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Revenge of the Domestic
By Donna Harsch Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
Introduction
The shattered state of their country in 1945 sobered German Communists but did not debilitate them. Communists, a small but determined minority, planned to use class struggle, production, and Marxist ideology to drive Germany toward the socialist future. Contemplating the labor before them, they barely registered the grave concerns of compatriots: divided families, destroyed homes, scarcity of food. As people, Communists loved their families and had to eat and sleep. As Communists, they rated private concerns as diversions, even obstacles, to the realization of socialism. For them, family, household, and consumption formed the backdrop to the drama of class, politics, and production. While Communists studied the wide road ahead, German women stared gloomily at the rut in front of them. Women, a substantial but diffuse majority, looked at their devastated world through the Communist lens inverted: they were sick of struggle; uninterested in production; suspicious of ideology, but ready to sacrifice for family; anxious for a home of their own; and desperate for food, clothing, and any nice thing. Many women worked for wages and participated in political life as it emerged in occupied Germany. Yet most women predicated employment on their family situation and spoke in public about domestic issues.
This book reconstructs the encounter between Communists andordinary women in eastern Germany, from the era of occupation through the first two decades of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The narrative addresses the problem of continuity and change in the relationship between women and the family, on one side, and the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the state it constructed, on the other. The gap between a production-oriented party-state and family-oriented women citizens, the book contends, never disappeared. The SED clung to its Marxist-Leninist ideology and propagated the primacy of socialized production. Women remained deeply interested in their domestic situation and notably family-oriented in career choice, opting for occupations that would allow them to harmonize family and employment. The gulf narrowed, however, and from both directions: women and the SED adapted to one another's position and worldview. At first glance, ordinary women appear to have made all the adjustments. The GDR, as did most state-socialist lands, drew women of every marital and maternal status into wage labor and, hence, "socialized" them. East German women came to rate employment as integral to their sense of self. The party-state appeared stationary relative to the women it moved but, in fact, it shifted its productivist stance. State adaptation occurred incrementally, by tweaking "woman policy" in an "affirmative-action" direction; recognizing the family as a determinant of the "socialist personality"; spending much money on services; channeling funds toward consumption and housing; and financing a generous welfare package. Many measures emerged as permanent policies and major leaps in expenditures only after 1971, but they originated in the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1945 and 1970, the book concludes, there unfolded a confrontation between unorganized women, with their domestic concerns, and the dictatorial party-state, with its productivist agenda, that vitally shaped the lives and self-perception of East German women and the policies and discourse of the SED-and contributed significantly to the fall of Communism in the GDR.
The pattern of continuity and change emerged out of a dynamic interaction between structures and agents, on the one hand, and a manipulative party-state and maneuvering women, on the other. The GDR was a dictatorship, and the SED set the terms of the encounter. Women reacted to state actions within structures created, supported, or condoned by the SED. I define "structure" as economic, political and domestic arrangements, as well as ideological convictions and cultural attachments. The fundamental tension between the SED state and women, the book posits, arose from the party-state's contradictory relationship to these structures. Tension was generated, above all, by subordination of all things domestic to a production-based understanding of political economy and social transformation. The "classical socialist system" had an "ambivalent" relationship to the family, notes János Kornai. This ambivalence arose from Stalinist ideology's indifference to domestic needs and desires, combined with the Stalinist economy's dependence on the material and emotional labors performed by the nuclear family. Orthodox Stalinists, including the SED, squeezed consumption and exploited unpaid domestic labor to accumulate capital for investment in production. The SED aimed also to mobilize the wage labor of mothers of young children, while promoting high fertility and trying to keep access to birth control from women.
