Varieties of egalitarianism: gender ideologies in the late socialism of the German Democratic Republic

ABSTRACT

The socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east part of former divided Germany, which existed between 1949 and 1990, saw the emancipation of women as a national objective. In this paper we examine the gender ideologies of young people in the GDR in relation to state socialist ideas of gender equality. First, we outline the GDR’s socialist state policy in favour of maternal full-time employment, even with young children, between the 1950s and the 1980s. We then present the results of our analysis of gender ideologies using survey data collected by the GDR’s Central Institute of Youth Research in 1984. By applying latent class analysis, we identify two patterns of egalitarianism in the analytic sample, which we term ‘all-inclusive-egalitarians’ and ‘not-in-my-backyard-egalitarians’ (‘nimby-egalitarians’). The former supported gender equality in both the public and familial spheres. The nimby-egalitarians, by contrast, had ambivalent attitudes, as they supported gender equality in the public sphere and at the same time held more traditional attitudes towards the private sphere. Our study demonstrates that after almost 40 years of propagating gender equality, state socialism in the GDR had some success in shaping societal gender ideologies. However, we reveal ambivalences which researchers have previously often overseen, especially in contrast to the Western part of Germany. The top-down shaped GDR patterns of egalitarianism also bear similarities to the stalled gender revolution in contemporary Western democratic societies. Beyond the results, the paper proves the richness and principle usability of hitherto rarely used data sets preserved from the GDR.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender role attitudes
• gender equality
• German Democratic Republic
• socialism
• family policy
• latent class analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The data have only been analysed by the survey project team at the ZIJ. An overview of the reports is available at: https://search.gesis.org/research_data/ZA6138?doi=10.4232/1.6138

2. We refrain from testing ‘education’ as a predictor of gender ideologies (van Berkel & Graaf, 1999) as the late GDR had an universal school system and access to higher education was regulated and strongly dependent on regime loyality (Hadjar & Berger, 2010; Mayer & Solga, 1994). Thus, a selection bias of highly regime loyal individuals in the higher education groups cannot be ruled out in the cohorts included. We were also unable to include the number of children (Fan & Marini, 2000) as a predictor of gender ideology due to missing information.

3. All translations from German are ours.

4. Schlegel was a research assistant and then head of department at the Central Institute for Youth Research from 1972 to 1990. After 1990, she was one of the few researchers from the Institute who continued to find employment in the German academic system. She was also the only scientist from the Institute who was willing to give us an interview; numerous other attempts to contact former researchers failed. We suspect this is due to the feelings of frustration of former researchers who were catapulted out of the science system after 1990, but we cannot prove this.

5. Methodologically innovative was the fact that the study planned to interview not only the women but also their mothers (Zentralinstitut Für Jugendforschung (1984). This two-generation approach was implemented in Western research many years later. However, we decided not to include the data of the elders because our focus is not on a generational comparison (as e.g. in Kreher (2002), but on the attitudes of the younger generation at reproductive age. Moreover, only about half of the elders participated and the questionnaire did not ask for their gender, which is why we cannot ensure whether fathers did also answer.

6. The districts of the GDR were named after the district cities and included not only these cities but also other counties. The district of Erfurt in the south-west of the GDR was a medium-sized district in terms of area and population (1984: 1.2 million) and had an industrial character. The district of Karl-Marx-Stadt in the south was the most populous (1984: 1.9 million) and most densely populated district of the GDR and was the second most important for industrial production (Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik Ed., 1986). Its former district city is now called Chemnitz. Regional disparities, e.g. in terms of the economy or health care, income or education of the population, were not very pronounced in the late phase of the GDR (Beyme, 1988; Kind, 1997).

7. We included this item as it measures the belief whether professional development is compatible with the responsibilities of motherhood (rather than parenthood or fatherhood) or the well-being of the child, i.e. the degree of agreement that mothers are responsible for childcare and that children’s needs should take precedence over their employment and career. Nevertheless, we tested the LCA model without this item, which did not change the results presented.

8. The first step estimates the unconditional class model. The second step assigns respondents to classes based on posterior probabilities of membership resulted from the first step.

9. The term ‘Nimby’ is originally used in political science to describe local resistance to the siting of politically planned facilities (such as wind turbines, landfills, drug addicts’ homes). The concept’s central hypothesis is that people may agree with the overall goal of the measures (e.g. climate protection or social facilities), but disagree with implementing them in their immediate surroundings for various reasons (Dear, 1992; van der Horst, 2007; Wolsink, 1994). The concept is controversial in the literature, but it can be used figuratively to aptly describe the ambivalence of the gender ideology class in question (support for gender equality at the public level versus less support at the private level).

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted within a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project number 434947732. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in GESIS Data Archive, at https://doi.org/10.4232/1.6138, ZA6138 Data file Version 1.0.0.