Gender History of Germany after 1945
© Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv
The monograph argues for a re-examination of German history after 1945 from the perspective of gender - a consistently disputed category. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the constitution's principle of equality was in clear contradiction to the traditional orders of gender and legal, which caused intense conflicts of perception. In contrast, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) considered equal rights to be synonymous with female employment, without paying any attention to the distribution of roles within the family or women's opportunities for social mobility and participation. This contributed to massive dissatisfaction among female GDR citizens with the state, which was perceived as “patriarchal”. The reunified Federal Republic initially tried to resolve the imbalance in the organization of women's rights in both states (employment, state childcare, abortion regulations) by emphasizing patriarchal structures, and reforms had to be fought for again. However, all these struggles over “women's issues as fundamental societal questions” (Ina Merkel) hardly found their way into the predominantly gender-blind master narratives of German contemporary history research.
The gender-historical perspective therefore not only enables a description of the intense struggle of contemporaries for equality and gender equality in democracy and socialist society, but above all also a long demanded integrated history of the two German societies and reunified Germany. The central category of gender allows a longue-durée perspective, intersectional analysis and transnational contextualization to be combined. In this way, new caesuras in contemporary history become visible, while others lose their conciseness. Above all, however, women as political and social actors become the focus of contemporary historical analysis. Three dimensions of gender and state, gender and work, and gender and space structure the study.