Chapter Five—
Protecting Mothers' Work

"My entire hope is the West German Basic Law," explained Anneliese Teetz to the reporter from the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel as she cut up greens for her family's midday soup. It was the spring of 1949, and Teetz was out of work. This alone would not have justified news coverage of Teetz's plight; female unemployment had risen sharply in the wake of currency reform nearly a year earlier. In large numbers, women whose work as housewives and mothers had won them exemption from labor mobilization under the Nazis and whose services as scroungers, black marketeers, and managers of scarcity had kept them out of the wage-labor force in the immediate postwar years now sought paid employment. What set Teetz apart and what caught the reporter's attention was that she wanted a job as a ship's captain. Teetz had practiced this profession since 1943, the only woman in Germany to complete the necessary training. In search of a new position, Teetz complained that she was facing resistance from the Public Transport and Traffic Workers' Union, which threatened to block its membership from working on any ship piloted by Teetz. The union argued that there were plenty of unemployed men available for any open slot and also claimed that Teetz was disqualified because of her past membership in the Nazi party.

For Teetz, more was involved than her "irrepressible desire" for the life of the sea; she also needed to pay the rent for her modest one-room apartment near Hamburg. Not just romance, but the Deutschmark was at stake, the Spiegel reporter commented dryly. Teetz, "with her mas-

culine haircut and perfectly round eyes," supported her unemployed husband, a machinist who was also looking for work on a ship, and who testified to his complete confidence in his wife's leadership abilities. The couple's shared love affair with the sea found expression in walls covered with pictures of ships from a recent series in a Hamburg newspaper and a large spyglass with which they could identify who was sailing by on the Elbe. Teetz justified her desire to pursue her passion by identifying herself with a long line of "heroines from folk tales, queens, female sea pirates, and freedom fighters," all of whom had gone to sea. And why not? After all, she added, "in reality the two sexes are really not so different."^[1]

If Hans Böckler read the Spiegel story, he was not learning of Teetz for the first time. Böckler was head of the postwar German Federation of Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund), the single national representative of organized labor. Created to eliminate the splits among socialist, Catholic, and liberal organizations that had divided trade unionists in Weimar, it was the realization of Böckler's vision of mixing "all unions in one pot" (Eintopfsgewerkschaft ). In July 1948, the would-be female ship's captain sent him a long letter, soliciting his support and describing her circumstances in detail. Teetz's father, a physical education teacher, had opposed his daughter's aspiration to pilot an ocean-going steamship. Despite her love of the sea, in her youth she tried to accept the fact that such employment was out of the question for a woman. After completing her secondary school education (Abitur ) in 1929, she resigned herself to a profession as a teacher, but in school vacations, she learned more and more about the ocean and ships. Disguised as a boy, she even managed two trips, one on a fishing boat, one on an ocean-going sailing ship. While this experience only heightened her passion, it also reaffirmed that as a woman she had no prospects of making a living at sea, and she fought to repress her "unruly desire." But after completing her training as a schoolteacher in 1932, her common sense and pragmatism were still on a collision course with her dreams. Despite attempts to remain fully occupied with her job, a gymnastics club, and volunteer work with a local civil defense organization and the Red Cross, she ultimately conceded that "the battle against nature was to no avail. . . . With every strong wind [my thoughts] went to sea and returned to beckon me."

In her appeal to Böckler, Teetz made no secret of her National Socialist past. She entered the NSDAP in 1937 as a teacher, she explained, both out of "honest conviction to serve in a good cause and in part

because I hoped through practical work to change some things that I did not like." Her frustration with the limits to her success in the classroom, however, only intensified her desire to pursue the career of her choice. Finally, her persistence won out over the opposition of the Nazi organization of workers (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), and the Transportation Ministry approved her application to sign onto a steam-powered vessel. Still, it required years of additional petitions and personal appearances in Berlin before she landed a position as the pilot of an ocean-going fishing boat. Happily for Teetz, personal and professional life coincided; she married a machinist under her command, and until 1948, when they quit to look for better jobs, they remained employed together.

Teetz categorically rejected charges that she was "politically encumbered" (politisch belastet ); she had been officially "denazified" in 1946. She countered that the real "point of contention is naturally the status of women in a community of men and in an outspokenly difficult male profession." To be sure, for a woman extraordinary responsibilities came with such a job; it was up to her to ensure that "in the close quarters of these primitive surroundings" on board the ship, relations with the crew remained purely professional. But Teetz pointed out that she made this easier by ensuring that crew members "never see me decked out like a woman." Moreover, the demanding work on a ship left little time for sleep, let alone for "flirtatious thoughts."

