payment
of up to 90 per cent of net average earnings. Both forms of leave guaranteed job retention.¹⁶

Although the dismantling of bourgeois law and the introduction of the Family Code and other such legislation were decisive steps towards equality, it was recognised that this alone would not achieve social equality. As the SED put it:

The important thing now is the gradual solution of all those problems which determine to what extent women can make use of their equal rights. Without underestimating the increasing cooperation of men in the household, it remains a fact that the main burden is borne by women. … [We must] improve childcare so that women can work.¹⁷

These problems were particularly evident in the lack of women in leadership positions and in the burden of domestic and care work.

Work

The increasing numbers of women who entered the workforce following World War II faced various challenges, including a lack of adequate childcare facilities, long commutes, underdeveloped transport infrastructure, unsuitable working hours for mothers, and lingering discrimination regarding their ability to carry out management roles. All of these factors restricted women’s participation in society. The integration of women into the workforce was thus a priority in the DDR, since, as the ethicist Helga Hörz argued, a woman’s position in society could only be ‘changed through her role in the labour process’.¹⁸ Hörz argued that incorporating women into the workforce was not only a matter of providing additional income to the household or giving women their own spending money. Rather, the new social character of labour, built through public ownership of the means of production, enabled women to be more engaged in public life. For women, this meant not only more participation in economic life, but also active involvement in social processes and full participation in the political system.

Yet, even as women became integrated into the workforce on an unprecedented scale, it soon became evident that women were predominantly engaged in less complex tasks and were not afforded the chance to pursue additional education and professional development. In its Women’s Communiqué, published in December 1961, the politburo of the SED’s central committee condemned the ‘fact that a totally insufficient percentage of women and girls exercise middle and managerial functions’, blaming, in part, ‘the underestimation of the role of women in socialist society that still exists among many – especially men, including leading party, state, economic, and trade union functionaries’.¹⁹ The central committee called upon ‘the entire public’ to overcome these problems but considered trade unions, ‘as a mass organisation of workers’, to bear the primary responsibility of ‘ensuring the development of a correct social opinion on the role of women in socialism’.²⁰

In the newly founded Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), the revolutionary trade
unionist Grete Groh-Kummerlöw warned, as early as 1946, that ‘[only] with women will we succeed in achieving unity and thus the victory of the working class’.²² Until the 1950s, however, trade unions did not sufficiently address the way enterprises represented women’s interests. In 1952, the SED began to form women’s committees in the workplace, which were to act independently alongside trade unions and exert influence on them. Once these committees emerged, the DFD shifted back to its original focus working in residential areas. The women’s committees advocated for housing, childcare, and an age-appropriate division of labour and against wage differentials.²³

The communiqué, frequently referenced in subsequent discussions, vehemently criticised the complacency of the leadership of the party and mass organisations. The party leadership acknowledged its shortcomings and proposed solutions such as introducing women’s ‘advancement plans’. These plans, annually drawn up by a women’s committee in consultation with trade union representatives, created requirements that the enterprise’s management was obliged to follow concerning issues such as education for women, occupational health and safety measures, and the expansion of childcare and leave for pregnant, nursing, and young mothers.²⁴ Such plans were an integral part of the collective bargaining agreement between the union and management, and their implementation and enforcement was overseen by the women’s committees.²⁵

These plans became a crucial tool for women’s committees to advocate for social and professional measures in enterprises and thus enhanced career opportunities for women.²⁶ The incorporation of women’s committees into the trade union structures of the FDGB in 1965 further increased working women’s rights. Despite the challenges it struggled with in its early years, the FDGB emerged as the central organ of women’s representation, surpassing the DFD. By 1987, out of 9.5 million trade union members, 5 million were women, 1.4 million of whom were actively involved in trade union functions, such as the women’s committees.²⁷

By the late 1980s women had reached the same levels of formal qualification as men, with the proportion of women in higher education and technical colleges reaching 55 per cent in 1988.²⁸ Gender parity was also reflected in crucial areas of democratic-political life, influencing the decisions and policies being made about social life. Women accounted for more than 50 per cent of all judges; 35 per cent of all mayors; and 40 per cent of parliament.²⁹ Despite not reaching full gender parity in management positions, by 1986 there were more women in management in the DDR (34 per cent) than there are in Germany today (28.9 per cent in 2022).³⁰ In 1989 (the year before the dissolution of the DDR), 92.4 per cent of all working-age women were employed and most of them were unionised.³¹

