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Donna Harsch, Alexandria N. Ruble. Entangled Emancipation: Women’s Rights in Cold War Germany., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 481–482, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae600
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Extract
By the late 1950s, the constitutional law of both East and West Germany included a clause that guaranteed equal rights between women and men. At that time, the constitutions of few West European countries explicitly incorporated the principle of gender equality under law. Thus, by the end of their first decade of existence, both Germanys look comparatively progressive on the question of “equal rights” for women.
Yet, as Alexandria Ruble shows in her readable, meticulously researched, and evenhanded comparative study, Entangled Emancipation: Women’s Rights in Cold War Germany, this conclusion is simplistic and ahistorical. She does not deny the significance of the equal rights provisions but complicates their meaning by tracing their prehistory in political tensions and debates of the 1940s and 1950s, and by following their after-history in the family law of East and West Germany of the 1960s and 1970s. Her first great contribution to the literature on German women’s rights is to demonstrate convincingly that the process and the content of gendered legal change in each state was related to what was happening in the other German state. As do other feminist scholars, she sees gender relations as a major point of contention in the Cold War rivalry between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and German Democratic Republic (GDR). Applying this insight to the case of women’s legal rights, she shows that these rights did not evolve along parallel tracks in East and West but alternately diverged, converged, and crisscrossed as experts, government ministers, legislators, and ordinary citizens looked over their shoulders at debates and decisions in the other Germany—and aimed to prove that their state had more to offer women than did the other.
