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Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective
Varieties of Feminism investigates the development of German feminism by contrasting it with women's movements that arise in countries, like the United States, committed to liberalism. With both conservative Christian and social democratic principles framing the feminist discourses and movement goals, which in turn shape public policy gains, Germany provides a tantalizing case study of gender politics done differently. The German feminist trajectory reflects new political opportunities created first by national reunification and later, by European Union integration, as well as by historically established assumptions about social justice, family values, and state responsibility for the common good. Tracing the opportunities, constraints, and conflicts generated by using class struggle as the framework for gender mobilization―juxtaposing this with the liberal tradition where gender and race are more typically framed as similar―Ferree reveals how German feminists developed strategies and movement priorities quite different from those in the United States.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published March 7, 2012
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January 3, 2017
Chapter 2 – Creating Women Citizens: National Frameworks for Gender Equality and Self-determination, 1848-1968
p.25 – “I am recruiting women citizens for the empire of freedom,” wrote Louise Otto-Peters (1819-95) in 1848. All across Europe, women and men were rising up against the power of the aristocracy. In this general ferment, German bourgeois revolutionaries like Otto-Peters were trying to create a modern liberal nation-state out of the patchwork of principalities and dukedoms.
Unfortunately, the liberal revolution of 1848 failed. Germany unified in 1871 as an empire built on monarchy, militarism, social hierarchy, and representation of the Left rather that democratic citizenship and political freedom. The struggle for women to be citizens had to be carried forward in a social system in which the fundamental principles of modern citizenship – democratic rights and political freedoms – were not secured.
p.26 – In Germany, as this chapter shows, class inequality as the epitome of social injustice and political organization along class lines formed the institutional framework for gender politics.
p.32 – When gender is understood as “like class” in Germany, it is being constructed as a social relation of exploitation among group and an appropriate political object of state intervention.
p.33 – As in the earlier movements in the United States and France, the first feminists in Germany were liberal revolutionaries. Like their male comrades on the barricades, they were part of the 1848 struggle to form a united democratic state from multiple German-speaking princedoms. The feminist newspaper published by Louise Otto-Peters made her the most visible advocate of the position that a state founded on principles of liberty and equality demanded full citizenship rights for women.
Otto-Peters was as strong an advocate for better wages for women factory workers as for women’s right to education and a profession. The General Association of German Women (ADF) she founded in 1869 pushed both for women’s education (eventually establishing precollege education for girls) and for all-woman trade union.
p.34 – But August Bebel, a friend of Otto-Peters, argued that women’s employment contributed to their emancipation and that women’s status was a marker of national progress. His tremendously influential 1878 book, Women and Socialism, made the case for seeing women and the working class as the two most oppressed groups, joining their struggles politically and defining women’s employment as a necessary stage of political and social development.
p.35 – In the 1890s, Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) accepted the need for socialist party leadership and a unified struggle of the working class, so gender and class politics split apart. Now liberal feminists appeared not as potential allies but as rivals for support of working-class women.
The main women’s umbrella organization, the Bund deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), formed in 1894 at the impetus of the international women’s movement, excluded socialist women and was conservative by international standards. They did not endorse a demand for women’s suffrage until 1902, when Germany’s ban on women’s political groups was relaxed.
By the outbreak of World War I, two mutually hostile German women’s movements were mobilizing, fighting each other in class-defined terms and developing class-based constituencies among women.
p.36 – The socialist party agreed in principle with Christian and nationalist conservatives on a distinct place for women in the family where individual male authority was paramount; it differed in wanting this kind of family for working-class men too. Although it consistently supported women’s right to vote, the party – and the trade unions allied with it – disparaged and undermined women’s independent self-organization as a threat to the common good of the (patriarchal) family. Neither Left nor Right supported women’s self-determination.
Class divisions among feminists were exacerbated by the Exceptional Law against Social Democracy, which from 1878 to 1890 made the SPD illegal, producing in socialists a sense of outsideship and in liberals a suspicion that this movement supported “dangerous revolutionaries.”
p.37 – Imperial Germany’s 1900 Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) took a step backward from the rights women had enjoyed in many individual German States.
