The East German woman was more emancipated. Wasn't she?

How four decades of divided history still shapes German women today — and why the conversation is overdue.

Mar 08, 2026

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On February 24, in the plenary hall of the German Bundestag, the journalist Heribert Prantl stood at the podium to deliver a memorial address. The occasion was the state funeral of Rita Süssmuth—former President of the Bundestag, long-time CDU minister, feminist inside a party that wasn’t sure it wanted one. She had died three weeks earlier, at 88. And she had personally requested Prantl as her speaker.

The hall was full of the usual dignitaries. But one face, somewhere in the audience, was harder to miss than others.

Prantl spoke with the warmth and precision of someone who had known his subject well. He called Süssmuth a Wegbereiterin - a pathfinder. He described how she had fought patriarchal structures inside the CDU with what he called “sovereign obstinacy.” And then he said it, the sentence that made the news:

"Without Rita Süssmuth, there might never have been a Chancellor Angela Merkel.” Heribert Prantl in honour of Rita Süssmuth
(Source: Bundestag)

Angela Merkel, sitting in the audience, heard this. And she smiled. A small, slightly surprised smile. I’ve been thinking about that smile ever since.

It was a gracious smile, to be sure. A smile of gratitude and acknowledgment. But I think there was something else in it too. Something more complicated. Because the claim Prantl was making, generous as it was, and true in one important sense, was also, in another sense, a very West German story about how Angela Merkel happened.

There is, to be fair, a concrete thread between the two women that goes beyond symbolism. In 1985, Rita Süssmuth became Federal Minister for Youth, Family and Health. The following year, her ministry was expanded to include women’s affairs, making her the first head of a dedicated women’s portfolio in West German government.

When reunification reshuffled the cabinet, that ministry was split. In January 1991, a 36-year-old physicist from the former GDR walked into the newly created Ministry for Women and Youth. It was Angela Merkel’s first cabinet post. She was, in a structural sense, stepping into institutional space that Süssmuth had carved out.

Helmut Kohl, who gave her the job, called her Kohls Mädchen - Kohl’s girl. The condescension in the nickname, intended or not, is its own small chapter in West German political culture. So yes: the thread is real. Prantl’s claim holds. And yet.

Angela Merkel did not happen because of the CDU’s slow, contested, often grudging path toward accepting women in its ranks—however real and hard that path was. Angela Merkel happened, in large part, because she came from the East.

This is not a small detail. It is, I would argue, the central one. And it opens a question worth sitting with on this particular day: was East Germany really more emancipated—for women—than the West? The research says yes. The data is compelling. And yet, as with most things that look clean from a distance, the closer you look, the more interesting - and ambiguous, too - it becomes.

Today is March 8. I don't usually mark the calendar: Beyond Berlin is not that kind of publication, and I have limited patience for one-day-a-year solidarity. But this question feels right for today, precisely because it resists the easy version. It is not a celebration. It is not a complaint. It is a look eastward, as this blog tends to do, at a history that keeps turning out to be more complicated, and more instructive, than the official story allows.

Two Germanies, two models

Let’s start with the law, because the law is the starkest place to start.

In 1948 and 1949, four women sat in the Parliamentary Council in Bonn writing the West German Basic Law among sixty-one male colleagues and fought for a sentence. The men had not planned to change much. A family law textbook published at almost exactly the same moment described the legal status quo with clinical precision: the husband determines "the nature and extent of household expenditure, the running of domestic life, the upbringing of the children, place of residence and home." He has "authority over the wife's assets." He may terminate his wife's employment "if marital interests are impaired." The wife, in the language of the time, had the Folgepflicht: the duty to follow.

The first draft of the equality clause in the Parliamentary Council wanted to leave things more or less there — proposing only that men and women have "the same civic rights and duties." Language that had already appeared in the Weimar Constitution of 1919. No advance at all.

