“Foreigners and Women Have the Same Problems”

Abstract

This article discusses the Alliance of German Women Married to Foreigners (Interessengemeinschaft der mit Ausländern verheirateten Frauen [IAF]) from its origins in 1972 until the mid-1980s. The IAF founders recognized that in Germany, women’s rights and foreigner rights were intricately linked; they worked to address both. Yet pursuing this dual-pronged approach over the next fifteen years, an increasingly hostile period for foreigners in Germany, exposed the challenges of working both for and with foreign men. The resulting tensions within the organization, highlighted in discussions over the inclusion of foreign men and women, ultimately led IAF women to broaden their organization’s scope and constituency. The IAF’s history reflects the gradual, and not always smooth, mutual recognition of Germany’s feminist and foreigner/citizenship rights advocacy communities. It also shows that in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not foreign but German women—specifically, those married to foreign men—who represented the confluence of these issues and grappled with their implications.