Women’s Work experiences in the GDR

Abstract

Schüle argues that the Eastern German dictatorship had a greater impact on the lives of women than on those of their male counterparts. Her research, based on interviews with female workers in a in a cotton-spinning factory in Leipzig, portrays women’s everyday-life and work, and offers a convincing study of the experience of female industrial workers. Using the three categories “cohort,” “women’s work,” and a discourse of “factory-as-community,” Schüle discusses her interviews with respect to the promotion of female textile workers on the one hand and the negative stereotypes associated with working in the textile industry on the other hand. Using concrete examples, Schüle demonstrates how a factory organised by women did not undermine the patriarchal frame in which it was embedded but how existing power differentials were reproduced as part of a discourse of family, security, and subordination.