Frauen arbeiten: Weibliche Erwerbstatigkeit in Ost- und Westdeutschland nach 1945 (review)

Frauen arbeiten is a model of comparative history. The editor’s introduction usefully highlights overarching similarities and differences between women’s work in postwar East and West Germany. In her essay on the challenges facing historians of women’s paid labor, Karin Hausen notes the problematic nature of much of the data available to us, and critiques historians’ continued adoption of the “breadwinning husband—secondary earner wife” model. Demonstrating the inadequacy of this model, Claudia Born deftly demonstrates that West German married women born around 1930 did not make their entry to and departure from the labor force dependent on their household responsibilities or on their husbands’ earnings. Rather, their participation in the labor market depended on the demand for labor in the field in which they had received vocational training, and on whether that field was open to women who were no longer youthful or women who had interrupted their paid work.

The most groundbreaking essays are those that engage explicitly comparative questions. Carola Sachse’s fine contribution on the “housework day,” a paid monthly day off for women who bore responsibility for a household, is an example. Introduced (without pay) during the war, the housework day lived on in four West German provinces and in East Germany. But it was never uncontroversial, and Sachse’s analysis of the arguments for ending, maintaining, or expanding it reveals the complexities of women’s politics in divided Germany. Support for or opposition to the housework day could depend on economic considerations or on one’s vision of what constituted “women-friendly” policies. The negative examples of the Nazi state or the “other” postwar Germany, whichever that might be, could be employed to back just about any position. Part-time work was another way to accommodate women’s “double burden.” In exploring East and West German unions’ attitudes toward part-time work, Christine von Oertzen and Almut Rietzschel, like Sachse, find a discussion deeply embedded in ideological and political differences between the two Germanies. The picture, however, is not a static one of East versus West: rather, internal union politics and shifting relationships between the unions and the political parties brought significant changes in the unions’ approaches to part-time work for women.

The companion essays of Helene Albers and Christel Panzig, on women’s farm work in West and East Germany respectively, deserve serious attention as well. Examining structures of employment, level of training, and the nature of the labor itself, the authors make a compelling case that the much-overlooked agricultural sector may have been the site of the greatest differentiation in the working lives of West and East German women. Reinforcing a recurring theme in many of the essays, Albers and Panzig discover that their subject requires not just comparative but integrated treatment: both states self-consciously contrasted their agricultural practices, and women’s place in them, with those on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Among the essays that are not explicitly comparative, the contributions by Leonore Ansorg and Annegret Schüle warrant special note. Part of the emerging genre of East German factory studies, they provide important detail about the implementation of economic plans and social change at the ground level. Many additional fine essays, which cannot be discussed here, make this book indispensable for students of the postwar Germanies, women’s history, and labor history.