Report:  German Studies Association 2002 Session Nr. 118, Communicating
Gender in the Two Postwar Germanies

Moderator:  Ann Taylor Allen, University of Louisville

"Fragen Sie Frau Irene: Die Rundfunk- und Familienzeitschrift HOER ZU!
Als Ratgeber fuer Ehe und Familie in der Bundesrepublik der 1950er und
fruehen 1960er Jahre"
Lu Seegers, Universitaet Hannover

"Teilzeitarbeit fuer die moderne Ehefrau: Geschlechterpolitik und
gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Westdeutschland, 1955-1969"
Christine von Oertzen, German Historical Institute (Washington, D.C.)

"Love and Marriage, Socialist-Style: Change and Continuity in the SED's
Understanding of Private Gender Relations, 1950-1970"
Donna Harsch, Carnegie Mellon University

Commentator:  Robert Moeller, University of California, Irvine

The papers in this panel offered perspectives on how Germans--in East
and West--answered the "woman question" in the late 1950s and 1960s.
The papers demonstrated forcefully how central definitions of gender
were to defining what it meant to be German--in the BRD and the DDR--and
how little attention political and social historians of the postwar
period have paid to this fact.  Many historians of the 1950s and 1960s
have simply not made gender a central category of analysis.  These
papers revealed how much we can learn when we put women and gender at
the center, and the contributions to the session illuminated key
questions of class formation, economic development, the gap between
policy pronouncements and lived experience, state formation, and
national identity in the two decades after the end of the Second World
War.  Read together, they also made a very strong case for writing
postwar history not as two parallel stories but as comparative
German-German history, Abgrenzung und Verflechtung--separation and
interconnection--as Christoph Klessmann puts it.

Lu Seegers and Christine von Oertzen both focused on the West German
case. Lu Seegers's paper made excellent use of a source that probably
most of us have picked up at one time or another at a newsstand--Hoer
Zu--and there was quite simply no periodic publication read by more West
Germans in the 1950s.  How rich a source it can be for reading changing
attitudes toward gender and the status of women became clear in
Seegers's paper.  Seegers gave us a rich description of a metaphorically
cross-dressing Walther von Hollander, a postwar pundit and commentator,
as he responded to letters to "Frau Irene," a kind of German Ann Landers
who dished out advice and fielded controversy.  Seegers's analysis began
in the early 1950s.  By then, the suspension of some conventional moral
views--characteristic of the immediate postwar period--was already at an
end.  Women were clearly positioned as those entirely responsible for
the moral management of families and the restoration of men.  By the
late 1950s, Frau Irene was far less intent on having women subordinate
their ambitions and desires to men's wants and needs.  Even divorce
might be recommended, though as Seegers noted, it is interesting to see
that in the early fifties, divorce was a bad idea because of its ill
effects on children, and by the late 1950s, it was a good idea because a
bad marriage had ill effects on children.  Even women who were
independent of men and employed in the wage labor force remained defined
by dependent relationships with children.  And if in the early 1950s,
Frau Irene was charging women with the emotional management of men, by
the late 1950s and early 1960s, she was counseling them on how to get
along with their sons and daughters.  Woman continued to be defined by
her relationships with others.

Donna Harsch's paper moved us to East Germany.  As she made clear, in
the late 1950s and 1960s, the focus of public policy was also on keeping
families together, less on women's interests and desires than the needs
of children.  The Socialist Unity Party addressed the question of family
reform as part of a larger discourse on how best to create the
"socialist personality."  If in the West, the boundaries between public
and private were fluid, rhetorical constructions, in the East, no one
even pretended that the boundary existed.  The personal was always quite
explicitly political.  There were striking parallels between West German
beliefs that "it's in the children's room that the democrat, the
citizen, is initially shaped," and East Germans' convictions that the
education of the socialist individual began at home. Keeping homes
together became the job of counselors and psychologists, on the one
hand, and work collectives on the other. Harsch asked if this "new
discourse and policies regarding marriage and its quality should be
judged "modern," and she also invited us to understand the state's
attitude toward families in the context of a larger modernization
project.

Marriages that were in trouble in the GDR, Harsh explained, were
sometimes helped by the wife's move to part-time work.  This was,
however, something the SED and the trade union did not want to tolerate,
and as Almut Rietzschel has shown, the FDGB and the SED sought to
mobilize a broad spectrum of female labor--including women with
children--and believed that part-time work would not serve as an
effective measure to promote women's complete labor force integration.
Christine von Oertzen's paper provided plenty of evidence of the
dramatically different route that West Germans took--not to shore up
unstable marriages but to acknowledge women's desire to earn some money
and increase the family income.  West Germans changed their minds.
Viewed as a regrettable concession to economic necessity in the early
1950s, by the end of the decade, part-time work for women was celebrated
as a way for women to achieve a higher standard of living and a
heightened sense of self-reliance.  At the same time, they should never
forget that childcare and the emotional nurturance of husbands were also
women's work.  The endorsement of part-time work for women went hand in
hand with the endorsement of women's vital role in the expanding
consumer economy.  It is perhaps not surprising that up until the middle
of the 1950s--when there were actually not that many consumer goods to
buy and when West Germans were still recovering from the devastation of
the war--fears of consumer society and its dangers were at an all time
high.  Once goods actually lined the shelves of department stores,
consumption became a positive good, and women were authorized--and
encouraged--not only to buy but to earn the money they needed to do it.
Von Oertzen provided stunning evidence of the link between women's wage
labor and consumption when she described how labor recruitment offices
were located in department stores.  In a society that eschewed the move
to credit and purchase on the "never-never," the way to consume more was
not to mortgage the future but to earn a wage.  Until the middle of the
1950s, women were constantly reminded of the dangers of crossing the
boundary that separated necessity from desire; a decade later, they were
being told that consumption need not be conspicuous.

The comment and discussion focused in particular on the question of the
extent to which the changing attitudes toward gender--recorded in all
three papers--could be taken as a mark of "modernization."  We agreed
that there is no easy answer to this question.  In West Germany, woman's
increased participation in the wage labor force--documented by von
Oertzen--went hand-in-hand with the assumption that household and
children were largely women's responsibility.  And in the East, Harsch
provided evidence of the ways in which women continued to confront a
triple burden--of wage labor, housework, and childcare.  Seegers's paper
also attracted particular attention because of its innovative use of a
rich primary source--typically overlooked by many social and political
historians--to illuminate key questions about West German attitudes
toward gender relations and family structure in the 1950s.

Robert Moeller
University of California, Irvine


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2002 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

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