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VARIETIES OF FEMINISM

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................ixList of Abbreviations.............................................................................................................xv1 Practical Theory and the Politics of Gender.....................................................................................12 creating Women citizens: national frameworks for Gender equality and self-determination, 1848–1968........................253 Women Themselves Will decide: Autonomous feminist Mobilization, 1968–1978.................................................534 Women Help Women: The Women's Project Movement, 1975–1985.................................................................836 You can't Make a state Without Women: German Unification, 1990–1995.......................................................1447 Kissing the frog? Butler, Beijing, and Brussels remake Gender relations, 1995–2005........................................1768 feminism, families, and the future: Practical Theory and Global Gender Politics in the Twenty-first century.....................201Glossary..........................................................................................................................233Notes.............................................................................................................................237References........................................................................................................................267Index.............................................................................................................................289

Chapter One

ON JANUARY 21, 2005, the German parliament (the Bundestag) began discussing a bill to outlaw discrimination in employment, housing, and forms of private contracts. The law would cover discrimination based on gender, skin color, ethnic origin, disability, age, and religion, and it set up a national office to receive complaints and manage statistical information.

But what does it mean to target discrimination in 2005? One might compare the bill to the 1964 civil rights Act in the United states and wonder why it took more than forty years for Germany to get to this point. Another might see it as a response to the European Union (EU), for without Europe-level guidelines prohibiting discrimination and demanding member-state action, would Germany even then be considering such a bill? Yet another might observe that, although lacking antidiscrimination laws, German policy long included a strong constitutional mandate for gender equality. The constitution not only asserts that women and men have equal rights (something the US constitution still lacks) but also mandates the state take steps to realize this equality in practice.

German women are certainly visible as political actors. The government in 2005 was headed by Angela Merkel, the first female chancellor. The proportion of women in the Bundestag has steadily risen since the 1970s; in 2005, before Merkel became chancellor, it stood at 32 percent (twice the Us figures: 16 percent in the House and 14 percent in the senate). German federal states, counties, and municipalities have more than a thousand women's affairs offices charged with advancing women's rights. Gender mainstreaming—scrutiny of public policies for disparate effects on women and men—is institutionalized by federal law.

Among European countries, however, Germany's commitment to gender equality hardly stands out. West Germany had been especially slow in taking measures to enable women to enter the paid labor force, combat stereotypes of women and men or reform family law and social services to be gender neutral. When Sweden and Finland joined the European Union, they succeeded in shifting this more conservative transnational body toward affirming gender equality, mandating "women-friendly" state actions. The EU's resulting directives, along with the incorporation of the different political culture of east Germany, challenged the state to change its approach to women's welfare.

So is Germany a reluctant latecomer to combating discrimination against women, an exemplary case of feminist political leadership, or a middle-of-the-pack European welfare state? I argue that it is all three, and the variation reflects the different ways women understand and pursue their political interests. The diversity of feminist aims and strategies is easiest to recognize when countries face different problems because of the considerable gap in their standard of living, as between the United states and china. Although highly industrialized countries like Germany, other members of the EU, and the United states face similar challenges and have comparable resources to meet them, their gender arrangements and women's movement mobilizations are also quite various—not simply more or less good for women, but good for different women and in different ways. Like the varieties of capitalism that Hall and soskice identified, the varieties of ways that feminism works in different countries matter.

As this book will show, Germany's feminism is premised on political assumptions that stress social justice, family values, and state responsibility for the common good. over generations, compromises between conservatives and social democrats have institutionalized a different set of premises from those of the Us and UK women's movements. The latter privilege liberal individualism and equal rights, and they are often presented as if their politics exemplified feminism overall. comparing German feminism to this more familiar equal rights model, this book explores how the politics of gender and intersections among social justice movements take distinctive forms that reflect core assumptions about the state, gendered citizenship, and individual rights.

Although the archetypical Us case forms a sometimes explicit point of theoretical comparison, the empirical basis of this study is the nonliberal German case. Because most states are not liberal, the frequent equation of feminism with the distinctive shape liberalism gives it may limit appreciation of the challenges and opportunities women's rights struggles face around the world. in other nonliberal contexts, feminists dealing with their own national priorities and institutional opportunities may find parallels to the story of how the German women's movement has developed and changed in interaction with its society and state. The German case is also interesting in itself. following one case over time offers unparalleled opportunities to see historical legacies, path- dependencies, and strategic choices interacting and transforming movement results.

Like the United states and many other countries, Germany had a highly active and visible feminist movement in the 1970s. Yet when I said I was writing a book that would carry the movement's story to the present, many Germans asked, "But is there any women's movement today?" This is a question many Americans might also ask. Where have these women's movements gone, what have they accomplished, and where might we look for them in the present and future? Have different paths really led to the same...