Abstract
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the re-unification of Germany meant for women in former East Germany severe changes in their workplaces, reproductive rights, gender ideologies, and social policies. Making Their Place asks: how do feminist movements emerge in postsocialist countries to resist these dramatic economic, political, and ideological changes? Guenther provides an original comparative analysis of two local feminist movements in East Germany between 1989 and 2004, weaving together a range of factors from different approaches to fashion what is ultimately a satisfactory explanation for cross-case variation in social movement evolution, development, and outcomes. The key findings are that the variation in the development of these two movements can be explained by the particular local history, politics, and culture regarding gender relations that they encounter.
Guenther introduces refined concepts from cultural anthropology and geography to social movement studies, creating a new, original innovative framework for theorists of gender politics and social movements alike. The book gives an insightful new twist to political process theory—including concepts of political opportunity and political fields (drawing from Raka Ray) by focusing on space and localities in particular. The book is an important contribution to the areas of gender politics and social movements not only to show that context matters but how.
Guenther broadens the scope of gender politics, social movements, and postsocialist studies by making a compelling argument for why place matters to the birth and development of social movements and how gender relations and feminist movements’ claims to affect social change are shaped by the political and cultural context in which they emerge. While all Eastern German movements struggle with the same challenges of rapid transition from East German gender politics to a more conservative West German gender regime with federal state mandates, the two local feminist movements address these challenges in different ways. The organizations have a shared concern for issues of women’s unemployment, violence against women, and restrictions in abortion rights. Yet, the movements have taken different routes to address these and have to different degrees been successful in shaping local debates around gender. Feminists in the northern city of Rostock borrowed Swedish progressive notions of gender politics, while feminists in the more southern city of Erfurt sought to align themselves with more conservative notions of gender relations from West Germany and an uneasy relationship with local churches. The regional links created opportunities for feminist activists as agents in the diffusion process of the West German model of gender relations.
The book contributes to debates about German feminism in several ways. It provides a deep understanding of the complex politics between East and West and their challenges in building connections and alliances with local politicians, unions, the churches, other stakeholders, and other feminist activists across space to West Germany, and their European Union neighbors. This process is rooted in contradictory ideological constructions of feminist identities, but East and West do not appear as two homogeneous blocks.
The book reshapes theories of the continuing effects of socialism after the collapse of that regime. Guenther shows neosocialist feminist organizations in Rostock have been very successful in incorporating positive elements of the socialist past while feminists in Erfurt deeply rejected the socialist past. Guenther explains this in terms of history: the different local experiences with state socialism as well as the different role that local churches played in harboring dissidents. She provides a nuanced assessment of positive ways that a socialist legacy can play for social movements.
In addition, this book addresses debates about jumping scales of social movements in the context of the European Union. Guenther elegantly shows how local movements position themselves vis-à-vis supranational influences based on regional ties and identities rooted in history and culture. This finding contributes to the understanding of social change and Europeanization of inequalities and politics, often overlooked in studies of the influence of the European Union that focus only on national-level politics. The attention to the different scales of politics makes an important contribution.
Making Their Place is not only well researched but also beautifully written. The book provides an excellent balance between ethnographic description and theoretical analysis. While Guenther is clearly a masterful sociologist, she apparently has the patience of a good historian. The book is based on rich data from many years of fieldwork, including a multisite ethnographic study with observations and extensive interviewing, as well as archival research and document analysis. Guenther aptly describes the feel of these different localities, weaving her field notes into the analysis at the beginning of each chapter, drawing the reader to that place and time. Hence, the book is suitable for both upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminars in the sociology of gender and social movements. It is a must-read for scholars of gender politics, women’s movements, German feminism and postsocialist studies.