Gunilla-Friederike Budde. Frauen der Intelligenz: Akademikerinnen in der DDR 1945 bis 1975. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. 446 S. (broschiert), ISBN 978-3-525-35143-7.

Reviewed by Donna Harsch (Carnegie Mellon University)
Published on H-German (April, 2006)

Educated Women in the GDR

The late, unlamented Socialist Unity Party (SED) liked to trumpet its ideological commitment to women's emancipation and to claim astounding progress in solving "the woman question" in the German Democratic Republic. The GDR (so SED leaders crowed) drew women into higher education and the professions at much higher absolute and relative rates than any German state before 1945 or the Federal Republic since 1945. Gunilla-Friederike Budde explores the reality behind these assertions. They were not, she concludes, cut out of whole cloth. There is a sunny side to the story of women's higher education and professional employment in the GDR. The percentage of college-educated women and their representation in the professions increased relative to ratios in earlier German regimes and in the Third Reich in particular. These indicators of women's social advancement also rose considerably sooner in the GDR than the FRG. Moreover, "women of the intelligentsia" (p. 14) recognized their comparative educational advantages vis-à-vis women in the FRG and took pride in their accomplishments as professionals in East German academia, law and medicine.

The gains were, however, neither as rapid nor as uniform nor as pathbreaking as the SED claimed. And they certainly did not signify the achievement of women's professional equality for, as Budde shows, their career advancement lagged behind men's in every profession. Budde examines the multiple obstacles that cast shadows over the path of women of the intelligentsia. The ruling elite of the SED, she demonstrates, mixed a murky political-cultural cocktail out of "classic" patriarchal prejudices about educated women and Stalinist gender bias, which placed sexual relations far down on the grand Communist to-do list. Thus, ambiguous directions from above contributed to women's meandering academic courses. From below, it ran into familial and cultural hindrances. Girls' upbringing often directed them away from pursuing any type or level of qualification. Even enlightened versions of family socialization tended to steer young women toward the least technical and most "caring" or humanistic branches of every profession or academic field. This proclivity hurt them, for in the GDR (as in other industrial societies) the more technical or "hard" the scholarly, scientific or legal enterprise, the more status it enjoyed and the higher compensation it earned.

Both socialization and a fork-tongued official discourse inclined women to continue to attach much significance to domestic matters and, thus, to tailor their careers to fit familial demands. Their husbands (who were typically of equivalent educational achievement) were less burdened by domestic duties and, certainly, by pangs of conscience about such duties, and so men scrambled more nimbly up the GDR's professional ladders. Gender handicaps did generate some ironic benefits for women. Women could more easily retreat, Budde argues, into a quiet professional corner and follow scientific, medical, legal or scholarly interests that provoked scant attention of either a positive or negative sort from the party or state.

Budde's book is, then, a nuanced examination of East German women of the intelligentsia from 1945 to 1975--but it is also much more. She offers a study of the GDR that is theoretically informed and empirically rich, attuned to East German questions while still sensitive to her material's comparative significance. Her sources are diverse, including state and party documents and reports, statistics, the press (dailies, women's periodicals and academic journals), films, novels and interviews. Budde "works" the evidence with several methodological tools. She combines a discourse analysis of the qualitative sources with a sociological investigation of the quantitative data. She interweaves gender and social-class analyses. Her angle of observation shifts vertically between the decision-making of top party-state officials and the Eigensinn with which women reacted to policy. Her perspective moves horizontally between an examination of the general discourse about university-educated women and a reconstruction of the specific experiences of women in four professions: primary/secondary education, academia, medicine and law. Budde places her findings in the wider German-German context, assessing continuity and change in women's place in the professions across both the 1945 divide and the East/West partition. She also frames her subject within major historiographical debates about the GDR and SED. The effect of all of this analysis is to turn a case study of one set of women into a story that illuminates East German gender relations and, indeed, casts light on the relationship in the GDR between ideology and practice, on the one hand, and state and society, on the other.

