From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (Harel Barzilai)
Subject: Poll: Life is Worse for Ex-GDR Women
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 19:42:34 GMT

[Via misc.activism.progressive from PeaceNet's glasnost.news]
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information about PeaceNet/EcoNet or about misc.activism.progressive]
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    In 1990 most GDR women supported unification. ``Only now are women
    realizing how male-dominated the western society actually is,''
    German psychologist Joerg Richter told the Post. ``This is a
    tremendous shock for them.''
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Topic 287       AGL:LIFE WORSE FOR WOMEN IN EX-GDR 
christic        Political Change in Eastern Europe       2:05 pm  Sep 12, 1992 
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	LIFE IS MUCH WORSE FOR EX-GDR WOMEN AFTER UNIFICATION
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A recent poll by the Allensbach Institute says that 81 percent of 
women who live in the former German Democratic Republic believe 
the ``situation of women in eastern Germany has deteriorated 
since unification.'' 

Before the GDR was absorbed by West Germany in 1990, most East 
German women were needed by the economy. Now unemployment rates 
are high for both men and women. The social benefits that allowed 
working women to combine family and career--including affordable 
day care and a full year of parental leave at full pay--have been 
abolished by the new system. 

``With unemployment rates in the east still soaring, women make 
up two-thirds of the jobless but only half of the population,'' 
the Washington Post reported on Sept. 9. ``Day-care costs--which 
were only a symbolic 35 cents a day under the communist 
government--are rising dramatically, and other support systems 
for working mothers are disappearing.'' 

The bleak outlook for families in the former GDR has taken a toll 
on the birth rate in the new eastern states, the Post reported. 
``Birth rates have plummeted 40 percent in the past year and are 
likely to decline even more this year as women become more unsure 
about their future and decide against having children.'' 

Birgit Druse, a 34-year-old mother of two young children who 
worked 13 years as a bank teller before losing her job, told the 
Post that in the former GDR ``women were very self-supportive and 
financially independent.'' 

But no more. In the old GDR, state policy tried to help women 
reconcile careers with family responsibilities. During the ``baby 
year,'' new mothers could care for a child at home at full pay, 
with their place on the job guaranteed when they returned to 
work. After Erich Honecker fell from power in 1989, the reform 
socialist government that briefly ruled the GDR proposed 
liberalization of the law to allow either the father or mother to 
choose the ``baby year'' option. Instead, the entire social 
program was swept away by unification. 

Other social benefits for the family included universal day care 
for the children of working parents, a liberal leave policy that 
allowed parents to care for sick children and the monthly paid 
``Haushaltstag''--household day--for shopping, cleaning and other 
family chores. 

``As a result of a supportive government system, 95 percent of 
East German women worked, double the percentage in the western 
part of the formerly divided country,'' the Post reported. ``The 
state needed the contribution of women in the work force to 
offset a drastic labor shortage.'' 

Although the GDR's abortion law was one of the most liberal in 
Europe, economic necessity did not force single women to 
terminate their pregnancies. In July the Berliner Zeitung 
reported that nearly one-third of the 192,000 families in the 
eastern wards of Berlin were headed by single parents--mostly 
women. 

In 1990 most GDR women supported unification. ``Only now are 
women realizing how male-dominated the western society actually 
is,'' German psychologist Joerg Richter told the Post. ``This is 
a tremendous shock for them.'' 

``The Allensbach poll shows wide differences in the experiences 
of women who lived on opposite sides of the heavily fortified 
border,'' the Post said. ``An average East German woman married 
early and had more children at a younger age but always worked; 
West German women, on the other hand, often worked first, married 
later, had fewer children and typically did not go back to a 
full-time career.'' 

Petra Falkenberg, a single mother of a nine-year-old girl, said 
that single working mothers faced no social or economic pressures 
in the old GDR. ``I used to collect a lot of respect for being 
single and working and being a mother,'' she said. Now, she told 
the Post, she feels completely drained by her new life. ``Now I 
feel that a lot of people think they have to pity me. . . .'' 

The Post described a seminar for unemployed East German women who 
``retained a self-confidence from their careers . . . [and] 
proudly recited their decades of job experience.'' 

``I was economically better off'' in the GDR, an unemployed 56- 
year-old salesperson told the Post. ``Things I could afford 
before . . . I can't anymore.'' 

However, Renata Koecher of the Allensbach Institute insisted that 
the majority of eastern German women ``feel they have profited 
enormously from unity with better possibilities, more freedom, 
growing incomes.'' 

But Regine Hildebrandt, minister for social affairs for the 
eastern German state of Brandenburg, said that ``[m]any women 
have not yet realized how much their situation has worsened, and 
I am afraid of what will happen to them when they do. 

``We need to fight the situation in the east with all possible 
measures, or else the psychological damage will be permanent.'' 

[Story summarized by Andrew Lang.] 
Conf? 

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[Note: Here again the "conservative" net.reactionaries can point to
misc.activism.progressive saying the "like/d" East Germany. In fact,
it follows *logically* that this is the only possible conclusion for
them, since the alternative -- that this is clearly not praise for
Communism but a *criticism* that needs to be made regarding *capitalism*
(many social services worse even than those undera system which, in
other respects, was horrible) -- is incomprehensible, impermissible
thought. --HB]

[Of course there is a whole can of worms here, e.g. the famous lie
about "Communism" or our "capitalist" system being "the only
alternatives" -- so that society can only have the choice of being
ruled by a small elite of CP officials and bureaucrats of by a small
economic and corporate elite; similarly for who controls the press,
etc -- sentiments echoed by the "conservatives" ideological brothers,
the CP officials who similarly claimed that the only alternative to
"Communism" was the U.S. or worse Latin American etc models; the
self-serving lie that to give up the Party's yoke one would have to
accept the corporate yoke and the misery and starvation so common in
"free market miracles" encouraged by Washington; similarly those who
more or less own the U.S. (including the media) tell us that the only
way to remove the corporate yoke is to replace it with a bureaucratic
(if not Stalinist) yoke.

But of course Big Biz and the C.P. officials are just disinterested
observers...--HB]
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