Family law, broadly understood, became the heart of the self-determination issue for left-liberal feminists. Notable among these groups (excluded as too radical by the BDF) was the Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform (BfM, League for the protection of Mothers and for Sexual Reform, founded in 1904), led by Helene Stöcker (1869-1943).
p.38 – The German Empire ended with a revolution. In the closing days of World War I, soldiers and sailors rose up against their commanders, and cities were taken over and run by revolutionary workers councils. The provisional, socialist-led government concluded a peace treaty and began to organize a new national state. Gender relations remained a contested element if this new state’s authority. The constitutional assembly that met in Weimar conferred on women the right to vote but explicitly limited women’s equality to the public sphere (staatsbürgerliche Rechte), rejecting efforts to reform the Civil Code and empower women within the family.
p.41 – The German Women’s Suffrage Association (Deutscher Verband für Frauenstimmrecht) was founded relatively late (in 1902, at an international women’s suffrage meeting in Washington, DC), and the mobilization remained relatively small on an international scale.
p.42 – When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the BDF refused to be incorporated into the party machine and dissolved itself, but it had already shrunk into insignificance. Gertrude Bäumer, one of its last presidents, was co-opted into the Nazi mobilization and allowed to publish her magazine Die Frau throughout the war. Alice Solomon and other Jewish feminists were forced into exile, along with pacifists and socialists such as Heymann.
Chapter 3 – Women Themselves Will Decide: Autonomous Feminist Mobilization 1968-1978
p.53 – It began right after lunch on September 13, 1968. The national assembly of the German Socialist Student Association (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, SDS) reconvened and took up its next order of business without discussing the feminist critique Helke Sander had offered just before the break. Sigrid Damm-Rüger, one of the best-known women in SDS leadership, was more than a little annoyed that the meeting was moving on without responding to the points raised by Sander on behalf of the new Action Group for the Liberation of Women in Berlin. So she stood up and let fry – tossing tomatoes at the young man chairing the meeting.
The leadership of the SDS stood accused of silencing women in their supposedly democratic student politics. Activists and press understood immediately. Widespread coverage of the tomato incident made gender relations in the student movement a matter of public discussion.
p.56 – West German feminists used more overtly political strategies and the East more indirect ones, but language was central for both.
p.57 – The men were not willing to take on child care, allow children at their events, or even recognize the reluctant marginalization of women as a problem. Sigrid Damm-Rüger, formerly a movement leader, was no longer among those at the podium – she had a two-year old and was nine months pregnant when she threw her tomatoes.
p.58 – Sander told her male colleagues that women already saw the personal as political.
p.62 – In practice the number of convictions for illegal abortions steadily declined, from 1,033 in 1955 to 267 in 1969.
p.63 – Drawing on the example of a protest in Paris the previous month, Alice Schwarzer, a feminist and journalist, organized women celebrities publicly to confess to a crime – that they had had abortions. In the June 6, 1971, issue of the popular magazine, Stern, 374 women acknowledged their own abortions and called for total abolition of §218.
A national public call for eliminating §218, led by autonomous feminist groups and action committees on the local level, produced widespread mobilization.
p.67 – In the early 1970s, many small-group discussions and local struggles revolved around the “battlefield of the mattress,” as women tried to make their sexual relationships with men more equal and more rewarding.
This experience became broadly shared with the publication of Verena Stefan’s Shedding (Häutungen) in 1975. She describes it as the story of a woman “who is active in the Left. Unhappy with her body. Sexually unsatisfied. Step by step recognizing her comprehensive exploitation and devaluation, joining the women’s movement, developing a new body consciousness, discovering her love for women and coming to her senses.”
p.72 – Beginning withIrmtraud Morgner’s The Life and Experience of the Troubadour Beatrice (published in the GDR in 1974 and in the West in 1977) and continuing with Maxie Wander’s Guten Morgen, du Schöne (1977) and Christa Wolf’s Kein Ort, Niegends (1979), the new women’s literature of the East portrayed the grueling reality behind the superwoman myth. But these works of fiction also offered images of self-confident women for whom both a job and a child were simply part of normal life. This normality was institutionally secured for GDR women in a way it was not for West German women. East German social policy facilitated women’s employment by making employers provide on-site child care and cafeterias, as well as a full school day and hot lunches.
