ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the shifts in the meaning of consumption as primarily female labour in its relationship to wage labour, which was largely cast as masculine, during three phases of post-war economic reconstruction. The three phases are the period of extreme shortages from 1945 to 1948, the 1948 dual currency reforms and reappearance of un-rationed goods in East and West that marked a transition to the normalization of separate economies, and the prosperity that Germans increasingly felt in the early 1950s. 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.
