ABSTRACT
Women in eastern Germany were such a vulnerable group. Although the GDR seemed to have overcome gender discrimination and integrated women as frequently as men into the workforce, they have been threatened in greater numbers than men by labour market exclusion in the transformed social and economic climate of the 1990s. Indeed, gendered treatment that had been hidden by women's apparently equal employment participation in the GDR years disadvantaged women after the system transformation. Although there is evidence – anecdotal and research-based3 – of personal discrimination and a preference for men over women in the labour market, women as a group found themselves in a situation of 'structural disadvantage' on account of their employment status and activities, their income levels and family commitments. While the collapse of the socialist order removed the stranglehold of political conformity and enabled individuals to exercise options from travel or consumption to educational participation and careers, it removed the certainty of finding and retaining employment. Above all, it shattered the GDR 'Muttipolitik' of social policy measures to reduce the conflict between employment and motherhood for women. The privatisation of the economy also privatised this conflict, leaving it to individual women to develop strategies of combining two areas they had taken for granted in the GDR era and continued to see as two facets of their daily lives: employment and motherhood.