p.73 – The concrete benefits offered by the East German state, however, came not from engagement with the state but as patriarchally bestowed gifts. The GDR responded to system competition between East and West, its reading of women’s literature, and its own interests in increasing labor productivity and population growth by offering new supports for women’s reproductive labor. Abortion was legalized for the first trimester in 1972, but women were also offered an increasing number of incentives to have children. The so-called baby year of paid maternity leave was introduced in 1976, and a paid “housework day” off each month gave married women time to take care of shopping and cleaning.
p.74-75 – Along with Shedding, the other 1975 feminist best-seller was Alice Schwarzer’s The Little Difference and its Big Consequences. This book attacked the “functional differences” argument that the German high court accepted as a legal justification for treating women and men unequally. Schwarzer took the position that there was no gender difference that would be properly important politically, and many autonomous feminists scorned her emphasis on “sameness” as denying reproduction as an important gender difference and maternal power as a politically realizable goal. But women who felt stifled by being defined by their reproductive capacity, many of whom had no direct contact with autonomous feminist activism, found Schwarzer appealing.
p.76 – EMMA, named for socialist Emma Goldman and aiming to be a newsstand rather than a movement magazine. EMMA published its first issue in February 1977. EMMA gave Schwarzer continuing visibility as a feminist voice on political and social issues, and over time, gave voice to other feminist concerns, including sexual harassment.
p.81 – The apparently easy 1973 victory of Roe v. Wave in granting legal access to abortion and the absence of any long tradition of state-supported maternity benefits combined to sideline the reproductive issues so central to the West German movement.
Chapter 4 – Women Help Women: The Women’s Project Movement 1975-1985
p.103 – In the mid-1970s, a violent splinter group of the Left, the Red Army Fraction (RAF), led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, allied itself with revolutionary movements in Palestine and Vietnam and carried out high-profile kidnappings and assassinations.
By 1977 two-thirds of those on the police’s most-wanted list were women, and Meinhof herself became “the icon of these debates, negatively and positively idealized.”
Feminists deplored revolutionary violence as the false pursuit of equality with men, claiming that RAF women and other sold out their own needs and perspectives to embrace a “masculine” taste for destruction.
Chapter 5 – We Want Half the Power: Feminists and Political Institutions, 1982-1990
p.113 – The Green Party initially attracted feminists because it promised electoral politics done on anti-hierarchical principles: to spread positions around and avoid superstars, the party said that those who won seats in elections were not to be freed from other responsibilities and that no one could hold a high-ranking office in both party and parliament. It was antimilitarist, pro-environment, and open to grassroots participation (one need not be a member to work in a policy group or even rung for office.)
Chapter 6 – You Can’t Make a State without Women: German Reunification, 1990-1995
p.145 – When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, it turned out not to be the beginning of a new era of reform for an independent German Democratic Republic (GDR), but the start of a process of German reunification. In less than a year, on October 3, 1990, formal unification was completed, and the GDR was absorbed as five new states for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).
This was a tremendous shock for everyone, but most especially for women and men in the “new federal states.” Overnight, as “immigrants in our own country,” they faced the hurdles of adjusting to different laws and different ways of doing things in everyday life.
East Germans did successfully put one issue on the FRG political agenda: the classic struggle over women’s self-determination in abortion.
p.154 – The abortion law passed by the Bundestag in 1994, after small modifications by the FRG constitutional court, gave a woman the limited right to make the decision herself in the first trimester.
p.155 – Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter who had not been much engaged in the earlier protest movements, presented a typical case of how the CDU recruited educated women with self-determined lives (a physicist, divorced and remarried, maintaining her birth name) who might in other circumstances have been feminists. Like many women in the GDR. Merkel benefited from the state’s educational policies, but also faced discrimination, more as a Christian than as a woman. The SED government, not a domestic regime of male authority, shaped her oppositional priorities. Her autonomy as a woman was anchored in GDR social policies; her autonomy as a citizen had been restricted but was now opening in the West. Shortly after reunification, Chancellor Kohl appointed her to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, where she was to be (in his words) his “Mädchen” (girl).
p.159 – The policy framework of the FRG was, as noted before, oriented around a male-breadwinner and wife-mother, with strongly institutionalized patterns of support for women being full-time homemakers when they had children. The wage, tax, and school systems all presumed married women would depend on husbands for financial support and devote themselves fully to child care.