Budde brings a gender perspective to three central questions that have animated post-unification debates about the GDR. I will discuss the first two in tandem before turning to the third one. She addresses, first, the problem of whether a clear break occurred in the social composition of professional elites after 1945. If a turnover did happen, Budde asks, did it affect not only the class, but also the gender, make-up of elites? And if feminization took place, was it largely the effect of the SED's "woman policy" or mainly a by-product of deprofessionalization--of a decline in standards and/or status in the profession(s)? Budde considers, second, the matter of generational turning points in the evolution of the GDR's professional elites. Were the turning points different for women than for men and, especially, did "1961"--the construction of the Berlin Wall--constitute a more or less significant marker for women's educational mobility than for men's?

From 1949-61, Budde concludes, the SED's educational policies were much more oriented toward social transformation than toward change in gender roles. Women students, the data show, did enter the expanding university student body in large numbers. Yet this statistic alone is misleading, for expanding technical colleges remained very heavily male. Here Budde's findings support the groundbreaking research of Karin Zachmann. Like Zachmann, Budde shows as well that the entry of female students into the universities looks especially impressive if one includes only "direct" learners (on-campus students), leaving out the not insignificant number of "distance learners" who earned university degrees. If distance learners are included, women's ratio among university students looks less striking, for distance learners were more disproportionately male than students in "direct study." The Stalinist institution called "the workers' and farmers' faculty," which prepared proletarian and peasant children for university study, was also lopsidedly male in student composition.[1] In sum, progress was made in the 1950s toward de-gendering higher education but the historic break was in the class composition of students.

In fact, the preference for children of the proletariat disadvantaged girls in a number of ways. Daughters of the bourgeoisie had a much better chance than did proletarian girls to breach the gender barrier. They were better prepared educationally and also often encouraged by parents to study but, of course, bourgeois girls were not exactly gefragt by the SED. Working-class daughters, in contrast, possessed a class advantage, but they were often actively discouraged by parents (and/or boyfriends or husbands) from pursuing a higher education. Also pernicious was the Stalinist assumption that political orientation mattered and that, further, young women--working-class or not--were less likely to be "red" than were young men. The assumption that women were apolitical continued to dog them after they managed to get a higher degree and move into their chosen profession. It was one reason that women did not advance as rapidly as men, including considerably less well-qualified men. In the 1950s, this Stalinist prejudice intersected with still-widespread philistine notions about the lady professional as neither lady-like nor professional. With a few prominent exceptions, the most touted women of the intelligentsia before 1960 were those married to a member of the intelligentsia, mothering a large brood, and active in the East German Women's League. In the brave new world of the politicized proletarian professions, then, gendered continuities were surprisingly strong, though by no means absolute.

Only after the construction of the Wall did the SED regime begin to pay sustained attention to women's education and promotion. Budde argues that this move was motivated, first, by the GDR's growing shortage of labor and, second, by the "scissors" that opened between women's rising employment and stagnant qualification levels. In its widely broadcast "Frauenkommunique" of December 1961, the SED threw the spotlight of state attention on women's promotion for the first time. The communiqué was multiply significant. Its discourse broke with the anodyne phrases about women's work in the 1950s. It admitted that the emancipation of women in the GDR was stalled and blamed men for this state of affairs. It even hinted that powerful men (though certainly not the party) harbored retrograde views on the woman question. Its semi-feminist language rippled into official discourse over the next several years. The communiqué also introduced stricter and more regular controls over measures for women's promotion. Women's oversight committees were created, the highest of which was "attached" to the Politburo. These committees conducted hundreds of local investigations at factories and offices to gather information on women's (lack of) advance in the workplace. The existing circle of academic women inaugurated the sociological study of the "woman question" and in the process increased their clout and their number. The "concrete results" of all this attention to women's promotion were still few in the 1960s, Budde concludes, but the "climate of discourse" was more open than earlier (p. 68). In the 1970s came real, if always circumscribed, advances for women in the professions.

