Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements

Abstract

Despite its centrality to everyday lived experience, gender has not enjoyed a prominent position in the historiography of post-war Germany; indeed, as the editors of Gendering German Post-1945 German History claim, most post-reunification studies on West and East Germany are ‘gender blind’ (p. x). Their volume deftly addresses this lacuna by placing a nuanced consideration of gendered experience at the centre of post-war German history. The contributors proceed from the understanding that, while West and East German governments both proactively pursued a post-war reordering of society along gendered lines, this took on a very different character in the Federal Republic versus the German Democratic Republic, despite both governments professing to pursue the emancipation of women as a central goal. While West Germany aimed to reintroduce the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model, insisting that an emancipated woman was one who possessed the freedom not to work, the SED viewed this as regressive, instead proffering that full, equal employment, together with state-run daycare for children, was the true path to female emancipation.