Modernity and professional life in the GDR: women in agriculture

Abstract

The widespread notion that women in capitalist and socialist agriculture occupied similar positions will be questioned in this article by use of a variety of sources and interview materials: it is necessary to discuss professional qualifications, the experience of work and training as well as family structures in two periods, the 1960s and the 1980s. Is the term ‘modernisation’ appropriate for this finding, and what can be found in the concrete sources? Local examples will be evaluated on the basis of the parish of Brodowin, which is today part of the Schorfheide-Chorin district, approximately 60 kilometres north-east of Berlin, and Klützer Winkel, a village in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern not far from the old border between East and West Germany. Further consideration is given to working conditions after the ‘change of system’, when the impact of the Agriculture Adjustment Act could be felt by those concerned. Overall, in the last two decades, economic and social conditions have resulted in a situation where women have been unable to use positively their professional qualifications, their own income, their own social and old-age insurance, specific women’s rights or their self-determined non-family childcare experience (nurseries, kindergartens, school day-care centres) What role did one’s own experience in the field of professional qualifications play, for different age-groups of female workers, in terms of developing options for coping with the situation of social collapse in the 1990s? How does this relate to decisions about migration and especially about the process of deciding to move away from rural areas?