ABSTRACT
India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Britain and Norway - what have they all in common? Perhaps not much, but they all try to conduct their political life on democratic lines and in all of them women are, or have been, at the top of the political ladder. By comparison the Warsaw Pact states have a poor record. In none of these states has a woman achieved the highest political office and women are few and far between in the political bureaux of the ruling parties. In the Politburo o f the s e d two women had candidate membership in 1981 out of a total membership (full and candidate) of twenty-five. Since 1950 only four women, including the two in 1980, have reached candidate membership - Elli Schmidt (1950-4), Edith Baumann (1958-63), Margarete M üller (1963-) and Ingeburg Lange (1973-). Neither of the two present women members is concerned with a key area of party policy. In the case of Frau M üller this perhaps helps to explain why she has been a candidate since 1963 and has not risen to full membership. T his poor representation of women in the Politburo is not likely to change dramatically. Lower down, in the Central Committee, twenty-four women were elected at the IX Congress of the s e d in 1976. T his was out of a total membership of 202. As a percentage women’s member ship had declined compared with the previous Congress in 1971. Then there had been twenty-four women members out of a total o f 189. A t the X Congress in 1981 twenty-four women reached the enlarged Central Committee of 213 members. Only three women were heads of the forty-three departments of the Central Committee in 1980. These were in the ‘traditional’ women’s departments - culture, women and the office of the Politbüro. N o woman was a first secretary in a s e d
Bezirk organisation in 1980 and at the Kreis level very few women hold the rank of first secretary. About 30 per cent of the s e d ’ s membership are women as compared with nearly 53 per cent of the population. Though exact comparisons are difficult to make, the percentage of women members in the s e d is roughly the same as the percentage in the Socialist Party of Austria.1 It is about double what it had been in the early years of the sed.