Even more importantly, Teetz lectured Böckler, "the differences between the sexes are much more subtle than we generally see," and she attributed the blurred vision of male trade unionists to a "thousand-year-long education since the introduction of the law of the father that surely went hand in hand with the discovery of iron and the spread of armed conflict, that led girls . . . to dependence and subordination, while boys and men felt like powerful rulers." Given the opportunity, women could pursue many professions denied them by the "tyrant 'tradition.'" How could Böckler deny that twenty years of difficult struggle against tenacious opposition were evidence that Teetz's commitment to her profession was more than a passing fancy? Crossing the line between dispassionate description and melodrama, Teetz claimed that for her a life without the ocean and fishing would be like a life in prison.^[2]

Böckler and the trade union were unmoved by such appeals, and for the next five years Teetz pursued her "paper war," as her case made the rounds of the Federal Transportation Ministry, the Labor Ministry, and even the Bundestag. Throughout, she invoked the Basic Law's promise of women's full equality with men, charging the trade union with em-

ploying "dictatorial measures" to keep her from going to sea. Supporting herself by working as a schoolteacher in Hamburg, she awaited vindication and reentry into her other profession.^[3]

The trade union countered that it was "no enemy of women"; indeed, it was the union's "well-meaning attitude toward women" that prevented it from sanctioning women's employment on deck or as machinists until there was protective legislation in place that would regulate women's working conditions in the maritime industry. Such laws would ensure "proper moral conditions" and take into account the "physical constitution of a woman and the function of motherhood," lest women's work endanger their "bodily and spiritual health." The constitutional proclamation of female equality did not eliminate the need for consideration of women's "bodily constitution"; protective legislation was in no way inconsistent with women's equality, and exceptions were justifiable only in the face of shortages of male workers—such as had existed in the war and the immediate postwar years—which no longer prevailed.

Critical of Teetz's tendency to the romantic, the union disputed her self-portrayal. Why had she left teaching, which "should offer a woman myriad possibilities for inner satisfaction" and which promised far greater economic security, particularly for older women, than a life at sea? The union also charged that Teetz had initially gained entry into the profession through her brother's personal connection to Hitler. This was all the more necessary because in her trips to sea as a sailor before obtaining a post as a pilot, she had served more "for the entertainment of the crew than to fill a position on board," though the union agreed that she was innocent of any specific moral infractions. Still, past history was no necessary predictor of future behavior, and there were precedents for "doubting whether an individual could enter into the close community of the crew, for example, in the case of homosexuals; women are an alien body in a close-knit crew, and [they] endanger it." It was precisely for this reason that wives of seamen had already made known their intention to keep their husbands at home should women be allowed on board.^[4] Wives were not the only ones with problems. When trade-union representatives asked, "Can a woman stand at the head of a unit that is organized in an almost military fashion?" the question was rhetorical.^[5]

Specialists within the labor and transportation ministries took seriously their charge to break the impasse, even visiting the Hamburg wharves to inspect firsthand the working conditions on ocean-going ships. They could find no laws explicitly prohibiting women from

becoming captains, but this was a reflection of the exceptional quality of Teetz's case; were more women in the profession, there would be more laws regulating their work. No one disputed that any "mechanical equivalence of the rights and associated obligations of women with those of men" was risky "because such an interpretation would pay no heed to the differences in the sexes given by nature."^[6] The Nazis had provided elaborate descriptions of those differences, and labor ministry officials drew on their efforts. Citing a 1941 report, they emphasized that because of their pelvic structures, women could not carry heavy loads. Women had lower average body weights and smaller hearts, less physical strength, higher pulse rates, and in addition, their job performance was jeopardized by menstruation. At least three to four days out of every twenty-eight, women's physical capacity was decisively diminished, while one-third of all women experienced even greater discomfort, approaching illness. Women's bodies and characters were not fully developed before they were twenty-four; by fulfilling the normal requirement of fifty months "before the mast" between the ages of 15 and 20, they ran extraordinarily high risks. Menopause presented still other problems that deserved special consideration.^[7] These natural barriers combined with concerns about ethical behavior on board set limits to the Basic Law's promise of women's equality. Some jobs endangered women's bodies; others endangered their morals; in still others, because of their bodies, women presented a threat to workplace morality. The occupation of sailor or ship's captain seemed to present problems on all counts.

