Marilyn Rueschemeyer

Women in the Two Germanys

Many women scholars in all fields of the social sciences in recent years have used a feminist perspective I for analyzing the relation between social and political institutions and the different historically shaped roles of women and men in production and reproduction. Although asymmetry prevails in nearly all societies, an increasing number of studies show evidence of variation in gender roles developing out of different structural and cultural bases. It is this variation that we are trying to explore here in order to gain a greater understanding of the crucial factors involved.

The Quality of life in the German Democratic Republic : changes and developments in a state socialist society

Published simultaneously as Vol. 18, nos. 3 and 4 of International journal of sociology. To complement studies of East Germany that center on the state, examines social structures, institutions and processes of daily life, including families, schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, and leisure

New Family Forms in a State Socialist Society: The German Democratic Republic

Family formation patterns and the changing role of women in the German Democratic Republic are examined. Consideration is given to employment and female labor force participation, the availability of child care, changes in the fertility rate (including illegitimacy), female education and occupational level, single parenthood, divorce, consensual union, and state policies. Data are from official and other published sources.

Soviet emigré artists : life and work in the USSR and the United States

The blind mendicant in Ukrainian folk tradition is a little-known social order, but an important one. The singers of Ukrainian epics, these minstrels were organized into professional guilds that set standards for training and performance. Repressed during the Stalin era, this is their story.

Social and Work Relations of Professional Women: An Academic Collective in the GDR

The work collective is a new institution that has developed in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It is part of a general effort to establish work and the place of work as a central reference point in peoples lives. In an earlier study, which explored the effects of pressures at work on marriage and friendship relations among professional women and men in the United States and two socialist societies,1 quite unsolicited comments of respondents both from the Soviet Union and in the German Democratic Republic made it clear that the work collective was indeed an element of considerable importance in their personal lives. To explore it further promised to reveal important facets of daily life in a socialist country. When I had the chance to do a series of intensive interviews with professional women directly or indirectly affiliated with a university in the German Democratic Republic (GDR),2 I therefore decided to focus my talks on the work collective. I sought to clarify the formal structure and the tasks of the work collective, as well as to understand the actual role of the collective in the lives of the women I spoke with. That I talked mainly with professional women associated with one university is a limitation but one that also yields advantages. I was able to tap a variety of perspectives on the same or very similar work groups and to gain deeper insights into what they really mean for the practicing women professionals participating in them.

Research in Communist Countries

A series of memoirs by scholars who conducted research in communist countries before 1989-1990 reveals lessons learned, both expected and unexpected, through exposure to conditions of everyday life in the Soviet bloc.

The Wall in My Backyard: East German Women in Transition

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and German unification less than a year later, East Germany entered a period of radical change. In this collection of interviews, eighteen East German women describe the excitement, chaos, and frustration of this transitional period. The interviewees discuss candidly the problems they have faced as women in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and in the new Germany. Although the East German government proclaimed equal rights for men and women and promoted women in the dual role of worker and mother, the interviewees often take issue with those policies. The perspectives contained here are as diverse as the women who voice them. Ranging in age from twenty to sixty-nine, the women work at a variety of occupations, including filmmaker, mental health therapist, water safety instructor, university professor, housekeeper, writer, and representative to Parliament. In telling their stories, they present a wide range of experience that offers the reader a multidimensional view of life in the former GDR. The interviews challenge conventional notions about what East German women gained under socialism as well as what they lost after unification. The book shows that many women are successfully negotiating the obstacles of the transition, taking responsibility for their lives in ways that were not possible in the GDR.

New Towns in the German Democratic Republic: The "Neubaugebiete" of Rostock

The new towns of Rostock are a result of planned social policy in the GDR in the 1960s which emphasized rapid and inexpensive housing construction. Based on empirical research in the new towns as well as an analysis of the East German sociological and architectural literature, this essay describes developments in housing that have taken place in the past twenty-five years?as well as some of the social responses of the inhabitants to their new living environment. Rostock is a two-and-a-half hour ride north from Berlin toward the Baltic Sea (see Map 1). Over seven hundred years old, it has traditionally been a provincial city in the underdeveloped agricultural area of Mecklenburg. Shipbuilding and fishing play an important role in its economy. The University of Rostock, present ly the Wilhelm Pieck University, was founded in 1419 and is one of the oldest universities in Northern Europe. Before the outbreak of World War II, the population of Rostock was 120,000; in 1945, there were fewer than 90,000 inhabitants. Over half of the inner city was destroyed. During the last forty years, the population has more than doubled, reaching about 250,000, with an annual increase of 5,000 new residents. Sixty percent of the population now lives in the new residential areas begun in 1962 between old Rostock and Warnemunde, a popular seaside resort on the Baltic Sea. With the completion of the expanded international harbor and the building of a new chemical industry at the outskirts of the city, a further increase in popula tion is expected. Of course, the construction industry has also developed enor mously. The first years after the war were characterized by a partial rebuilding of the

Conclusion: The transformation of a state socialist society

The essays collected in this book reflect the complexity and differentiation of GDR society today. Contrary to a widespread image of state-socialist societies as nonpluralist and monolithic, they indicate that the GDR is a highly complex, advanced industrial society sharing some of the problems that trouble Western industrial societies. Differentiation as well as the accompanying partial auton omy of different social groups and institutions are real features of this society even if the consequences of differentiation are also contained by a strong state and a nonpluralistic party system under the leadership of the communist party, the SED. The growing differentiation of GDR society is the result of far-reaching economic and social change. The changes in the social structure are dramatically apparent when one compares the present situation with the initial phase of trans forming society according to the Marxist-Leninist goal culture in the late forties and fifties. The bourgeois intelligentsia has been converted by changed recruiting and training mechanisms into a socialist intelligentsia.1 Parts of the traditional middle class have disappeared, while a growing number of public servants are employed in health, education, state and social services. At the same time, the new educated strata represent an increasing diversity of concerns and interests. In agriculture, peasants have become cooperative farmers or workers in a state controlled agricultural system. The working class as a whole emerges as a highly differentiated social stratum, in which training and qualification, income, and position within the work process give rise to changing interest configurations and new values, attitudes, and behavior.