Complete Families, Half Families, No Families at All: Female-Headed Households and the Reconstruction of the Family in the Early Federal Republic

Abstract

“Morethan any other social institution”, proclaimed parliamentarian Bernhard Winkelheide in a meeting of the first West German Bundestag, “the family has fallen into the whirlpool created by the collapse.” His colleagues evidently agreed. Surrounded by families that still bore the scars of wartime separation and death, lawmakers made the “reconstruction of the family” a priority in the first decade of the Federal Republic's existence.