Suchergebnisse

Describes the postsocialist East German solution to combining work & family & the institutional transformations concomitant with reunification, drawing on the stories of three mothers. In-depth interview data & fieldwork are drawn on to demonstrate the differential manner in which institutional changes played out in the women's lives. Evidenced are distinct work-family strategies used to confront typical patterns of risk & opportunity in the market economy that fostered shifts in their marriages vis-a-vis the domestic work-paid employment balance. Each women's work-family strategy was influenced by the intersection of institutionalized gender roles, employment opportunities, family income & consumption goals, & marital gender relations. These cases illustrate how the emerging postsocialist values hierarchy marginalized women's roles & identities as mothers. Further, it is shown that East German women's attempts to mix work & parenting clashed with an institutional environment opposing wage earning to mothering, valued paid employment over domestic work, & made mothering a labor market liability. Thus, revealed is a marketization-related cultural process whereby institutional practices & everyday life experiences that marginalize mothering are reproduced. J. Zendejas

This article traces the gendered consequences of changes in the problem of combining work and family caused by the collapse of state socialism in former East Germany. The transition to capitalism made the trade-offs between work and family more extreme, amplified the experiential distance between work and family, and increased the perceived social value of work relative to family activities. These processes highlighted gender stratification: Women's labor power was devalued just as the value of paid employment increased, and women were increasingly excluded from work just as women's family roles seemed to lose value for society. This study suggests that feminists should conceptualize postsocialist transitions not only as changing labor market conditions and state policies but also as shaping gender relations through changing the meanings and experiences of work and family activities.