Summarizing this massive documentation, Marie Schulte-Langforth, a labor ministry specialist on protective legislation for women workers, affirmed that equality and special treatment were by no means incompatible. However, Teetz represented a truly "unusual case" (Sonderfall ). She was physically able to do the work required on board a ship and entitled to a job. Drafting specific legislation to regulate women's employment in the maritime industry was not necessary, and most women needed no instruction to realize that work on large fishing boats was not for them. Teetz's case was unique, an exception to this rule, and the Transport and Traffic Workers' Union was informed that if it did not clear the decks for Teetz, it could anticipate massive intervention by the labor ministry on her behalf.^[8] With support from women leaders within the SPD, Schulte-Langforth's threat worked. By March 1953—as the Bundestag was debating "money-for-children" and rapidly approach-

ing the deadline for specifying the dimensions of women's equality in a revised Civil Code—Teetz was back at sea, pursuing her "irrepressible desire" and earning a living.^[9]

Although Teetz was the only West German woman to work as a sea captain in the late forties and early fifties, she was not the only woman to work. Her experience was exemplary not because throngs of women shared her professional ambitions but because it illuminated larger dimensions of the West German state's attempts to negotiate the boundaries between the drive to get women into nontraditional occupations under the Nazis and the Allies in the forties and the return to a normal labor market in the fifties, between equality and special treatment, between women's rights and women's protection, between women's bodies and women's work, between women's productive and reproductive labor. The Basic Law had ensured all women equal rights with men, but as Selbert had insisted, recognizing equal rights was completely consistent with acknowledging that women and men were different. How that difference translated into women's work in the home was at issue in debates over family policy and reform of the Civil Code. How it translated into women's rights in the paid workplace was the question that had been raised explicitly in Teetz's case and that would be answered for hundreds of thousands of others in state policies aimed at protecting working women.

The relentless emphasis on the indispensability of women's work as housewives and mothers in the debates over family policy and family law did not prevent many women—married and unmarried—from going out to work in the first years of the Bonn Republic. Their numbers began to increase in 1948 with the introduction of the Deutschmark. With the collapse of the black market and the end to the postwar subsistence economy, more women sought jobs that paid wages.^[10]

Finding work was not always easy. In some heavy industrial districts women confronted unemployment rates of twice the national average. Those who had been granted exemption from labor mobilization under the Allies because of their responsibilities for dependents also now swelled the ranks of job-seekers; often with little or no work experience outside the home, they fared poorly in a tight labor market. Together with female expellees, they were overrepresented among the unemployed.^[11] But the number of women job-seekers unable to find work after currency stabilization was generally lower than labor

ministry officials had predicted, and increases in unemployment paralleled increases in employment; there were more jobs, but there was also a growing number of women looking for work.

When women found jobs, it was not, as some critics of women's work alleged, at the expense of men. Allied proposals for increasing the employment of women in jobs typically held by men, particularly by expanding training opportunities, had remained vaguely formulated and not systematically implemented before 1948. Indeed, six months before currency reform the Allies began to back off from early calls for women's mobilization into nontraditional employment; training women for jobs that were fit for men returning from prisoner-of-war camps was seen to be unwise, because "it would not make for stability if women were employed on jobs for which unemployed men would be equally suitable." The market, not Allied policy, should define women's opportunities, and by early 1948 the Allies emphasized that with regard to training and mobilizing women workers, "our policy must inevitably be subordinated to economic considerations."^[12] Even though the Allies perceived that it was not only market forces but also many male trade unionists who opposed the "idea of women entering other than traditional occupations," they were not willing to undertake concerted action to overcome this prejudice.^[13]

What the Allies were loath to do, German labor ministry officials, particularly those responsible for enforcing the protective legislation that limited the hours and conditions of women's employment, had always viewed with enormous skepticism. Before 1948, they aggressively opposed all Allied attempts to coax women into "men's jobs." They acted no differently once they were freed completely from Allied supervision and it became their responsibility to oversee developments in the labor market on their own.^[14] Protective legislation that had barred women from certain jobs, suspended first by the Nazis to meet the needs of the war economy and held in abeyance by the Allies to respond to the shortage of adult men after the war, was still considered necessary to circumscribe women's work with the return to normal times after currency reform. There was no longer any reason to force women into occupations for which men were available and which women did not want; the war and postwar years were seen as a mandated experiment that had changed no one's priorities. Käthe Gaebel, writing in the labor ministry's official publication, concluded that "young women approach 'new' occupations only very hesitantly, their parents even more so, and the masters not infrequently withdraw an apprenticeship once offered, if

there is no young man assigned to it." The division between women's and men's work, explained Gaebel, was defined by "the bodily performance capacity of the woman," which simply put some jobs out of her reach.^[15]

