Preliminary Programme

The paper analyses the societal attitudes towards gender roles in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1980s. At that time, the socialist state claimed to have reached gender equality, mainly because women were just as likely to be employed as men. However, using unique survey data still collected by the GDR’s Central Institute of Youth Research in 1984, we describe ambivalent societal attitudes: Women’s employment was often seen as an important element of gender equality. But at the same time, we find a relevant proportion of people in the GDR who were sceptical towards the employment of mothers with small children. By applying latent class analysis, we identify two attitudinal profiles in the studied sample which differed primarily in the ascription of female and male domains.
The paper is linked to historical research on the triple burden of women living under GDR’s state socialism: Mothers were expected to be employed full-time, raise children and do a major part of the housework, while the fathers’ role was primarily and predominantly oriented towards the productive sphere. Our study adds attitudinal aspects and makes clear that state socialism in the GDR after almost 40 years of propagating gender equality had not led to consistently egalitarian gender role attitudes in society. (Show less)