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Making Their Place

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments......................................................................................................ixList of Abbreviations................................................................................................xi1 The Place of Feminism After Socialism..............................................................................1Lifelong Residents...................................................................................................232 Feminist Organizing Under Socialism and Capitalism.................................................................25A World Reopened.....................................................................................................493 Place and Politics in Rostock......................................................................................52Fishing for Happiness................................................................................................784 Making Claims Across Scale and Space in Rostock: Looking to Sweden and the EU......................................80Who Needs Feminism?..................................................................................................1045 How Conservatism, Religion, and Enthusiasm for Unification Shut Feminists Out of Erfurt............................106Rethinking Sisterhood................................................................................................1416 Making Claims Across Scale and Space in Erfurt: Wanting to Be Western..............................................144A Bridge Between Places..............................................................................................1707 Claiming Their Places? The Feminist Movements in Rostock and Erfurt in Comparative Perspective.....................172Methodological Appendix: Integrating Comparative, Narrative, and Feminist Approaches.................................207Notes................................................................................................................217Works Cited..........................................................................................................223Index................................................................................................................235

Chapter One

THE COLLAPSE OF STATE SOCIALISM in eastern and central Europe in 1989 transformed the world. International leaders hailed the dawning of a new era in which formerly socialist states were to flourish socially, economically, and politically. In spite of these optimistic predictions, struggle has marred the road toward long-term stability. Citizens of formerly socialist states have faced a plethora of problems including interethnic conflict, political division, economic meltdown, and soaring unemployment.

In much of the region, women disproportionately shoulder the burden of the challenges of life after socialism. Women were typically better represented among workers in socialist states than in the capitalist West, but they have been consistently overrepresented among the un- and underemployed in many parts of eastern and central Europe since 1989. While postsocialist transformations have created new opportunities for women, especially for those with specific skills (see, for example, Ghodsee 2005), women overall have witnessed the loss of state support for their economic activity, the curtailing of their reproductive rights, and the rise of traditional gender ideologies that value women primarily as mothers and wives rather than as active participants in the labor market and political life.

Across eastern and central Europe, women have resisted these changes. The most visible feminist mobilization in the region was the East German feminist movement, which worked to integrate women's issues into the calls for a reformed socialism during the tumult of 1989. Yet the national-level mobilization of the East German feminist movement survived only a few months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Since that time feminist activity in both eastern Germany and other parts of postsocialist Europe has largely disappeared from public view.

Still, in eastern Germany-as elsewhere in eastern and central Europe-women continue to organize. Cities and towns throughout eastern Germany are home to feminist organizations that address issues like violence against women, women's un- and underemployment, women's political representation, and family and childcare policy. The eastern German cities of Rostock and Erfurt, for example, have each given rise to more than a dozen women's organizations since 1989. These local women's organizations-and the local feminist movements they comprise-emerged when forty years of state repression ceased and the sudden installation of democracy created new arenas for activism and engagement.

Both the local feminist movements in Rostock and Erfurt formed around a fundamental concern for the well-being of women. They offer social services while also engaging in political advocacy and public awareness campaigns to increase women's status and challenge gender inequalities within a range of institutions such as the family and the state. Both movements started out seeking to help women cope with the sudden rupture as socialist East Germany unified with the democratic, capitalist, and less gender egalitarian West Germany. The feminist organizations in the two cities address the same issues, including women's unemployment and violence against women. Both operate in the same political structures and the same national political climate and culture. Even the cities that are home to these two movements are uncannily similar in terms of their sizes and population characteristics.

Yet while the feminist movement in Rostock has been a startling success in many ways, the movement in Erfurt has struggled. The two movements have embraced different feminist ideologies and divergent strategies for effecting change. More recently, they have taken dissimilar positions vis--vis the rise of the European Union (EU) as a source of gender equality policy.

How has this happened? Why were the paths of the feminist movements in Rostock and Erfurt after unification so different? Given shared experience with socialism and German unification, and common political structures and institutions, shouldn't these movements be relatively similar? This book examines local feminist movements after socialism and explains why these feminist formations vary across places, even within the same national state. I draw on interview, observational, and archival data to analyze the central differences, as well as important similarities, between the feminist movements in Rostock and Erfurt. I chronicle the continued resistance of women in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) to the new expectations for gender and gender relations introduced in eastern Germany as a consequence of German unification in 1990. What emerges is a story not just about two feminist movements but also an analysis of how the people and structures in two cities struggle to define themselves, their values, and their understandings of gender in a period of monumental social,...