After receiving her doctorate in 1953 Renate Meyer had been ambitious to embark on a political career, but she found that there was no demand in the job-market for women keen to work in politics on the basis of a higher degree in history. Despite the rapid economic growth of the 1950s in West Germany and the slaughter of war half a generation earlier, unemployment was still relatively high because of the scale of the ethnic cleansing of the 1940s from the eastern third of Germany. These territories had been transferred, formally in 1945, to Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Further competition for jobs came from the millions more who crossed from East Germany to West Germany during the 1950s in search of a better life. In the end Renate Meyer took a job as a typist in Bonn with the &lt;a href="German%20Academic%20Exchange%20Service"&gt;German Academic Exchange Service ("Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst" / DAAD)&lt;/a&gt;. It might not have been the path to a stellar career for which she had planned, but since Bonn had been selected, in 1949, as the "provisional capital" of West Germany, the work placed her close to the world of politics in which she aspired to participate. Meyer would later express herself forcefully on the subject of the gender discrimination she experienced as a typist in Bonn. Gender discrimination was a theme to which she would return many times after her political career eventually took off. Folloing a couple of years as a secretary-typist she resigned in order to accept a very much better paid job with the press office of the organisation, securing rapid promotion. In 1955 she even joined a trades union, a source of continuing pride ("worauf ich doch recht stolz bin"), as she later told an interviewer. 1956 was the year in which she defied her father's world view further by becoming a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Around this time she also started working for the party on a voluntary (unpaid) basis.