Gendering unemployment in postsocialist Germany: ‘what I do is work, even if it's not paid’

Abstract

This article uses feminist theories of the family to examine women's unemployment in the early years of German postsocialism. It is based on qualitative fieldwork, including 80 in-depth interviews, conducted in three cities in the formerly socialist region of Germany. In this article, three cases of couples coping with a wife's unemployment are analyzed in terms of micro-processes of negotiating work-family balance, redefining employment and domesticity, and reconstructing gendered identities. The central argument is that a couple's stance on emerging market institutions shaped how they re-negotiated their gender division of labor during postsocialism.

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