Women in the GDR were the largest group to lose out through unification. They may now have access to material goods not available before, but they have been pushed back into dependence by a dominant ideology of women serving men. In the GDR, 88% of all adult women worked and another 8.5% were in full-time education, which meant that 96.5% took an active part in the wider social context outside the home and they also had their own income. Work was the basis for economic independence, a sense of self-worth, a place for communication and social interaction, not just a source for additional household income or, as some critics have argued, a state-imposed, obligatory activity.
Women were highly skilled - only 6% had no qualification at all, as against 24% of West German working women. In the GDR, 50% of all jobs in medicine and law were carried out by women and a third of women worked in technical professions.
Given the great importance that work represented to women in terms of their identity, unemployment on the scale, that happened after unification, had a devastating effect. Even after 20 years, on the territory of the former GDR, two thirds of the unemployed were women (in agriculture it was as much as 75%) and they made up at least 70% of the long-term unemployed. Post-unification, the labour market was biased against women; men had a better chance of finding alternative work. […]
Although gender discrimination was by no means completely abolished in the GDR, this blatant disparaging of women as a group appeared like history going into reverse. This perception is underlined by the fact that, in the general hunt for jobs, children are now deemed to represent a problem. It is well-known that the GDR had excellent childcare facilities which made it possible to combine work and parenthood without financial hardship. In 1989, 68% of working women in the GDR had children under the age of 18, whereas in the Federal Republic it was only 25%. […]
Unification brought another considerable change for women: the abolition of their right to an abortion on demand. In the GDR, since 1972, women had had the legal right to terminate their pregnancy free of charge within the first 12 weeks. West Germany has a penal code (paragraph 218) which states that abortion is unlawful and those who attempt to abort face up to three years in prison or a fine. After unification it became necessary to bring West German and East German law on this issue into alignment. In 1992, paragraph 218 was amended to adopt GDR legislation, but a compulsory consultation prior to the procedure was added. After protests from the CDU/CSU and the Bavarian state government, which wanted abortion itself to remain illegal, even this amendment was declared null and void by Germany’s Constitutional Court only one year later. […]
Even after 25 years since unification there still exists a very different perception of equal rights among women in the territory of the former GDR. According to an investigation undertaken in 2008, 80% of East German women wanted an equal division of labour in the family, but only 50% of West German women, among whom traditional family models still exerted a strong force. In fact, the more emancipated consciousness of GDR women has increasingly influenced women in the West, even though they often appear to be unaware of where their new confidence has come.
Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It by Bruni de la Motte & John Green with Seumas Milne (Contributor), 2015.