Those four women — the Social Democrats Elisabeth Selbert and Friederike Nadig, the Centre Party's Helene Wessel, and the CDU's Helene Weber — pushed through something different. The sentence that ended up in the Basic Law was short and almost shockingly clear:

"Männer und Frauen sind gleichberechtigt."
Men and women have equal rights.

Not just civic rights: the entire legal order. Family law. Labour law. All of it.

The vote, after fierce argument, was unanimous. Prantl, in his speech for Süssmuth, called these women the Mütter des Grundgesetzes—the Mothers of the Basic Law—and Süssmuth, he said, their late fifth.

And then the West German legislature proceeded, for the next decade, to largely ignore what they had written.

The first equality law did not come into force until 1958. And even that was hedged: a woman could work, yes—but only insofar as it was "compatible with her duties in marriage and family." The husband remained, in law, the Oberhaupt der Familie. The head of the household. The last word. It took until 1977 - nineteen more years, and a social-liberal coalition - for his right to veto his wife's employment to disappear entirely. July 1, 1977: the Hausfrauenehe, the housewife marriage as legal template, was finally abolished.

In East Germany, the GDR had enshrined full professional equality for women in law in 1950.

The GDR's Article 7, written into its very first constitution in 1949, was unambiguous:

"Mann und Frau sind gleichberechtigt. Alle Gesetze und Bestimmungen, die der Gleichberechtigung der Frau entgegenstehen, sind aufgehoben."

!Men and women are equal. All laws and provisions that stand in the way of women's equality are abolished.”

The 1968 constitution went further still, naming not just equal rights but active state obligation: to promote women's professional qualification, and to guarantee the compatibility of work and family life.

On paper, the contrast with the West could hardly be sharper. In Bonn, four women had fought to insert equality into the Basic Law — and the legislature had spent the next decade finding ways around it. In East Berlin, equality was written into the founding document and backed, at least structurally, by the machinery of the state.

The cynical reading may be that this was economics dressed up as ideology. The GDR needed every available body in the workforce. Women were not emancipated out of enlightenment, some say; they were mobilised out of necessity. Both things can be true simultaneously.

And in the GDR, the gap between constitutional promise and daily reality was, as always, considerable: the zweite Schicht, the second shift of housework and childcare, remained stubbornly female, the Politburo remained stubbornly male, and the glass ceiling above a certain altitude was as thick in Leipzig as anywhere.

But for the texture of ordinary life - the right to work, the infrastructure to make it possible, the legal standing to exist as an economic person without a husband’s permission - the difference was real, and it was not small.

In the GDR, by 1989, 91 percent of women were in the workforce.

The state had built a comprehensive network of nurseries and kindergartens, free and full-day. It had introduced the Babyjahr - a paid year of leave after childbirth - and even a monthly Haushaltstag, a paid day off each month specifically to manage housework. Women earned their own pensions. They did not need a husband’s permission to open a bank account, sign a contract, or keep their jobs.

The photo shows children from the first combined nursery and kindergarten in Marzahn, which opened on 2 May 1978 at Marchwitzastrasse 47-49. © Bezirksmuseum Marzahn-Hellersdorf, Berlin / Licence: CC BY-NC-SA

In West Germany, 51 percent of women were employed by the same year.

Those who worked often faced a tax and childcare system that explicitly incentivized part-time arrangements. And those who chose a career while raising children risked something worse than legal obstacles: the social label Rabenmutter. The raven mother — a bad mother, in German folklore. It is not a neutral word.1

The Abortion Law and what it revealed

If the labor statistics show you the economic picture, the abortion debate shows you something rawer: what the two states really thought about women’s bodies and women’s autonomy.

In the GDR, the 1972 Fristenregelung made abortion legal on demand within the first twelve weeks, alongside free access to contraception.

It is, as a historical footnote, the only law the GDR People’s Chamber ever passed with dissenting votes—fourteen against, eight abstentions. That a law granting women autonomy over their own bodies was the most contested vote in a rubber-stamp parliament is its own kind of commentary. But it passed. And it held.

