"They Say, 'Oh God, I Don't Want to Live Like Her!'"

Abstract

Describes the postsocialist East German solution to combining work & family & the institutional transformations concomitant with reunification, drawing on the stories of three mothers. In-depth interview data & fieldwork are drawn on to demonstrate the differential manner in which institutional changes played out in the women's lives. Evidenced are distinct work-family strategies used to confront typical patterns of risk & opportunity in the market economy that fostered shifts in their marriages vis-a-vis the domestic work-paid employment balance. Each women's work-family strategy was influenced by the intersection of institutionalized gender roles, employment opportunities, family income & consumption goals, & marital gender relations. These cases illustrate how the emerging postsocialist values hierarchy marginalized women's roles & identities as mothers. Further, it is shown that East German women's attempts to mix work & parenting clashed with an institutional environment opposing wage earning to mothering, valued paid employment over domestic work, & made mothering a labor market liability. Thus, revealed is a marketization-related cultural process whereby institutional practices & everyday life experiences that marginalize mothering are reproduced. J. Zendejas