The domestic structure that the Communist state exploited was, basically, the family it inherited in 1945, a family forged by cultural traditions, capitalism, the Third Reich, and war. The SED did not attempt to transform domestic arrangements, whether understood as family labor (the totality of work and care performed in the family) or gender relations (the division of domestic labors). The neglect of the domestic was not just pragmatic, but also philosophical, resting on the assumption that the family was of secondary social significance. Communists recognized, certainly, that women's oppression was grounded in the patriarchal family. They supported civic and social equality for women and, in power, eliminated the legal privileges of husbands and fathers. They believed, however, that female emancipation and familial change depended fundamentally on woman's participation in wage labor. Herbert Warnke, the head of the East German trade union federation (FDGB), summarized this viewpoint in 1952: "The equality of women is rooted in her place in production. In those places that woman is kept away from production or where she seeks to realize an ideal that keeps her out of production, there she remains dependent on man, her so-called provider." As wage workers, women would gain autonomy, cast off their parochial concerns, and become class-conscious. Communists, in sum, approached the "woman question" from a progressive standpoint. They were, however, antifeminist, for feminism attributed women's oppression to men, not to class society.
Early Marxists recognized that woman could not realize her productive potential unless she was freed from domestic drudgery. A socialized economy, exclaimed Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, and V.I. Lenin, would liberate her by transferring most consumption, child care, and housework out of the home and into the socialized sector. Three points require emphasis here. First, Communists denied social meaning to domestic work. Housework contained no emancipatory potential because it was unwaged, private, individualized, unproductive, and, by their definition, unskilled; it did not function as real labor. Nor did they attribute much significance to the emotional work of the family in developing character. Second, they premised the socialization of housework and consumption on the prior transformation of the relations of production. Socialized wage labor, production, and workers would, over time, mechanistically and independently transcend private unwaged labor, consumption, and housewives. Third, they did not see a redistribution of labor within the family as an interim, much less a long-term, solution, for reapportionment would not decrease the total claim of the household on members' time, effort, and attention. Redistribution would, instead, constitute a step backward, burdening men with the repetitive everydayness of the home's routines and the petty, even frivolous, concerns of consumption. After the Russian Revolution, several Soviet Communists had envisioned communalization of the household or socialization of the family, not just displacement of its work to socialized services. By the 1940s, however, influential German Communists, like their Russian and Eastern European comrades, had abandoned this revolutionary impulse. The SED never officially questioned the nuclear family as the form of domestic life under socialism.
The ideological justification for ignoring family structures was linked to political interest. A program of private transformation might have alienated male proletarians, the social base of Communism. The German Communist party (KPD) consistently advocated women's rights in the 1920s. Yet the KPD remained a predominantly male organization that celebrated the ideal Communist worker as brawny, tough, and devoted to "masculine" organized activities such as soccer, strikes, and street-fighting. The KPD's commitment to political struggle, self-abnegation, and disciplined cooperation was more than an abstract worldview. German Communists had battled the rise of National Socialism, resisted the Third Reich, fought alongside the Spanish Loyalists, suffered in Nazi concentration camps, and contributed to the Soviet cause in World War II. They lived their politics and believed that everyone else-rescued from capitalism and correctly educated-would live Communist politics as well.
The neglect of the family rested, finally, on the psychological bedrock of self-serving bias. Virtually every leading Communist in the GDR and elsewhere was a man, and most were husbands and fathers. As they set out to build socialism after the turmoil of fascism and war, they benefited from the conventional, gendered division of domestic labor and were personally invested in the status quo, although they were oblivious to this conflict of interest. Steeped in the rationalistic assumptions of Marxism, Communists profoundly underestimated the power of private desires-including their own-to resist "reform."