Chapter 7 – Butler, Beijing, and Brussels: Remake Gender Relations 1995-2005
p.176 – feminist philosopher Judith Butler came to Berlin in 1997.
p.185 – Founded in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the EU endorsed gender equality as a goal in the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. The 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam formally mandated positive action toward gender equality via gender mainstreaming.
p.188 – Article 2 of the Amsterdam Treaty provided that promotion of equality between men and women is a task of the EU as a whole, to which member-states must be committed. The treaty provides that the EU should aim to eliminate inequalities and promote equality between men and women in all its activities, naming gender mainstreaming its “primary strategy.”
p.189 – From 2003 to 2010, the feminist-led and federally funded Gender Expertise Center at the Humboldt University in Berlin offered free training to civil servants across all agencies. From 2000, gender training was also offered by the Green party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation, whose teams, typically a man and a woman, were castigated by some feminists as being more likely to reify gender differences in the minds of those they trained than to deconstruct it.
p.190 – In the 1980s, West Germany’s acceptance of the EU mandate to adopt laws barring discrimination against women in employment had been minimal and grudging.
p.191 – In 1994, the post-unification German constitution was amended to mandate the state to “promote the actual implementation of equal rights for women and men and take steps to eliminate disadvantages that now exist.”
Chapter 8 – Feminism, Families and the Future: Practical Theory and Global Gender Politics
p.201 – On November 23, 2005, the news echoed around the world: Angela Merkel had become the first woman chancellor of Germany.
p.206 – In 2006, Merkel’s Grand Coalition finally succeeded in passing an antidiscrimination law, as the EU had demanded for a decade. It also reshaped family policy to provide shorter child-care leaves at higher wage replacement rates, arguably making them more gender-inclusive than mother-directed. Both policies affirmed women’s citizenship as individuals (in the liberal sense of personal autonomy and market freedoms) and as a social group (by endorsing an active state extending economic and social rights to the more vulnerable). Each policy was strongly influenced both by the EU’s market liberalism and by feminist advocacy networks throughout Europe.
p.207 – Under Merkel, the conservative parties shifted course, acknowledging women’s rights to compete in the labor market (through more attention to anti-discrimination measures), women’s and men’s joint contributions to family breadwinning (through a restructuring of childcare leaves), and married women’s interests in more egalitarian men (through targeted support for engaged fatherhood). This shift toward a more gender-balanced model of paid and unpaid labor is less surprising than it might seem. All over Europe, birthrates were falling, less in the Scandinavian countries, which provided extensive work-family supports, and more in less work friendly policy environments such as Spain and Italy. The 2006 EU Roadmap for Gender Equality urged national governments to reform family policy to grow their populations and economies. Germany, buffeted by its extreme drop in Eastern births after unification, was particularly anxious about the pension crisis portended by a low birthrate and aging population.
p.208 – Merkel’s proposal followed the “daddy-leave” models pioneered in Scandinavian countries, giving extra time to (married, heterosexual) families in which men shared childrearing leave. Her government invoked values of modernization and family friendliness rather than feminism to legitimate this significant policy shirt.
p.211 – Organizations for women entrepreneurs and in business management sprouted across Germany. The media ideal of Alphamädchen (girls on top) – competitors unafraid of power and unworried about social decorum – still came in for feminist criticism, but networks for women entrepreneurs blossomed, echoing the state’s growing emphasis on individual self-support.
p.213 – The 2005 movie Kebab Connection provides an amusing but informative window into the changing norms for gender and family in Germany. A Romeo-and-Juliet story about a Turkish-German young man and his pregnant German girlfriend, the movie uses pushing a baby carriage in public as a symbol of the purported unwillingness of “Turkish men” to be engaged fathers. This action becomes the site of extended conflict and fantasy between the young lovers.
p.25 – “I am recruiting women citizens for the empire of freedom,” wrote Louise Otto-Peters (1819-95) in 1848. All across Europe, women and men were rising up against the power of the aristocracy. In this general ferment, German bourgeois revolutionaries like Otto-Peters were trying to create a modern liberal nation-state out of the patchwork of principalities and dukedoms.
