Restructuring the Engineering Profession and the Mobilization of Women as a Resource in System Competition

Abstract

In her advanced dissertation, Karin Zachmann pursues the dispute between the technical and political elite over fundamental reconstruction in the Soviet Occupied Territory/German Democratic Republic. She takes as her starting points both the history of technology and gender as well as newer GDR-research. She examines how the political elite asserted their claim to total access to technical knowledge and what effect this had on the professional self-conception of technical experts in the time period between 1945 and the 1971 successful exchange of power from Ulbrecht to Honecker. Central to the study are the feminization processes and the shift in the gender-coding of the engineering profession. This was accompanied by an increased mobilization of women for technical professions. The study, which is founded on a broad array of sources, not only sheds light on the question as to the scope of the technical experts in the GDR, but also represents an important contribution to the “deconstruction of the socialist state’s gender order.”