Exactamente.
Dorothy J. Rosenberg writes in "Shock Therapy: GDR Women in Transition from a Socialist Welfare State to a Social Market Economy," _Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society_ 17.1 (1991):
***** The highest price for unification is being paid by GDR women, children, and the elderly as a "socialist welfare state" is transformed into a "social market economy." By the summer of 1991, only slightly over half of the newly unemployed were women; however, women constituted just one-quarter of those who had found new jobs as the labor market shifted and membership in the labor force was redefined by the West German model. Single mothers were disproportionately represented among the unemployed, as are women over fifty and women with college degrees. As child-care centers raise their prices or close for lack of funding, more and more women are forced out of work or onto welfare. Although a recent INFAS [Institute for Applied Social Research] poll showed that only 3 percent of the women in the five new eastern states described housewife as their ideal job and 65 percent stated that "they would work even if they didn't need the income," the West German social agenda and economic infrastructure are returning them to the private sphere whether they wish to be there or not.
Women who made career choices and personal decisions within a different social and economic universe now find themselves confronted with a set of consequences for which they are unprepared. In fall 1990, Christine Schenck, speaking for the GDR's Independent Women's Union (UFV), characterized the effects of unification as "a massive attack on the rights of women." In the Bundestag's closing debate over the Unification Treaty, Representative Renate Schmidt noted that instead of making urgently necessary improvements in West German social services, unification was making conditions in the GDR equally bad. In fact, as the true costs of unification become visible, social services in both parts of Germany are being degraded.
Although American observers generally consider West Germany to have a progressive social welfare system (true in comparison to the United States), it does not compare favorably with the Scandinavian social democracies in the general level of social services and is even further behind in policy on women and family issues. West Germany is an essentially conservative society, which is especially evident in gender issues. Compared with other advanced industrial nations, it has a relatively low level of female employment, a highly gender-segregated labor force, and poor integration of women into the professions. West Germany's tax code strongly favors the "housewife marriage"; its adoption law narrowly restricts access; and its family policy encourages mothers to leave the work force, while its labor market and child-care policies discourage them from returning to it.
Upon unification on October 3, 1990, the West German legal code took effect (with certain exceptions) in GDR territory. The Bonn coalition had announced August 23, 1990, that all superior rights or benefits provided in the GDR would be reduced to FRG levels. The two social insurance systems were not joined, however: based on lower wages in the GDR -- but no longer justified by lower costs -- a lower level of pension, early retirement, unemployment, and health insurance benefits continued to be paid in the former GDR. In fact, in an unprecedented move, the Bonn government has reduced and capped the pensions of doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, college professors, and public administrators, along with other public employees in the former GDR. This means that East German professionals, who earned significantly less than their colleagues in the West, are being punished as retirees for having failed to emigrate. Women, who were concentrated in public administration, education, medicine, and the judiciary, are especially affected. This petty and arbitrary new policy becomes even more offensive when compared to the generosity shown to retired fascist civil servants in postwar West Germany. Virtually all former Nazi members in public employment received their full pensions.
Negotiations over the unification treaty reached an impasse over abortion, which was available on demand during the first trimester in the GDR. The West German parties, concerned about alienating millions of GDR voters by banning abortion outright before the all-German election on December 2, 1990, agreed to a "transitional period" of at most two years during which abortion would continue to be legal in the GDR. The last few days before the deadline for signing the treaty were dominated by a debate between the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD): not over whether the right to abortion should be preserved, much less expanded, but over whether West German women who had abortions in the GDR during the transitional period should be prosecuted. The CDU/CSU supported the "home address" principle (_Wohnort_) and demanded prosecution of women who seek abortion in other countries ("abortion tourism"), while the SPD insisted that the legality of abortion at the "scene of the crime" (_Tatort_) -- an oddly contradictory bit of terminology -- should govern. The SPD finally won by threatening to derail unification. Unfortunately, the abortion debate was primarily a political side show which did little for the pro-choice agenda and distracted attention from a number of other discriminatory or deeply flawed and ambiguous passages in the unification treaty. West German social conservatism may be to some extent a result of the country's higher age curve....The older members of society tend to hold (and vote) the values of an earlier period, including gender prejudices and sex-role stereotypes. In Germany, these are the generations whose childhoods and young adulthoods were spent in the virulently racist and sexist German fascist school system and in Nazi youth organizations. The National Socialist regime systematically excluded women from higher education, the professions, the skilled trades, and the civil service; outlawed equal pay for women; and attempted to force "eugenically sound" women into lives of full-time housework and prolific motherhood. Those who grew up in this era and the first postwar generation in West Germany experienced a complete absence of positive, nontraditional female role models. Beginning from the same point, the GDR's postwar development took a rather different course.
...Measures to achieve the legal and economic equality of women in the Eastern occupation zone were first instituted by the Soviet Military Administration in May 1945 and steadily expanded as an autonomous civil administration emerged in the GDR. Officials made special efforts to help reduce the economic burden of child raising....Financial support programs and social institutions were reorganized to facilitate simultaneous career advancement and motherhood, a dramatic reversal of Nazi policies.
To reintegrate women into the public sphere, Party and state administrators undertook a comprehensive revision of the legal code to guarantee full statutory equality for women and instituted a series of special laws and policies promoting women's education and training (e.g., paid time off for education and mandatory employer affirmative action plans and compliance reports at one- and five-year intervals). Legislation assured women maternity leave and benefits with guaranteed reemployment, sick leave, and paid time off for child care and housework. Economic measures instituted a broad range of transfer payments and subsidies and enforced equal pay for equal work. Political pressure and propaganda campaigns encouraged the integration of women into the professions and skilled trades, and the full integration of women into higher education.
These efforts were motivated by the Party leadership's ideological commitment to the emancipation of women as well as the immediate economic necessity of drawing the largely untapped pool of female labor power into the depleted work force for reconstruction. While West Germany turned to importing labor from southern Europe instead of expanding female participation in the labor force, this option was not available to the East for both political and economic reasons. With an expanding economy and a continuing loss of population to the West, women workers continued to be vital to the GDR economy. By the 1980s, about 92 percent of working-age GDR women were either in training or employed outside the home (compared to 52 percent in the FRG). The GDR's equally urgent need to maintain and expand its population led to the implementation of an exemplary program of maternity and child-care support. *****
As a feminist, I have many criticisms of the *limits* & *motives* of the GDR's policy on gender questions, as does Rosenberg (I urge you all to read her excellent article -- it is superbly researched), especially about the GDR's inability or unwillingness to do away with the gendered division of labor completely, but the GDR *was* superior to the FRG on the Woman Question (as it used to be quaintly called).
Yoshie