Unfortunately, the liberal revolution of 1848 failed. Germany unified in 1871 as an empire built on monarchy, militarism, social hierarchy, and representation of the Left rather that democratic citizenship and political freedom. The struggle for women to be citizens had to be carried forward in a social system in which the fundamental principles of modern citizenship – democratic rights and political freedoms – were not secured.
p.26 – In Germany, as this chapter shows, class inequality as the epitome of social injustice and political organization along class lines formed the institutional framework for gender politics.
p.32 – When gender is understood as “like class” in Germany, it is being constructed as a social relation of exploitation among group and an appropriate political object of state intervention.
p.33 – As in the earlier movements in the United States and France, the first feminists in Germany were liberal revolutionaries. Like their male comrades on the barricades, they were part of the 1848 struggle to form a united democratic state from multiple German-speaking princedoms. The feminist newspaper published by Louise Otto-Peters made her the most visible advocate of the position that a state founded on principles of liberty and equality demanded full citizenship rights for women.
Otto-Peters was as strong an advocate for better wages for women factory workers as for women’s right to education and a profession. The General Association of German Women (ADF) she founded in 1869 pushed both for women’s education (eventually establishing precollege education for girls) and for all-woman trade union.
p.34 – But August Bebel, a friend of Otto-Peters, argued that women’s employment contributed to their emancipation and that women’s status was a marker of national progress. His tremendously influential 1878 book, Women and Socialism, made the case for seeing women and the working class as the two most oppressed groups, joining their struggles politically and defining women’s employment as a necessary stage of political and social development.
p.35 – In the 1890s, Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) accepted the need for socialist party leadership and a unified struggle of the working class, so gender and class politics split apart. Now liberal feminists appeared not as potential allies but as rivals for support of working-class women.
The main women’s umbrella organization, the Bund deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), formed in 1894 at the impetus of the international women’s movement, excluded socialist women and was conservative by international standards. They did not endorse a demand for women’s suffrage until 1902, when Germany’s ban on women’s political groups was relaxed.
By the outbreak of World War I, two mutually hostile German women’s movements were mobilizing, fighting each other in class-defined terms and developing class-based constituencies among women.
p.36 – The socialist party agreed in principle with Christian and nationalist conservatives on a distinct place for women in the family where individual male authority was paramount; it differed in wanting this kind of family for working-class men too. Although it consistently supported women’s right to vote, the party – and the trade unions allied with it – disparaged and undermined women’s independent self-organization as a threat to the common good of the (patriarchal) family. Neither Left nor Right supported women’s self-determination.
Class divisions among feminists were exacerbated by the Exceptional Law against Social Democracy, which from 1878 to 1890 made the SPD illegal, producing in socialists a sense of outsideship and in liberals a suspicion that this movement supported “dangerous revolutionaries.”
p.37 – Imperial Germany’s 1900 Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) took a step backward from the rights women had enjoyed in many individual German States.
Family law, broadly understood, became the heart of the self-determination issue for left-liberal feminists. Notable among these groups (excluded as too radical by the BDF) was the Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform (BfM, League for the protection of Mothers and for Sexual Reform, founded in 1904), led by Helene Stöcker (1869-1943).
p.38 – The German Empire ended with a revolution. In the closing days of World War I, soldiers and sailors rose up against their commanders, and cities were taken over and run by revolutionary workers councils. The provisional, socialist-led government concluded a peace treaty and began to organize a new national state. Gender relations remained a contested element if this new state’s authority. The constitutional assembly that met in Weimar conferred on women the right to vote but explicitly limited women’s equality to the public sphere (staatsbürgerliche Rechte), rejecting efforts to reform the Civil Code and empower women within the family.
p.41 – The German Women’s Suffrage Association (Deutscher Verband für Frauenstimmrecht) was founded relatively late (in 1902, at an international women’s suffrage meeting in Washington, DC), and the mobilization remained relatively small on an international scale.
p.42 – When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the BDF refused to be incorporated into the party machine and dissolved itself, but it had already shrunk into insignificance. Gertrude Bäumer, one of its last presidents, was co-opted into the Nazi mobilization and allowed to publish her magazine Die Frau throughout the war. Alice Solomon and other Jewish feminists were forced into exile, along with pacifists and socialists such as Heymann.
