A01=Donna Harsch
Abortion
Adultery
Anti-capitalism
Anti-communism
Anti-fascism
Antifeminism
Author_Donna Harsch
Banditry
Bureaucrat
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Central Committee
Child care
Class conflict
Communism
Communist Party of Germany
De-Stalinization
Death
Defamation
Demoralization (warfare)
Dictatorship
Disgust
Divorce
Domestic violence
Employment
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Erich Honecker
False consciousness
Grounds for divorce
Home appliance
Hostility
Household
Housewife
Illegal abortion
Incest
Marital breakdown
Midwife
Misogyny
Narcissism
Nazi Party
Nazism
Neglect
Neues Deutschland
Neulehrer
New Course
Occupational inequality
On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
Oppression
Ostracism
Pension
Persecution
Physician
Politburo
Political repression
Politics
Prostitution
Racism
Rationing
Refugee
Ridicule
Sabotage
Scarcity (social psychology)
Sexism
Sexual dysfunction
Shortage
Soviet Union
Stalinism
Subversion
Supervisor
Total war
Trade union
Unemployment
War crime
Workforce
Product details
- ISBN 9780691059303
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 02 Nov 2008
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Revenge of the Domestic examines gender relations in East Germany from 1945 to the 1970s, focusing especially on the relationship between ordinary women, the Communist Party, and the state created by the Communists, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The book weaves together personal stories from interviews, statistical material, and evidence from archival research in Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Merseburg, and Chemnitz to reconstruct the complex interplay between state policy toward women and the family on the one hand, and women's reactions to policy on the other. Donna Harsch demonstrates that women resisted state decisions as citizens, wageworkers, mothers, wives, and consumers, and that in every guise they maneuvered to overcome official neglect of the family. As state dependence on female employment increased, the book shows, the Communists began to respond to the insistence of women that the state pay attention to the family. In fits and starts, the party state begrudgingly retooled policy in a more consumerist and family-oriented direction. This "domestication" was partial, ambivalent, and barely acknowledged from above.
It also had ambiguous, arguably regressive, effects on the private gender arrangements and attitudes of East Germans. Nonetheless, the economic and social consequences of this domestication were cumulatively powerful and, the book argues, gradually undermined the foundations of the GDR.
Donna Harsch is professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in twentieth-century German history.