However grounded, the effect of Communist denial of the independent significance of domestic relations was the same: the SED proceeded to socialize production and up end class relations, while leaving the organization of individual consumption and private gender relations basically as it was. The contradiction between brave new world and familiar home, and between dynamic production and stagnant consumption, generated ironic effects. The Plan's initial starvation of consumption, and its later inability to satisfy consumer wishes, enhanced the material and affective importance of the family for its members. East Germans depended on a family unit that worked hard to compensate for scarce provisions, crummy clothing, crumbling housing, low wages and pensions, inadequate services, and the paucity of public welfare. The state's exploitation of family labor and private networks of support impinged on women more directly and in more ways than on men: women organized consumption, a task that demanded much time, exertion, and ingenuity; women did the bulk of labor in a household that required much work; women bore and nurtured children; and women performed much of the care for infirm and aged relatives. A second set of ironic consequences was, thus, the continual reproduction of woman's domestic role, the reinforcement of her orientation toward consumption, the home, children, and marriage, and the fortification of men's assumption of the naturalness of women's orientation. Men and women were, obviously, both immersed in the family and its survival. Both contested state policies that restricted consumption and their ability to raise their children. Male workers' sense of themselves as breadwinners who should earn a "family wage" fueled their opposition to wage cuts and antagonism to the integration of women workers into better-paid occupations. Many husbands told wives how to run the household and rear the children. Men had much invested in the family. Nevertheless, they, women, and the SED treated consumption, reproduction, and the home as women's affairs.
The interaction between private domesticity and socialized production produced a third ironic effect: the family generated needs and desires that the socialist economy could not satisfy. In contrast, the "social market" economies of West Germany and other Western countries could meet consumer desires, a capacity that surprised Communists, who had, after all, cut their political teeth on depression-era, pre-Keynesian assumptions about capitalism. In sum, the intermeshing of public upheaval and private continuity paradoxically strengthened popular interest in the nuclear family, in individual consumption, in conventional gendered personas, and in things "over there."
The Stalinist economy, of course, did modify private lives. The family and public gender norms changed as married mothers entered the labor force in large numbers and became less willing to perform hard labor at home. The structures of wage labor altered the family but, mediated through women's decisions, mainly in ways the SED did not like, such as a rising divorce rate, declining fertility, and growing demands for timesaving household technologies. Party and state officials began to fret about such unexpected tendencies in the late 1950s, as the GDR was plagued by a vexing scarcity of labor, owing to the inefficiencies of every command economy and the hemorrhaging of workers to the West that affected only the GDR. Like every Stalinist economy, the GDR depended on the mobilization of new sources of labor to maintain rapid growth. The SED became eager to improve the productivity of current workers by raising skill levels. Looking ahead, the party leadership saw the need for more and better-educated children who would become the next generation of workers. The insatiable appetite of state-socialist structures for more and higher-quality labor, now and in the future, concentrated attention on women: housewives constituted the only remaining pool of nonemployed labor; women workers composed by far the larger pool of unskilled labor; women bore all the babies; mothers did the lion's share of child rearing; and wives performed most housework. The party became more alert to the significance of domestic matters as the weight they loaded onto women began to drag against its production and reproduction goals.
The operation of structures, even Communist structures, is always attenuated by the behavior of human agents. The SED, of course, might be seen as a single-minded agent and the GDR as its monolithic extension. As First Secretary of the Politburo, the ultra-Stalinist Walter Ulbricht held the Politburo in a tight grip; the Politburo, in turn, controlled the SED, the state, and the economy. Ulbricht's extraordinary power notwithstanding, the party-state did not act as a unified ego. Cleavages ran between the Plan and its implementation. Inside "the" state, each ministry pursued its particular priorities and pressed for more resources. Inside "the" party, leading members did not always agree about which line to toe in any one political or economic crisis. Officials in the "mass organizations," such as trade unions and the women's league, did not smoothly transmit the program to members. At the lower rungs of the state, SED, and mass organizations, officials had considerable contact with ordinary citizens. Functionaries relayed up to higher authorities what they heard, acting not only as spies, but as intermediaries. They were susceptible to pressure because they lived in East German society and shared many of its cultural norms. Officials also instrumentalized the opinions of "workers," "the people," or "women" in order to gain resources for their particular projects. Last but not least, individual East Germans navigated and, indeed, negotiated among institutional interests, trying to play this state bureaucrat against that political functionary, that economic manager against this trade union official.
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Excerpted from Revenge of the Domestic by Donna Harsch Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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