Chapter 3 – Women Themselves Will Decide: Autonomous Feminist Mobilization 1968-1978
p.53 – It began right after lunch on September 13, 1968. The national assembly of the German Socialist Student Association (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, SDS) reconvened and took up its next order of business without discussing the feminist critique Helke Sander had offered just before the break. Sigrid Damm-Rüger, one of the best-known women in SDS leadership, was more than a little annoyed that the meeting was moving on without responding to the points raised by Sander on behalf of the new Action Group for the Liberation of Women in Berlin. So she stood up and let fry – tossing tomatoes at the young man chairing the meeting.
The leadership of the SDS stood accused of silencing women in their supposedly democratic student politics. Activists and press understood immediately. Widespread coverage of the tomato incident made gender relations in the student movement a matter of public discussion.
p.56 – West German feminists used more overtly political strategies and the East more indirect ones, but language was central for both.
p.57 – The men were not willing to take on child care, allow children at their events, or even recognize the reluctant marginalization of women as a problem. Sigrid Damm-Rüger, formerly a movement leader, was no longer among those at the podium – she had a two-year old and was nine months pregnant when she threw her tomatoes.
p.58 – Sander told her male colleagues that women already saw the personal as political.
p.62 – In practice the number of convictions for illegal abortions steadily declined, from 1,033 in 1955 to 267 in 1969.
p.63 – Drawing on the example of a protest in Paris the previous month, Alice Schwarzer, a feminist and journalist, organized women celebrities publicly to confess to a crime – that they had had abortions. In the June 6, 1971, issue of the popular magazine, Stern, 374 women acknowledged their own abortions and called for total abolition of §218.
A national public call for eliminating §218, led by autonomous feminist groups and action committees on the local level, produced widespread mobilization.
p.67 – In the early 1970s, many small-group discussions and local struggles revolved around the “battlefield of the mattress,” as women tried to make their sexual relationships with men more equal and more rewarding.
This experience became broadly shared with the publication of Verena Stefan’s Shedding (Häutungen) in 1975. She describes it as the story of a woman “who is active in the Left. Unhappy with her body. Sexually unsatisfied. Step by step recognizing her comprehensive exploitation and devaluation, joining the women’s movement, developing a new body consciousness, discovering her love for women and coming to her senses.”
p.72 – Beginning withIrmtraud Morgner’s The Life and Experience of the Troubadour Beatrice (published in the GDR in 1974 and in the West in 1977) and continuing with Maxie Wander’s Guten Morgen, du Schöne (1977) and Christa Wolf’s Kein Ort, Niegends (1979), the new women’s literature of the East portrayed the grueling reality behind the superwoman myth. But these works of fiction also offered images of self-confident women for whom both a job and a child were simply part of normal life. This normality was institutionally secured for GDR women in a way it was not for West German women. East German social policy facilitated women’s employment by making employers provide on-site child care and cafeterias, as well as a full school day and hot lunches.
p.73 – The concrete benefits offered by the East German state, however, came not from engagement with the state but as patriarchally bestowed gifts. The GDR responded to system competition between East and West, its reading of women’s literature, and its own interests in increasing labor productivity and population growth by offering new supports for women’s reproductive labor. Abortion was legalized for the first trimester in 1972, but women were also offered an increasing number of incentives to have children. The so-called baby year of paid maternity leave was introduced in 1976, and a paid “housework day” off each month gave married women time to take care of shopping and cleaning.
p.74-75 – Along with Shedding, the other 1975 feminist best-seller was Alice Schwarzer’s The Little Difference and its Big Consequences. This book attacked the “functional differences” argument that the German high court accepted as a legal justification for treating women and men unequally. Schwarzer took the position that there was no gender difference that would be properly important politically, and many autonomous feminists scorned her emphasis on “sameness” as denying reproduction as an important gender difference and maternal power as a politically realizable goal. But women who felt stifled by being defined by their reproductive capacity, many of whom had no direct contact with autonomous feminist activism, found Schwarzer appealing.
p.76 – EMMA, named for socialist Emma Goldman and aiming to be a newsstand rather than a movement magazine. EMMA published its first issue in February 1977. EMMA gave Schwarzer continuing visibility as a feminist voice on political and social issues, and over time, gave voice to other feminist concerns, including sexual harassment.
p.81 – The apparently easy 1973 victory of Roe v. Wave in granting legal access to abortion and the absence of any long tradition of state-supported maternity benefits combined to sideline the reproductive issues so central to the West German movement.
