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Ideological indoctrination aside, it may suprise some people here that the german GDR had 92% working women, many of them in technical and scientific fields and

Ideological indoctrination aside, it may suprise some people here that the german GDR had 92% working women, many of them in technical and scientific fields and many having three children. One of the things they did right here is offering proper childcare widely around typical work time windows. The society and often husbands too felt responsible for children, it was not seen as "a mother's thing" like many in this thread seem to do. This has implications up until today, with several prominent and well-educated female politicians and public figures being GDR-born. It was not all perfect (housework and childcare was implicitly still seen as a mother's thing, mothers could request special housework days, sometimes questionable things like full-week kindergardens and so on), but much better than what young people face today when moving to west-german states (where the jobs for educated people can be found) where old-fashioned mindsets and kindergardens closing at 4pm and at random full days throughout the month persist. A single generation of children born among both men and women working in decent jobs did this. Angela Merkel is one of these GDR children, she studied physics and has a PhD in quantum chemistry. She is childless, but her mother - despite being very old now - is still teaching English because she has never stopped being passionate about her chosen profession (I know an interview where Merkel says that her mothers work attitude always inspired her). Well, she never had to throw her education away because society or her husband expected it either. Another well-known politician I can think of here is Sarah Wagenknecht. Peter Scholze who just won the Fields medal was born in Dresden (growing up in Berlin) - his father is a physicist and his mother is a computer scientist working as network technician.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago
Incidentally the GDR also had an extremely high divorce rate. I never saw an adequate explanation of the reasons for this. http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133p/133p04papers/CSmithEGermWomen046.htm http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133p/133...
- DanielleMolloy 8y ago
  This can be attributed to people who work themselves being independent from a potentially abusive person's income; and to widely spread atheism, much more than in most European states (currently still 50% atheists (approximately, depending on the survey)).
  - MichaelMoser123 8y ago
    Ok, but the other socialist countries didn't have an equally high divorce rate, so what is different?
arandr0x 8y ago
France, which is one of the countries in Europe where the birthrate is least endangered, also makes this easy by having widely available childcare and childcare subsidies, full-day school starting age 3 and reduced work hours for everyone, not just parents. (This is despite France being generally sexist and children being largely the responsibility of mothers until very recently.) This is not a panacea, and average age of mothers is also quite high due to a high proportion of people going for graduate degrees. However, it shows that a family with 2, 3 children can still be thought of as desirable and attainable by educated parents in a 1st world country, with the right environment.
T2_t2 8y ago
Has that continued post reunification? A big problem with interventions like this is that they are so specific to the zeitgeist. By that I mean when everyone struggles, gender differences diminish, and when everyone is doing well, or at least so it seems, gender differences exaggerate. To be less controversial, the number of artists in ancient Greece was small. Today, depending upon definition, a huge portion of people make a living creatively. Heck, even a job like Food Photographer is an historical outlier in terms of the skill set. As more types of jobs open up, and society has much, much better individual food security, people make decisions to enter more and more niche professions that don't always make for great statistics. That's part of the modern, western problem, that when people are free to do what they want, and what we individually want is complicated, they tend to choose paths that lead to an aggregate we didn't expect. I mean, honestly, how many people ever predicted Instagram models in the 1980s? Youtube stars are analogous to TV stars, but Instagram? You take a photo of yourself next to something? That's your job?
Arete31415 8y ago
I work in a technical field in the US, and my few female co-workers are supposedly in a great position compared to other women in the US. They've got good educations, and make good incomes. However, when it comes time for them to have kids, they still have to scramble around and cobble together a solution that is tedious and expensive and stressful. Every family in America has to figure out how to arrange childcare, as if this whole "people have children" thing is just a brand-new concept that no one else has tried out before. When government decides that it has zero responsibilities towards helping the next generation, and when the cost of living (and the cost of educating that next generation) is so darn high, women make the completely rational choice not to have children, or to have fewer than they would otherwise like. America found a way to offer childcare during WWII, when keeping women in work was a priority. But somehow we've forgotten how to do it in peacetime.
- nojvek 8y ago
  Probably not a popular opinion. With the world reaching ~10 billion in population, wouldn’t some in the govt see not offering child care, a good thing for the planet since it side effect encourages people to have less kids?

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

Incidentally the GDR also had an extremely high divorce rate. I never saw an adequate explanation of the reasons for this. http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133p/133p04papers/CSmithEGermWomen046.htm http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133p/133...

DanielleMolloy 8y ago
This can be attributed to people who work themselves being independent from a potentially abusive person's income; and to widely spread atheism, much more than in most European states (currently still 50% atheists (approximately, depending on the survey)).
- MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  Ok, but the other socialist countries didn't have an equally high divorce rate, so what is different?

arandr0x 8y ago

France, which is one of the countries in Europe where the birthrate is least endangered, also makes this easy by having widely available childcare and childcare subsidies, full-day school starting age 3 and reduced work hours for everyone, not just parents. (This is despite France being generally sexist and children being largely the responsibility of mothers until very recently.) This is not a panacea, and average age of mothers is also quite high due to a high proportion of people going for graduate degrees. However, it shows that a family with 2, 3 children can still be thought of as desirable and attainable by educated parents in a 1st world country, with the right environment.

T2_t2 8y ago

Has that continued post reunification? A big problem with interventions like this is that they are so specific to the zeitgeist. By that I mean when everyone struggles, gender differences diminish, and when everyone is doing well, or at least so it seems, gender differences exaggerate. To be less controversial, the number of artists in ancient Greece was small. Today, depending upon definition, a huge portion of people make a living creatively. Heck, even a job like Food Photographer is an historical outlier in terms of the skill set. As more types of jobs open up, and society has much, much better individual food security, people make decisions to enter more and more niche professions that don't always make for great statistics. That's part of the modern, western problem, that when people are free to do what they want, and what we individually want is complicated, they tend to choose paths that lead to an aggregate we didn't expect. I mean, honestly, how many people ever predicted Instagram models in the 1980s? Youtube stars are analogous to TV stars, but Instagram? You take a photo of yourself next to something? That's your job?

Arete31415 8y ago

I work in a technical field in the US, and my few female co-workers are supposedly in a great position compared to other women in the US. They've got good educations, and make good incomes. However, when it comes time for them to have kids, they still have to scramble around and cobble together a solution that is tedious and expensive and stressful. Every family in America has to figure out how to arrange childcare, as if this whole "people have children" thing is just a brand-new concept that no one else has tried out before. When government decides that it has zero responsibilities towards helping the next generation, and when the cost of living (and the cost of educating that next generation) is so darn high, women make the completely rational choice not to have children, or to have fewer than they would otherwise like. America found a way to offer childcare during WWII, when keeping women in work was a priority. But somehow we've forgotten how to do it in peacetime.

nojvek 8y ago
Probably not a popular opinion. With the world reaching ~10 billion in population, wouldn’t some in the govt see not offering child care, a good thing for the planet since it side effect encourages people to have less kids?