JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies.The peaceful revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 ushered in a new era of capitalist development, most radically and rapidly in East Germany. Unlike other countries' struggles to find a new path, the reform of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was rapidly converted into the drama of unification. In less than a year after the collapse of the government, on October 3, 1990, unification was completed, with the absorption of the GDR as five new states for the Federal Republic of Germany. More completely than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, women are now faced with life conditions drastically different from those in which they were raised and on which they oriented their lives. Although this will certainly open new opportunities for some women, it also represents a crisis of tremendous proportions for most.Although women were not completely invisible in this period of social transformation, only a few individuals (e.g., Birbel Bohley, of the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights) and issues (e.g., the legal regulation of abortion in the unification treaty) emerged even briefly into the international spotlight. Nonetheless, women were active participants in the nonviolent revolution that overthrew the state. Moreover, unlike all other Eastern European nations, the GDR saw a veritable explosion of autonomous feminist activity.1 Women not only fought alongside men for a new social order, but they also developed a distinctive gender analysis and organizations of their own. These feminist organizations and perspectives, newly freed from domination by the GDR's political agenda, are now struggling to survive in dramatically changed circumstances: ab-Feminist Studies 19, no.