Women enjoyed near wage parity compared to other industrialised societies then and even today, though the DDR did not succeed in eradicating wage differences completely. For production workers, for instance, there was a noticeable difference in wage levels between men and women, which averaged 16 per cent between 1984 and 1988 (compared to 30 per cent in West Germany during the same period).³² There are a number of reasons for this disparity. For one, special monetary premiums were paid to workers engaged in shift or heavy labour, which was most often carried out by men.³³ If such bonuses and supplements are deducted from wages, the net gender pay gap falls from 16 to 12 per cent on average in the same period.³⁴ Another factor contributing to this disparity was that, in the DDR, industrial workers (a sector predominantly made up of men) were better remunerated than service workers (predominantly women). Finally, alongside these sector-related wage differentials, the historic lack of workplace training for women, the insufficient number of women in management positions, and the increase in part-time work in the last decade of the DDR’s existence all contributed to women’s lower earnings.

These challenges notwithstanding, it is worth noting that during the DDR’s forty-year existence, the wage level doubled while overall wage differences across social strata remained small. For instance, university graduates earned only 15 per cent more than production workers, in stark contrast to West Germany, where that difference amounted to up to 70 per cent.³⁵ Other notable examples include the fact that only about 5 per cent of wages went towards rent (compared to around 23 per cent in Germany today), childcare and school were free, and food prices were fixed at low levels.

The DDR’s achievements in pay equity continue to impact former East Germany. For instance, a report published by the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in 2018 shows that the gender pay gap between men and women is far smaller in the former DDR (6.3 per cent) than in the West (20.6 per cent), and the proportion of women in leadership positions also remains higher than in the West.³⁶ Nonetheless, the lasting impact of near wage parity in the former DDR is stunted by the fact that the average income in the region remains much lower than in West Germany, even 34 years after so-called reunification.

Housewives’ Brigades

Amidst the atmosphere of post-war reconstruction in the early 1950s, self-organised collectives of unemployed women, often stay-at-home mothers affiliated with the DFD, emerged to take up paid short-term work where labour was urgently needed, following the example of peasant women who organised to help bring in the harvest. DFD activists soon organised brigades in other sectors, too, encouraging more and more women to enter the workforce and to challenge the isolated role of women within the private and individual domestic sphere by promoting collective organisation and integration into the production process.

By 1960, there were 4,031 housewives’ brigades made up of around 30,000 women.³⁷ Most of the brigades went to agricultural production cooperatives in rural areas, though others targeted the industrial, service, and healthcare sectors. Seeing their efficacy, enterprises began to request the brigades. However, after some of them began simply calling in the brigades for short terms to fulfil their quotas, the DFD and the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) made it obligatory for enterprises to set up contracts as a precondition for brigades to be deployed, thereby strengthening the labour rights of the brigade participants and paving the way for their long-term employment.

As the DFD noted, ­there remained a widespread belief that while post-war shortages initially prompted women to seek employment, socialism had progressed sufficiently for women to abandon work and still enjoy a comfortable standard of living.³⁸ In a 1958 article on her experiences agitating amongst housewives, DFD deputy Käte Lüders discussed how men – including party members ­– did not want to give up the ‘domestic comfort’ of their wives willingly caring for them, further reinforcing this dynamic. The housewives’ brigades thus fulfilled two important purposes: first, they revitalised the political debate on women’s isolation in the domestic sphere, and second, they strengthened their participation in the production process and, therefore, their economic independence from men.³⁹

However, with the increasing employment of women, which had already reached 70 percent in 1965, and in the context of the economic upswing after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, the lack of women’s access to professional development and skills training emerged as a far more pressing issue and the brigades ebbed away.⁴⁰ Skilled workers were urgently needed, and women demanded the vocational training opportunities promised to them.

Domestic Work

Though women’s lives improved by leaps and bounds as a result of the socialist project in the DDR, the double burden of domestic work alongside paid jobs proved to be difficult to eradicate. Measures such as the Family Code sought to create a more equal division of labour in the home, but they were often not consistently implemented. The widespread entry of women into the workforce created an opening to confront this double burden: as a result of their involvement in the production process, women were able to voice their needs and demands as workers while the workplace itself became a social place where reproductive labour could be socialised.

