OWEN - Searching For Women’s Lives And Identities Under Socialism

Well, take a generally optimistic view … at any rate always try to make the best of things. Don’t mope around, and have a sense of responsibility. … Try to use what you know … to achieve something. … Maintain a warm heart. A humanistic approach.

That is how one interviewee, who was born in 1931, described the insights from her own life that she wanted to pass on to her grandchildren. She was one of the women from the GDR who told her life story as part of the international project ‘Women’s Memory: In Search of Women’s Lives and Identities under Socialism’.

The Women’s Memory International Project

A subjective reconstruction of everyday life and history from the perspective of three generations of women who lived most of their lives until 1990 under socialism—this idea was developed in the mid-1990s by Jiřina Šiklová, a Czech sociologist, dissident, and founder of the Prague Gender Studies Centre. Soon after the collapse of socialist governments in Europe, ‘women under socialism’ became a popular topic of research and publications, especially in Western Europe and the United States. However, these efforts largely failed to consider the specific sociocultural, historical, and generational features of the individual socialist countries

Many women from former socialist countries had the impression that a Western interpretive perspective had little to do with their perceptions and experiences, and even appropriated their history. At the same time, this sense of unease prompted questions about the lives and outlooks of women who had experienced socialism first hand. As a constructive response in effect, the idea arose of taking the topic of women’s lives under socialism ‘into their own hands’, and thereby also having a liberating effect on women’s awareness of themselves as citizens.

The project’s idea was international from the start. The Prague Gender Studies Centre therefore looked for partners by contacting other centers as well as networks, organizations, and individuals in formerly socialist countries. In 1997, the project extended to what had been the GDR when it contacted OWEN e.V., the ‘Ost-West-Europäisches FrauenNetzwerk’ (Eastern-Western European Women’s Network, OWEN). We—the women at OWEN—were immediately taken with the idea. For one thing, in the early years after the GDR became part of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), we had often observed mutual incomprehension and misunderstandings in encounters between East and West Germans, and between Eastern and Western Europeans. Moreover, it seemed that almost everyone had forgotten that until October 3, 1990, the GDR had been a socialist country and that women in East Germany, too, needed to discover their history in socialism.

Open media viewer

More information

Open media viewer

More information

Pavla Frýdlová from the Prague Gender Studies Centre was the official coordinator of the EU-cofinanced international Women’s Memory project from 1998 to 2004. Regional interview materials have been archived in Prague, although plans for an international Women’s Memory Archive in Prague have unfortunately not been implemented due to a lack of funds.1<p><a href="http://www.womensmemory.net/english/" target="_blank" title="open in new tab">http://www.womensmemory.net/english/</a></p&gt; The regional teams from Czechia, East Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Ukraine were expected to be autonomous in their work, including regarding the subsequent use of their materials and the acquisition of funding. The East German project was supported from 1999 to 2001 by the Berlin State Senate as part of a program to promote women’s studies.

Methodology

At the first international workshop, which was held in Croatia in 1999, we agreed on a framework based on principles of oral history and qualitative biographical research, as well as on methodological principles for conducting the interviews. The aim was for the project to enable international comparisons and meet scientific criteria. As a civil society project, it was also intended to raise political awareness.

The framework’s feminist approach views women as active subjects in both their life stories and their biographical memories. As such, the focus was on the women themselves who were interviewed. We were interested in how they had lived, how they had shaped their lives under their specific societal conditions, what attitudes, and value systems they had held, and how they had perceived and experienced political developments. They themselves were to decide—to the extent possible during a single interview—what and how they wished (or did not wish) to say or speak about their lives. Connections between ‘objective’ historical events and developments on the one hand and individual lives and subjective biographical reconstructions on the other were to be drawn in the form of life-history narratives and the biographical data compiled in what were called biograms.

All interviews began with an open question that invited the interviewees to speak about their lives. The interviewers could then ask follow-up questions, either directly about the content or to gain a better understanding.

The follow-up part of the interview focused on memories of specific historical events or sociopolitical contexts, or delved deeper into individual topics. For the OWEN project, toward the end of the interviews we usually asked for some type of acquired wisdom or insights that the women might wish to pass on to younger generations. Data for the biograms were only compiled after the interviews were over. Each interview also has an accompanying report by the subject in which she recorded her personal impressions of the setting, atmosphere, and interview itself.

To place the interviews into historical context, additional material was often gathered, for example about sociocultural and political events, relevant legislation, and female roles and images (in mass media, films, novels), along with statistics and photos.

The Women’s Memory Project 

For the ‘East German’ part of the Women’s Memory project, we interviewed 130 women from the GDR. The interviews were conducted between 1998 and 2003 by the journalists Gislinde Schwarz and Rosemarie Mieder, usually at the homes of the women themselves.

We found nearly all the interviewees by means of informal contacts and ‘word of mouth’ or with the help of associations and organizations, plus a few from ads placed in newspapers. The talks, which were sound recorded, lasted from one to eight hours, with some held over two days. Many women had prepared for the talks, written notes, brought photo albums or mementos, and provided coffee and biscuits. Almost all told their life histories at one stretch for the first time.

All the interviews were anonymized and most were transcribed. OWEN opted for transcripts and biograms, experimented with different analytical processes (summaries, sequencing, hermeneutical text analyses, etc.), and produced a total of twenty global analyses from selected interviews.

The women interviewed were from the generations born between 1920 and 1960. They were from towns, villages, or major cities and came from different social classes. What they all had in common was that at the time of the interview, they had spent most of their lives in the GDR. However, they had experienced the early stages and developments in women-related policy in the GDR at different points in their lives. They differed in having been able to utilize or participate in the educational and promotional programs and social policy measures fully, partially, or not at all. Age differences also meant that they had been affected differently by the radical changes in 1989–90.

For the eldest generation in particular, many women’s formal education had not gone beyond state-required schooling. The younger generation, by contrast, had a far higher proportion of college-entry secondary school (Abitur), vocational college, or university degrees. The women were married, divorced, widowed, single, living in partnerships, with or without children, religiously affiliated, or atheists. Some had held mid- to high-level positions in government; others viewed the GDR critically or rejected it altogether.

Nearly all the women had pursued occupations or professions in the GDR. For the eldest generation, this had still frequently been done without formal training or with interruptions due to children and family obligations. Almost all were mothers, although once again the older generation differed in that not all their children had been planned.

Of those born in the 1920s and ’30s, a relatively large number came from areas that no longer belonged to Germany after the war ended in 1945—namely Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, or Moravia.

Unlike most of the other teams in the international Women’s Memory project, OWEN e.V. did not include any of its interviews in publications.

Our activities focused on political education and on promoting dialogue across borders. Our priority was on the process of learning—about our different perceptions and interpretations of the narrated life stories and identity structures of different generations of women under socialism. To this end, we used selected interviews as educational material for designing biography and history workshops. While doing so, we repeatedly realized how valuable and instructive it is to grapple with what are often controversial or argument-provoking memories not only for critical reflection on our own biases and stereotypes but also for critical analyses of our lives as women in societies today.

Open media viewer

More information

For my part, as someone who lived in the GDR for forty years and thought she had a good idea of what women’s lives were like under socialism, the Women’s Memory project was the best history lesson I have ever had. I learned how important safe spaces are for sharing subjective memories and for critical dialogue about common and disparate experiences of our pasts that are not yet past—which in turn are important for how we understand ourselves and each other, and how we view both our present and our future.