Abstract:  According to current accounts, proposals aimed at promoting gender equality vanished from the political agenda after a short revival in the immediate postwar years in order to give way to an almost undisputed promotion of the male breadwinner family. In these accounts, defeat meant motherhood and domesticity became key issues of West German social reconstruction. Married women, one reads, were expelled from the labour market and reduced to their duties in home and kitchen. The struggle for legal abortion of the 1970s is widely acknowlegded as the origin of serious discussions of women’s equality. 

This approach illustrates important characteristics of postwar gender politics and discourses, especially by the early 1950s. Nonetheless, it conceals important dynamics of change. Begining in 1955, attitudes towards married women's wage work undergo a striking social and ideological re-evaluation. The standing of married women in the labor market improved markedly, as public discourse about married women's work shifted from outright condemnation to active support of part-time work. More and more people accepted that -- even without economic necessity -- wives and mothers wanted to work for wages, in order to have their own money or to be more independent from their husbands. Contemporaries agreed that as long as wives and mothers fulfilled their family duties, they had the right to work outside their homes. The introduction of part-time work on the shop floor and in the office became, all the more as employers desperately sought women workers, a key public issue.

It is important to recognize that the change of attitudes went far beyond agreements forged in the labour market. Changing attitudes gave rise to claims women’s equality in the workforce as well as in society more generally. The most important demand which resulted from this process was the call for part-time work for highly qualified women in the civil service, such as teachers and lawyers. Women's organisations -- such as the German Association of University Women and the German Women’s Ring - - compelled this cause. They achieved their aim in 1969, when the West German parliament allowed female civil servants with children to halve their work hours without loosing their privileges. 

My discussion of changes in married women's employment in the 1950s and 1960s, along with my analysis of the women's lobby activities, revises the widespread view that the West German women's movement was silent for more than twenty years. My paper allows one to understand why ideas of women's ‚practical equality‘ in the sixties challenged concepts of female wage work without revising the dominance of the male breadwinner.

Paper: Click on the title below to view this paper.

Women, Work, and the State: Lobbying for Part Time Work and "Practical Equality" in the West German Civil Service, 1958-1969

This document is in Adobe PDF format.  If you have difficulty viewing the document in your browser, try one of the following: 1) right click on the title and save it to your hard drive-then open the file from there; 2) click the refresh/reload button in your browser;  3) use a browser other than the one which is not cooperating, i.e. if you've attempted to view the file with netscape to no avail, then try internet explorer.