The state set out to socialise domestic work and create the conditions for women to participate more fully in society, rather than being tethered to their home. This is particularly evident with childcare: in West Germany, there was virtually no childcare for women, which often made it impossible for them to take up work or engage meaningfully in life outside of the household (only 1.6 per cent of three-year-old children attended day care in 1986). The DDR, meanwhile, established a comprehensive state care structure that provided free day care, which was attended by 81.1 per cent of children up to age three as of 1986, as well as free kindergartens and after-school care and affordable or enterprise-funded holidays for children and families. As a result, whereas West Germany had a kindergarten placement rate of 67.6 per cent, in the DDR it was 93.4 per cent.⁴¹

Though similar efforts were made to further equality in the realm of housework, they were not met with the same level of success. According to the first detailed surveys on hours spent on domestic work, carried out by the Institut für Bedarfsforschung (Institute for Demand Research) in the early 1960s, working women spent an average of 4.6 hours a day on chores at the time – excluding caring for children, the sick, and the elderly. This amounted to 15 hours, or 24 per cent, more time on housework per week than working men.⁴²

In the midst of the economic upswing in the 1960s, optimism prevailed that the time spent on housework could be reduced with the help of new technologies and that work that had been carried out by women individually within the isolation of their home could be socialised. The different solutions proposed to overcome the double burden of housework brought out a debate: one side argued that the best solution to this problem was to socialise housework, while the other argued that improving conditions for domestic work – such as developing and increasing access to new technologies – made an individualised approach to housework the best option.

Ultimately, policy makers opted for a strategy to automate housework. From the 1970s onwards, the media began to emphasise the participation of the whole family in household chores. While housework became less strenuous due to increased access to improved technologies (such as new heating and washing systems), on the whole, this strategy was not effective: although housework fell from 38 hours per week in 1965 to 31 hours per week at the end of the 1970s, it remained largely unchanged for the duration of the DDR’s existence.⁴³

One effort to address this issue was the ‘housework day’, introduced in 1952 for women who worked full time and were either married or, if single, were mothers who lived at home with their mothers and children under age 16. Women vehemently demanded that the housework day be extended to other sections of the population through petitions, trade union meetings, and the DFD. As a result of these efforts, in 1965 housework days were extended to single mothers with children under the age of 18, irrespective of whether or not they lived with their mothers. Paragraph 185 of the DDR’s Labour Code of 1977 further extended those eligible for housework days to unmarried and childless women aged 40 and over, as well as to single fathers and men whose wives were in need of care.⁴⁴

The initial decision to reserve the housework day for women alone posed a dilemma. On the one hand, there was a real need to prevent housework from falling solely on women’s shoulders. On the other hand, statistics and the reality of working women’s lives showed only too clearly that women continued to do the majority of this work. Granting housework days to broader sectors of the population was an attempt to counteract this deeply entrenched division of labour. This was the first time that a part of women’s reproductive labour, however small, was paid for by law.

Aftermath

In the late 1980s, an ‘independent’ women’s movement emerged in opposition to the DDR’s women’s mass organisation, reprimanding its perceived stagnation. This was largely a result of the fact that the organised women’s movement in the DDR struggled to engage younger generations and build on the revolutionary fervour of the DDR’s early years. Yet, when so-called reunification took its course, it was the independent movement that was easily and willingly instrumentalised in dialling back the DDR’s achievements: all laws were scrapped, and it became clear that there would be no continuity of the DDR’s socialist policies in capitalist society.

In addition to the step backwards in legal protections for women and the overall well-being of East Germans, the unprecedented privatisation and deindustrialisation of the East German economy presented unique challenges. When the DDR’s social infrastructure was dismantled, women were the first to face unemployment as well as the contempt of their new West German superiors and were ultimately pushed back into a traditional family model in which they depended on men as the sole breadwinners.

The experience in the DDR shows that women made great strides in breaking the centuries-old economic dependence on men. This proved to be a complicated and lengthy process that faced its greatest hurdles in the realm of housework. Though policies in the DDR, especially in the early years, were important steps forward in improving women’s lives, it was impossible to simply impose them ‘from above’. It was the women’s mass initiatives, such as housewives’ brigades, that brought about the necessary change in mentality to win over society at large in favour of women’s emancipation.

This process remained unfinished in the DDR. At the time the DDR dissolved in 1990, housework was largely left to women and wage disparity persisted, as did traditional family roles (albeit less and less pronounced in the younger generations). Nonetheless, the examples discussed in this dossier bear witness to the DDR’s commitment and ability to creatively seek out the instruments needed to advance women’s emancipation under a given set of circumstances. The contradictions that emerged during this process reflect the need to constantly reassess the tactics adopted in this struggle and renew our unwavering commitment to it.

Notes

Bibliography