When reunification came, East German women found themselves subject to West German law. Paragraph 218 technically classified abortion as illegal—it simply exempted it from punishment under specific conditions. For women who had spent nearly twenty years with a settled right, this was not an abstraction. Anke Domscheit-Berg, who became a prominent voice in the post-reunification debate, put it plainly: "We felt transported back to the Stone Age."2

That sentence has stayed with me because it reveals a paradox Germany has never quite confronted. Reunification arrived as a promise of freedom. For East German women, in at least this one precise sense, it delivered the opposite. The liberal democracy absorbed them—and quietly revoked a right the dictatorship had granted.

The Wall came down. Paragraph 218 went up.

Aresin, Lykke Prof. Dr. med.: Neurologist at the University Women’s Hospital in Leipzig, GDR (GND 104619295). Bundesarchiv, via Wikimedia

The congress that went wrong

Perhaps the most revealing moment of what reunification actually meant for women came not in a parliament but in a sports hall.

In 1990, the First All-German Women’s Congress took place in East Berlin’s Dynamo-Sporthalle. It should have been a moment of solidarity—the two halves of a divided country’s women’s movement finally meeting. It was, by most accounts, a vicious dispute.

West German feminists - the Emanzen, as they were disparagingly called in the East, the man-haters, the theorizers - looked at East German women and saw what they called emancipation “from above”: granted by a dictatorial state, not fought for from below. Worse, they pointed out, correctly, that East German women still did the majority of the housework. They worked their 43-hour weeks at the factory or the office and then came home to the zweite Schicht, the second shift, because the GDR had never quite managed to automate domestic life at the pace of the West, and because equality at work had not translated into equality at home.

East German women looked back and saw something different. They saw women who were still fighting for rights they had simply always had. The right to work. The right to divorce: two-thirds of GDR divorces, notably, were initiated by women. The right to childcare that was guaranteed, not conditional on income or luck. Ulrike Helwerth, who documented the collision, summarized the mutual projections with painful accuracy: West women were “arrogant, know-it-alls.” East women were “adjusted, homely Muttis, male-fixated and not at all radical.”3

Both portraits were caricatures.
Both contained a grain of something real.

The Ostfrau between myth and reality

Here is where it gets complicated, and deserves an honest view.

The GDR’s emancipation of women was real—in the law, in the numbers, in the everyday texture of life. But it was not born from a feminist movement. It was born from economic necessity. A centrally planned economy needed every body in the workforce. Women were incorporated into the labor market not because the state was enlightened about gender equality, but because it needed them there.

This is not a reason to dismiss the outcome. Laws that begin as pragmatism often outlast their original logic and become something else—habit, identity, expectation, right. That is exactly what happened. But it does mean that the GDR’s emancipation had a specific shape: it was strong at the economic surface and weak in the interior. Women worked, and they worked fully, and they were paid independently. But they were also exhausted. The second shift was real. And where it really counted—in the upper echelons, in the leadership, in the rooms where decisions were made—men still sat.

Angela Merkel herself said it, in one of the most quietly devastating summations of the GDR’s gender record:4

”A real equality did not exist in the GDR either. Where important decisions were made, men sat.”

She was thinking of the Politburo. She was thinking of the Kombinatsleiter—the directors of the great state-owned industrial combines. She was thinking of the party itself, which spoke constantly of equality and practiced it selectively.

The historian Annette Schuhmann, in her 2025 book Wir sind anders! Wie die DDR Frauen bis heute prägt (“We Are Different! How East Germany Still Shapes Women Today”), does something important with this complexity: she refuses both the celebration and the dismissal.

She interviewed thirteen women across generations—some born before the GDR was founded, some born after it collapsed—and found that the myth of the Ostfrau is just that: a myth. Not because the differences aren't real, but because the differences are far more varied, far more internally contradictory, than either version of the story admits.