Chapter 4 – Women Help Women: The Women’s Project Movement 1975-1985
p.103 – In the mid-1970s, a violent splinter group of the Left, the Red Army Fraction (RAF), led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, allied itself with revolutionary movements in Palestine and Vietnam and carried out high-profile kidnappings and assassinations.
By 1977 two-thirds of those on the police’s most-wanted list were women, and Meinhof herself became “the icon of these debates, negatively and positively idealized.”
Feminists deplored revolutionary violence as the false pursuit of equality with men, claiming that RAF women and other sold out their own needs and perspectives to embrace a “masculine” taste for destruction.
Chapter 5 – We Want Half the Power: Feminists and Political Institutions, 1982-1990
p.113 – The Green Party initially attracted feminists because it promised electoral politics done on anti-hierarchical principles: to spread positions around and avoid superstars, the party said that those who won seats in elections were not to be freed from other responsibilities and that no one could hold a high-ranking office in both party and parliament. It was antimilitarist, pro-environment, and open to grassroots participation (one need not be a member to work in a policy group or even rung for office.)
Chapter 6 – You Can’t Make a State without Women: German Reunification, 1990-1995
p.145 – When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, it turned out not to be the beginning of a new era of reform for an independent German Democratic Republic (GDR), but the start of a process of German reunification. In less than a year, on October 3, 1990, formal unification was completed, and the GDR was absorbed as five new states for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).
This was a tremendous shock for everyone, but most especially for women and men in the “new federal states.” Overnight, as “immigrants in our own country,” they faced the hurdles of adjusting to different laws and different ways of doing things in everyday life.
East Germans did successfully put one issue on the FRG political agenda: the classic struggle over women’s self-determination in abortion.
p.154 – The abortion law passed by the Bundestag in 1994, after small modifications by the FRG constitutional court, gave a woman the limited right to make the decision herself in the first trimester.
p.155 – Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter who had not been much engaged in the earlier protest movements, presented a typical case of how the CDU recruited educated women with self-determined lives (a physicist, divorced and remarried, maintaining her birth name) who might in other circumstances have been feminists. Like many women in the GDR. Merkel benefited from the state’s educational policies, but also faced discrimination, more as a Christian than as a woman. The SED government, not a domestic regime of male authority, shaped her oppositional priorities. Her autonomy as a woman was anchored in GDR social policies; her autonomy as a citizen had been restricted but was now opening in the West. Shortly after reunification, Chancellor Kohl appointed her to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, where she was to be (in his words) his “Mädchen” (girl).
p.159 – The policy framework of the FRG was, as noted before, oriented around a male-breadwinner and wife-mother, with strongly institutionalized patterns of support for women being full-time homemakers when they had children. The wage, tax, and school systems all presumed married women would depend on husbands for financial support and devote themselves fully to child care.
Chapter 7 – Butler, Beijing, and Brussels: Remake Gender Relations 1995-2005
p.176 – feminist philosopher Judith Butler came to Berlin in 1997.
p.185 – Founded in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the EU endorsed gender equality as a goal in the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. The 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam formally mandated positive action toward gender equality via gender mainstreaming.
p.188 – Article 2 of the Amsterdam Treaty provided that promotion of equality between men and women is a task of the EU as a whole, to which member-states must be committed. The treaty provides that the EU should aim to eliminate inequalities and promote equality between men and women in all its activities, naming gender mainstreaming its “primary strategy.”
p.189 – From 2003 to 2010, the feminist-led and federally funded Gender Expertise Center at the Humboldt University in Berlin offered free training to civil servants across all agencies. From 2000, gender training was also offered by the Green party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation, whose teams, typically a man and a woman, were castigated by some feminists as being more likely to reify gender differences in the minds of those they trained than to deconstruct it.
p.190 – In the 1980s, West Germany’s acceptance of the EU mandate to adopt laws barring discrimination against women in employment had been minimal and grudging.
p.191 – In 1994, the post-unification German constitution was amended to mandate the state to “promote the actual implementation of equal rights for women and men and take steps to eliminate disadvantages that now exist.”
