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What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

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Elizabeth Heineman's first book improves on her earlier articles describing the hurdles overcoming political resistance to legal acceptance of women and their children. Professor Heineman challenges the assumption that the development of women "standing alone" in the East paralleled their development in the West. Her analysis goes beyond the battle for recognition of their social/sexual lives in the era of the "surplus women" (There were nearly seven million more women than men in Germany in 1946), and considers the effect on marriage of German reunification in 1990. Although married women in both Germanies, within the traditional locus for sexual expression, had eaiser availability to creature comforts, such as homes and apartments, the Christian coalition in power in the West made special efforts to defend the traditional nuclear family. Thus, women in the East grew up believing that women must integrate motherhood with their careers, but in the West the two livestyles were viewed as mutually exclusive. Heineman suggests that the generation of separation has created fundamental difference where sameness is expected, and that the equality created in the East may now be superimposed on the West.