Equality Decreed: Dramatizing Gender in East Germany

This essay situates four plays by and about GDR women, written between 1951 and 1963, in relation to the nascent state's gender legislation. The plays register the initially aggressive implementation of gender equality at work and at home that ended with the national and economic crisis created by the cold war. Under pressure, the state expected women to reshoulder domestic responsibilities and concomitant gender roles. Women's drama propagated acceptance of the "double burden," forfeiting feminist politics for family ideology and thereby shaping the contradictory construction of a female, socialist subject. (KS)