Chapter 8 – Feminism, Families and the Future: Practical Theory and Global Gender Politics
p.201 – On November 23, 2005, the news echoed around the world: Angela Merkel had become the first woman chancellor of Germany.
p.206 – In 2006, Merkel’s Grand Coalition finally succeeded in passing an antidiscrimination law, as the EU had demanded for a decade. It also reshaped family policy to provide shorter child-care leaves at higher wage replacement rates, arguably making them more gender-inclusive than mother-directed. Both policies affirmed women’s citizenship as individuals (in the liberal sense of personal autonomy and market freedoms) and as a social group (by endorsing an active state extending economic and social rights to the more vulnerable). Each policy was strongly influenced both by the EU’s market liberalism and by feminist advocacy networks throughout Europe.
p.207 – Under Merkel, the conservative parties shifted course, acknowledging women’s rights to compete in the labor market (through more attention to anti-discrimination measures), women’s and men’s joint contributions to family breadwinning (through a restructuring of childcare leaves), and married women’s interests in more egalitarian men (through targeted support for engaged fatherhood). This shift toward a more gender-balanced model of paid and unpaid labor is less surprising than it might seem. All over Europe, birthrates were falling, less in the Scandinavian countries, which provided extensive work-family supports, and more in less work friendly policy environments such as Spain and Italy. The 2006 EU Roadmap for Gender Equality urged national governments to reform family policy to grow their populations and economies. Germany, buffeted by its extreme drop in Eastern births after unification, was particularly anxious about the pension crisis portended by a low birthrate and aging population.
p.208 – Merkel’s proposal followed the “daddy-leave” models pioneered in Scandinavian countries, giving extra time to (married, heterosexual) families in which men shared childrearing leave. Her government invoked values of modernization and family friendliness rather than feminism to legitimate this significant policy shirt.
p.211 – Organizations for women entrepreneurs and in business management sprouted across Germany. The media ideal of Alphamädchen (girls on top) – competitors unafraid of power and unworried about social decorum – still came in for feminist criticism, but networks for women entrepreneurs blossomed, echoing the state’s growing emphasis on individual self-support.
p.213 – The 2005 movie Kebab Connection provides an amusing but informative window into the changing norms for gender and family in Germany. A Romeo-and-Juliet story about a Turkish-German young man and his pregnant German girlfriend, the movie uses pushing a baby carriage in public as a symbol of the purported unwillingness of “Turkish men” to be engaged fathers. This action becomes the site of extended conflict and fantasy between the young lovers.
June 7, 2018
This book provided an admirable insight into the struggle for social justice in terms of female treatment. There were four main issues covered in this book, all stemming from the main topic of the female's role in society: 1) Abortion; 2) Gender pronouns; 3) Motherhood; 4) Progress from second-class citizens onto global citizens--minor issues being the metamorphosis of feminine representation in parliament and its outcomes and induction of gender studies as a recognised field. This book is phenomenal because it hints at the answers to some of the problems we have today. Maybe what we deem as traditional is backward thinking in disguise; perhaps prejudice has more to do with making one accept the hierarchical structure of society than the unequal distribution of rights; Ferree daresay feminists don't have to force other women to take sides in order to prove their loyalty to the female gender; she posits that real change can only begin when women feel most comfortable in their own skin, and not having to prove themselves as superwomen just to show their emancipation. And only then can females challenge deep-rooted stagnant prejudices against them. And only then can we get people thinking and change their ways: to prioritise women as a citizen, a human being of equal right. And only then can we progress towards sustainable change.
April 6, 2021
**Read for my 2021 gender and sexuality comprehensive exams**
Not sure why I didn't enjoy this one too much. It definitely is a grand piece of work, holds a lot of information and history and addresses many of the difficulties and successes of the feminist movement in Germany. I kept getting distracted reading this though, and it took me far too long. But perhaps I might just be getting really burnt out with all my academic readings, lol.
Not sure why I didn't enjoy this one too much. It definitely is a grand piece of work, holds a lot of information and history and addresses many of the difficulties and successes of the feminist movement in Germany. I kept getting distracted reading this though, and it took me far too long. But perhaps I might just be getting really burnt out with all my academic readings, lol.
May 18, 2021
The author did an excellent job to capture all the political, historical and cultural events influencing the women’s movement in Germany.
I really learned a lot from it!
It’s not an easy reading tho, but I wasn’t expecting anything else.
I really learned a lot from it!
It’s not an easy reading tho, but I wasn’t expecting anything else.
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