ABSTRACT
Inge Lange, the head of the women’s department within the Socialist Unity Party (SED), said this during an interview with a leading journal for women in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1974. She offered this observation as praise for the state’s socialist policy on equality. The underlying message, however, was that technical competence in women need not threaten the stability of the bipolar gender order. This was in fact frequently articulated in the fiction and poetry appearing in the GDR in the early 1970s. Both female and male authors published novels, plays and novellas that dealt with the professional circumstances and actual living conditions of women engineers.3 None of these stories questioned the technical abilities of the women appearing in them as designers, chemical engineers, architects, civil engineers, or building planners. In almost every one, however, the women’s romantic relationships were a failure. Hence the central conflict of these stories was between technical competence and femininity. These stories emerged at a time when educational facilities in engineering were expanding substantially. As enrollments increased, women formed a higher percentage of those in academic technical training. In this context, authors began to ask whether women could find their own place in engineering when it was so heavily dominated by men. Would women be forced to adjust to the established (male) mores in order to survive professionally? Or would the presence of women in engineering mean that, under state socialism,. technical competence (which has always stood for gender difference in the modern era) would cease to be a specifically male trait?
