Yoshie Furuhashi quoted:
>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):
First of all I want to thank Yoshie for this well researched quote, you just backed my basic argument. Is it available on the web, or did you just scan it in? Most of Rosenbergs argumentation I can only agree with, but there are still some minor points, I would like to add some comments.
>Negotiations over the unification treaty reached an impasse over
>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.
There is some truth in the argument, but the age groups affected by Nazi schooling are now more or less numerically irrelevant. What I think is the main difference between East and West in the this respect is the influence of the Church. In the West the Christian churches play semi-statal role. The vast majority in the West is a member of a Church. As opposed to the East, where only a minority is a member of a Christian church. After the war it was mostly the churches that preserved bourgeois values. (Nazism was discredited for obvious reasons)
>...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.
This is more or less a description of the 70ties and 80ties and in East Germany these policies where known as the 'Unity of Economic and Social Policies' (Einheit der Wirtschafts und Sozialpolitik), that came with change from Ulbriccht to Honecker. Basically it was 'social-democratic' concession to the working class-
>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.
Here I agree with Jim Heartfield: Pure economic neccessity was the reason. During the early Ulbricht times a ban on abortion was in effect. In this respect the early GDR was a mirror of Stalins Russia.
> 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.
This is only partly true in two respects: 1. The main resource of migrant labour into the West came from the East: First the ethnic Germans that were forced to leave Eastern European countries after the war. (But some of them went to the GDR as well). Later on untill 1961 those ones who came from the GDR to the FRG. Omly in the short period from 1961 to 1973 the main share of migrant labour came from the Mediteranean countries (a more correct description than sothern Europe) 2. The GDR imported labour as well. Mainly from Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique and Mongolia, but from Eastern European countries as well.
Johannes