Budde delves in detail into developments in academia, law, medicine and lower education. In the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, women made virtually no headway in academia or law, some inroads into medicine and considerable incursions into the lower school system. After 1945, women continued to make progress in medicine and lower education and, after 1960, these professions "feminized" substantially, although mainly in less prestigious sub-fields and in less authoritative positions. In academia, women advanced compared to their very poor standing in 1945, although the going was quite slow. Women professors and "academicians" were and remained bunched in the humanities and "soft" sciences. Moreover, women rarely advanced into the top academic ranks. The only profession in which a sharp break occurred was law. By the early 1950s, the female judge was common in the GDR and by the 1960s, "justice" was substantially feminized, indeed, astoundingly so, relative to the German past and the FRG. Budde attributes women's breakthrough in the courts to three main causes. Most important was the fact that the SED thoroughly denazified the realm of legal justice and, thus, had to recruit and train a totally new personnel. The housecleaning in this area stood in contrast to the status quo ante that characterized medicine. The medical professoriate and even clinical personnel continued to be dominated by the old guard into the late 1950s. The structural overhaul of the court system might in itself not have benefited women, Budde suggests, if had not been for a contingent factor: from 1953 to 1967 the Minister of Justice was a woman. The redoubtable Old Communist Hilde Benjamin pushed and pulled women into the justice system and up its hierarchy. Despite Benjamin's impetus, women tended to cluster in a gender-stereotyped area: family law. Budde contends, finally, that the courts became disproportionately "feminized" in part because law was a profession that lost considerable status and independence relative to its earlier standing (although its autonomy was already badly compromised under National Socialism).

The third "big" question in the historiography that Budde addresses is the problem of relations between state and society in the SED dictatorship. Like other social historians who have plumbed the SED documents that became available to researchers after reunification, Budde argues that there were internal limits to Communist power. The limits were, of course, neither organized nor obvious but consisted of individual decisions and behaviors that articulated a person's Eigensinn. Each moment of "self-constructed meaning" was tiny, but the mass of many such moments sometimes frustrated the realization of official plans and even forced unwanted revisions of state policies. As did workers, youth and consumers, "women of the intelligentsia" located the small spaces outside state control and maneuvered in and around them.

Like Carola Sachse in her recent book on the housework day in the GDR, Budde defines Eigensinn more broadly than the typical social historian.[2] She includes women's decisions about qualification, family planning, professional practices and careers, and argues that the choices of women disturbed the state's attempts to channel their educational and professional paths. Not only did women actively shape their own lives and careers, in doing so they also caused the state to pay closer attention over time to the family and women's role in the family. The policy consequence of that attention was Honecker's famous Muttipolitik of the 1970s, a maternalist welfare policy that, Budde and most scholars agree, undermined gender equality as much as it promoted it. Whatever its effects, Muttipolitik originated, Budde implies, not only in raison d'état but also in response to the private calculations of millions of women, including academic women. As evidence of women's agency and Eigensinn, Budde incorporates telling excerpts from her interviews with prominent and unknown women of the intelligentsia as well as expert analyses of films and women's literature, especially fiction from the "literary feminism" wave of the late 1960s. Among many reasons for scholars of the GDR and/or gender relations to read this fine book, Budde's fascinating interpretations of these real and invented stories is far from the least.

Notes

[1]. Karin Zachmann, "Frauen für die technische Revolution. Studentinnen und Absolventinnen Technischer Hochschulen in der SBZ/DDR," in Gunilla-Friederike Budde, ed., Frauen arbeiten. Weibliche Erwerbstätigkeit in Ost- und Westdeutschland nach 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1997). Also see Karin Zachmann, Mobilisierung der Frauen. Technik, Geschlecht und Kalter Krieg in der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2004).

[2]. Carola Sachse, Der Hausarbeitstag. Gerechtigkeit und Gleichberechtigung in Ost und West 1939-1994 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002).

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Citation: Donna Harsch. Review of Budde, Gunilla-Friederike, Frauen der Intelligenz: Akademikerinnen in der DDR 1945 bis 1975. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11681

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