When the sexual revolution of the late 1960s overcame the wall and reached the territories that were under Soviet orbit, young women experienced desire and love in a particular way, quite different from their Western peers.
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Espionage, state control, persecution and the regimentation of life may not have been enough to liquidate the libido of the citizens of the extinct German Democratic Republic. For some reason the youth of socialist Germany were more satisfied with their sexual lives than the youth on the other side of the wall.
By then, there were a number of laws in the GDR that aimed at promoting gender equality. "Women were in the same conditions as men, at least before the law, with regard to wages, the possibility of exercising "male professions" and enjoying the same professional opportunities."
Then came the seventies, and with them the introduction in the communist enclave of Europe of the contraceptive pill and the legalization of abortion. Family planning was recommended by the State and the pill was prescribed with a medical prescription completely free of charge as part of the social security.
The interruption of pregnancy, legalized in 1972 without conditions or costs until the twelfth week of gestation, was practiced in all public hospitals in the Democratic Republic.
But different studies found that behind the sociocultural effects of female empowerment in communist beds, there were also political reasons, such as a state message that explicitly encouraged the enjoyment of the sexual life of its citizens.
In part, seclusion in the private realm was the flip side of a deeply regimented public sphere and social life that, in general, had far less stimulation than that of the West.
In the GDR it was very common for the idea of starting a family to appear as a possibility among an educated social sector that currently postpones parenthood for several decades or even chooses to resign it completely.
Studies, employment and the fact that job security was more than guaranteed made children an integral and logical part of family planning, even for students.
That scheme was broken in 1990, because studying and being parents was no longer possible under the conditions imposed by the market economy. “Having children became socially dangerous, an obstacle to employment and professional careers; an element that no longer fits well in the Curriculum Vitae, neither for women nor for men".
In the workplace, official statistics indicate that in 1985, 49% of the active population in the GDR were women, while the principle of 'equal work, equal pay' was in force. This is an index that will barely be reached twenty-five years later by some capitalist countries.
Equality in the GDR had more to do with a strongly economic issue: the state needed women as a workforce. Other principles were actually a consequence of this need, such as the idea that raising children should not fall exclusively on women, and that women should not stay in their homes, caring, raising and taking care of domestic chores.
The fact that women earned their own money and were not financially dependent on their husbands gave them greater personal freedom. They knew, for example, that they could live alone and raise their children without problems and that they did not need to sustain a difficult marriage for material reasons.
Women had to free themselves from the subordination to their husbands but they could not free themselves from the subordination of the men who controlled the State, despite the laws that aimed at gender equality, women were absent from the leadership spaces of politics, the science and economics.
Only a generation has passed since the fall of the wall. It remains for the future to decide how much progress has been made and how much has gone backwards in recent years in terms of these matters.
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🔎 I am Gustavo Llusá, Argentine, after traveling for several years in more than 60 countries, I settled in Latvia where I got married and learned to know another way of life, on the other side of the map.
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