The GDR, Schuhmann argues, was a shared Erfahrungsraum, a space of experience, but within it, women navigated that space very differently. There were the Systemträger, the women integrated into the state apparatus, whose biographies were tied to the preservation of the socialist order. And there were the Systemkritiker, who maintained private convictions while performing outward conformity. Between them, an entire spectrum of compromise and resistance. What they shared was not ideology but the daily reality of negotiating a state that watched, that rewarded, that punished, and that—on the matter of women's labor—happened to be structurally on their side.

So: the Ostfrau was more emancipated than her western counterpart in the ways that shape daily life—work, income, childcare, legal standing, the unremarkable expectation that a woman earns her own living. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot. But she was not emancipated in the ways that lead to power. And the feminism that accompanied her was not a political movement, because political movements were not permitted. It was, as one researcher has put it, a feminism without a feminist vocabulary.

Which is perhaps why Sybille, a woman from Erfurt, said what she said, simply and completely: ”If I cannot support myself, then I am not emancipated.” Not: if I cannot vote. Not: if I cannot march. If I cannot support myself.5

It is a definition of freedom built from a specific experience—one that is harder to argue with than most of the theory produced on either side of the wall.

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-78024-0007, Berlin, VII. DFD-Bundeskongress.jpg — The VII Federal Congress of the Democratic Women’s Union of Germany opened on 23 November 1960 in the festively decorated Dynamo Sports Hall in Berlin. More than 1,400 delegates and guests attended the conference, the largest women’s organisation in German history. Over three days, the congress focused on the contribution of women and mothers to the struggle to secure peace and build socialism in the GDR and other socialist countries. Veronika Prempel from Ghana (centre) talks with delegates during a break in the proceedings. Bundesarchiv, via Wikimedia

What reunification did

The story did not end in 1990. In some ways, it got harder.

East German women were frequently described, in the years following reunification, as the Verliererinnen der Wende: the losers of the transition. Massive deindustrialisation hit the East far harder than the West, and it hit women with particular force. Unemployment in the early 1990s ran at nearly double the rate for women compared to men in the eastern states. The childcare infrastructure, that great inheritance from the GDR, began to erode, as the financing model of a unified Germany struggled to accommodate eastern realities.

One of Schuhmann’s portraits deserves a closer look. A woman she calls Heidi—a Kulturfunktionärin, a culture administrator in the state apparatus, a convinced socialist—found herself dismissed almost overnight after the Wende. Her husband, the local mayor, lost his position too. What made the humiliation concrete was a small, absurd detail: a Western woman, impeccably dressed, mocked her coat. An ordinary light-blue coat, East German production. The mockery—what Schuhmann captures as the Siegermanier, the victor’s attitude—turned the coat into a symbol. Not just of poverty, but of worthlessness. Of being, suddenly, nothing.

Heidi’s response? Within eight weeks, she and her husband had founded their own company. The pragmatism is almost shocking in its speed. But it is also, Schuhmann suggests, entirely characteristic—the Macher-mentality, the doer reflex, that the GDR had actually trained into its women whether it intended to or not.

And yet something persisted beyond pragmatism. The Ostseele - the East soul - proved more durable than the factories. The women who had been socialized in the GDR took their professional identity with them into the new reality. Participation rates remained higher in the East than the West throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, even under conditions of scarcity.

The expectation that a woman works—not part-time, not as supplement, but as full participant—survived the system that had installed it.

A 2025 study of mid-sized German firms found that the regions with the highest share of women in management positions are still overwhelmingly in the East—Frankfurt an der Oder, Brandenburg, Saxony. The regions with the lowest are mostly in North Rhine-Westphalia. The researchers traced this not to some abstract cultural inheritance, but to three very concrete factors: female employment rates, childcare availability, and—crucially—the proportion of fathers taking parental leave. The last point is not a coincidence. The eastern states are not just more accustomed to women working. They are, incrementally, more accustomed to men doing their share of the rest.6

Today, tomorrow

I want to end somewhere personal, because this is not just a history essay.

