ABSTRACT
After the Second World War, the renegotiation of gender roles and identities became an integral aspect of German national reconstruction. The effort to leave National Socialism in the past and the progression towards the future Cold War division of Germany into two opposing socialist and capitalist states formed the economic and political context for the development of gender identities. Since the end of the war brought a breakdown of the economy, grim shortages and widespread hunger, a central issue of the post-war period was the regulation of consumption and the need to increase productivity to restore abundance. As the Soviet-guided East and the Allied-supported West followed their own paths to prosperity, Germans and occupiers negotiated definitions of female and male labour to fit these paths. This negotiation involved confrontation with traditional norms of the nuclear family encapsulating a division of labour between a male breadwinner and a female housewife. Owing to shortages the redefinition of gendered wage-earners and consumers became a crucial aspect of this confrontation. While the traditional division of labour constructed wage-earning as typically male, the labour of consumption, which involved shopping, budgeting and studying the marketplace, was left to women as part of their housework. This division of labour remained largely intact in the transition to the new German economies, but the meaning of the consumer role shifted in different phases of economic reconstruction.
