Restacking the deck: Family policy and women's fall-back position in Germany before and after unification

Abstract

This paper examines some of the effects of East and West German family policy on women's economic position by analyzing intrahousehold bargaining power, defined here as based on co-resident partners' relative fall-back positions, which in turn depend on the individuals' access to income in the event that the partnership ends. East German policy sought to integrate women into the labor force through programs such as free public child care and liberal maternity leave. West Germany based its family policy on the assumption of a stark gender division of labor, with one lifetime breadwinner per family and a second parent who temporarily leaves the labor force to raise children. On the basis of her findings and analysis, the author argues that while East German institutions increased women's bargaining power, gender-specific policies interfered with women's ability to use this power to bring about changes in the household division of labor. West German family policy did not assign gender roles, but it offered women less bargaining power with which to negotiate. The author maintains that society's refusal to address women's greater child-rearing costs is not based on an assessment of such costs and the costs of redistributive government programs, but on the assumption that women should absorb the risks and burdens of reproduction.Family policy, bargaining power, Germany, child-rearing, costs, housework, household work, socialism,

A Feminist Comparative Economic Systems

“…18 The increasing dominance of neoclassical economics on education in transition economies has changed the experience of younger scholars, but the feminist scholars cited here are old enough to have experienced centrally planned economies and different educational priorities. 19 Exceptions to this trend include Ann-Mari Sätre Å hlander's (2001) article on women's work in Post Soviet Affairs and Lynn Duggan's (2003) article on the gendered distribution of childrearing costs in Comparative Economic Studies. 20 Clearly the success of the Swedish system in terms of a favorable GDI is relevant to a feminist CES, but Geoffrey Schneider (2007) also points out that Swedish policies that support women's ability to balance work and family have led to one of the highest labor force participation rates in the world, which gives Sweden a competitive advantage.…”

“…This body of work appears primarily in heterodox journals such as the Review of Social Economy, the Journal of Economic Issues, Feminist Economics, and development journals. 19 Work by this group also appears to have had little impact on CES as a field (see, for example, Lynn Duggan 1995;Ulla Grapard 1997;Gale Summerfield 1997).…”

The Impact of the Family Policy on the Transformation of Gender Roles in the Professional and Private Spheres on the Example of German Society

“…The work-oriented society (Arbeitsgesellschaft) had to be replaced with more modern societal system based on the de-centralized power relations, flexible structure of the employment, and newly established information and service economy (Gleiser, 1996). The radical redistribution of the labor and the care, the resources and the income had a huge impact on the life of the entire society, although in various degrees: the losers of the combination turned out to be women who suddenly lost their economic independence, social guarantees and a number of civil rights (Mazari, Gerhard, Wischermann, 2002: 394;Behrend, Maynard and Purvis, 1996;Ostner, 1993Ostner, , 1998Duggan, 2010;Einhor, Gerhard, 1991-2;Kolinsky, 1992). For them, the reunification really meant a serious step back, the 'regression to pre-war gender roles' (Adler, 1997), in respect of loss of the status of the central object of numerous social benefits from the state.…”

“…Germany is a unique example of the state, which provides the conditions for the natural experiment (Cooke, 2007: 934), being the result of combination of two different socio-economic systems of the FRG and the GDR, that are identical in national, cultural and linguistic dimensions, but evolved in different ideological, economic and socio-cultural environment for forty years. As a result, two opposite family and gender policies were formed, that, in turn, determined the nature of the dominant models of male and female biographies and patterns of interpersonal relationships (Duggan, 2010;Ziefle, Gangl, 2014). The analysis of the process and the results of German reunification allows to find out how families with different gender patterns in the distribution of tasks of paid and unpaid work react to the changes in the powerful discourse on the family and the roles of men and women in the society.…”

Book Reviews

“…Rudolph, Appelbaum, and Maier view tensions between East Germany's ideology of encouraging women's paid labor and policies promoting the household as women's primary sphere as increasing women's burdens; in contrast, West Germany's system of labor market regulations is based solely on the presumption of conservative family models. However, Duggan (1995) finds women in the former East Germany reluctant to simplify the tensions by returning to traditional homemaking and suggests that women's bargaining power was greater under socialist family policies. Nevertheless, there are significant parallels between the experiences of women in post-socialist and developing countries.…”