I have lived in Berlin for years. I have friends from both sides of the old divide—from Leipzig and Dresden on one side, from Cologne and Hamburg on the other. And I notice something that I find difficult to describe without sounding reductive, so I will try to be precise.

When I talk to women who grew up in the East, especially those who are old enough to remember both, or whose mothers remember both, there is something in how they talk about work. It is not ambition in the Western, individualistic sense. It is more like bedrock. Work is not a choice being made against competing options. It is what you do, because you are a person, and persons support themselves. The alternative—financial dependency, a life organised around someone else’s income—is not just undesirable. It feels, to many of them, like a kind of disappearance.

Women from the West often take longer to arrive at that same conviction, if they arrive at it at all — and some who do eventually leave it behind. Often my generation. Often in prosperous regions like Bayern or Baden-Württemberg, where the financial case for stepping back is easy to make, and the social case even easier.

The structural incentives of West Germany's tax system, especially the Ehegattensplitting, the joint taxation arrangement that financially rewards one full earner and one part-timer, still quietly reward the old model. So does the school day, in many western parts of the country, which still ends at lunchtime and implicitly assumes there is someone at home.

What strikes me most, though, is this: neither side talks about it much. The younger generations especially—those born after 1985, who did not live through the division—often genuinely do not know this history. They do not know that their grandmothers in the East had rights their grandmothers in the West were still fighting for. They do not know about Paragraph 218, or the Hausfrauenehe, or the congress in the Dynamo-Sporthalle where two groups of women looked at each other and failed to find common ground.

The divide has been papered over. And in some quarters, there is active pressure to keep it that way.

Earlier this year, the Berlin City Senate proposed reducing the number of compulsory history semesters in secondary schools—a reform that would have allowed students to stop studying history after the National Socialist period, making the GDR, the division, and the Wende effectively optional. The outcry was immediate: historians, memorial sites, educators. The Senate backed down, partly. But the instinct had been revealed. The GDR as something you get to skip if you’re not interested. The eastern half of German history as an appendix.

It is in this context that two books matter—not just as reading recommendations, but as necessary corrections.

Schuhmann's Wir sind anders! (“We Are Different!”, 2025) insists on the biographical specificity of East German women: not the myth, not the caricature, not the demographic category, but the actual texture of thirteen actual lives. If you read German, it is essential.

*Wir sind anders! Wie die DDR Frauen bis heute prägt.*, Hamburg 2025.

And then there is Drei ostdeutsche Frauen betrinken sich und gründen den idealen Staat (“Three East German Women Get Drunk and Found the Ideal State”, 2024): a book whose title alone earns a moment of pause. Three East German women get drunk and found the ideal state.

*Drei ostdeutsche Frauen betrinken sich und gründen den idealen Staat,* München, 2024

Written by Annett Gröschner, Peggy Mädler, and Wenke Seemann, it is part collective memoir, part political provocation, part comedy born from exhaustion. The title is funny. It is also not joking. These are women who have watched their history be minimized, their experience be condescended to, their specific knowledge of how states fail and people persist be treated as quaint. So they get drunk and found one themselves.

Back in the Bundestag, on February 24, Prantl’s tribute to Süssmuth was generous and deserved. She was remarkable. She did pave paths, within the CDU and within West German political culture, that mattered. His sentence about Merkel was not wrong, exactly. It just told one part of the story.

The other part - the part where a woman born in Hamburg, raised in the Uckermark, who studied physics at Leipzig University and took her doctorate in quantum chemistry at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, walked into the chaos of reunification politics and found it considerably less intimidating than the men around her expected - that part also deserves its telling.

Germany still has work to do on women. Everyone knows this. But Germany also has work to do on understanding itself.

On understanding that the East is not a historical footnote, a curiosity, a wound to be managed. That it produced, among other things, a specific model of female independence that the West might have more to learn from than it has been willing to admit.