In the view of labor ministry officials, not only biology but also the destiny it entailed placed limits on women's labor-force participation. Counselors in the state-run labor exchanges that tracked unemployment and that brought job-seekers together with employers looking for workers were reminded that when they sought suitable employment for women, not only a woman's individual wishes but also her "personal ties and obligations" must be taken into account. These ties and obligations subjected her to particular physical and psychological demands, and job counselors and placement officers must remember that women were constantly weighing competing strategies of how best to fulfill the needs of their families. Not for men but for women, there "always exists alongside the world of work a second world of personal obligations, from which she can and will not extract herself." If a woman worked for wages, it was because such work was the way in which she could best serve her family. Although it was never discussed explicitly, men apparently worked because they were men. The female job-placement counselors, assigned exclusively to female job-seekers, were advised to recall that they and their clients bore the "same double burden of obligations." Finding the right job for women meant attempting to reconcile the "contradictory demands of occupational life and multifaceted family life," a challenge not faced when placing a man.^[16]

Elaborating on these general outlines, a local employment office in Lower Saxony instructed its officials to take into consideration the "otherness (Andersartigkeit ) of women's work." From the initial interview through final placement, a woman required special treatment because, unlike a man, she "is not born into the life of work." Only a small number of women would work their entire lives; the others would see wage work as a necessary evil to be tolerated as a transitional stage. Labor-exchange officials were also advised to distinguish carefully between the legitimate and illegitimate unemployed. A woman fell into the former category only if "she had nothing tying her to the home." A woman with family obligations could not be unemployed; she already had one fulltime job. The "life of work" she was "born into" was one of unpaid housewifery and motherhood, not one of work for wages. To be sure, under the existing economic conditions a mother might have to work, but it was worth evaluating critically whether she might lack "the will

and the physical strength" for this second shift.^[17] Such attitudes ensured that state policy did absolutely nothing to loosen the confines of a labor market rigidly segmented by sex, and it was into such a labor market that women came in the fifties. Indeed, by acknowledging this reality, women trade unionists sought to reassure men that women would not be competing for jobs with their male comrades.^[18]

A sex-segregated labor market did not translate into a shortage of jobs for women. Fears early in the decade that the economy might rapidly reach a "saturation point" for female labor, leaving women job-seekers out of work, proved unfounded.^[19] The combination of the influx of foreign capital initiated by the Marshall Plan and the "Korea boom," the increase in demand for West German goods as the United States economy diverted some of its resources to war in the Far East, generated more and more jobs for women and men.^[20] By 1953, West German economists predicted the imminent end of unemployment; by the mid-fifties, they proclaimed that it had arrived. Women's labor-force participation rates increased much more rapidly than men's. Between 1947 and 1955, nearly two million women entered the labor force. While total employment had grown by 28 percent, the number of women working for wages had increased by over 48 percent.^[21]

By the mid-fifties, the problem that labor-exchange officials confronted was no longer how best to allocate scarce jobs among a surplus of would-be workers but rather how best to meet the continued demands for labor by mobilizing the silent reserve of adult women who allegedly resisted work outside the home. Employers were advised to expect a certain resentment on women's part as once again they were called upon to make up for labor scarcities. Memories of the deployment of women's labor during the war were still vivid, and labor ministry officials reported women's concerns that the jobs offered them would not be tailored to their particular needs and aspirations.^[22]

Whether more motivated by necessity or desire, by 1961, 48.9 percent of all women between the ages of 15 and 60 were engaged in paid employment. Although those decrying the dangers of working mothers in debates over family allowances viewed this development with consternation, these employment levels marked a return to pre–World War II trends, not a startling departure from well-established patterns. The figures for 1961 were still slightly lower than those reached in the full-employment economy of Nazi rearmament in 1939 and no higher than those recorded in 1925. But for commentators in the first postwar de-

cade, the most common point of reference remained the low level of 1950. From this vantage point, the number of working women was increasing dramatically, not picking up where long-term trends had left off before the decade of economic disruption brought on by the war and the postwar crisis. For contemporary observers, it was still more alarming that among those women who worked for wages or salaries, some 2.3 million—about one in four of all employed women—were mothers of children under fourteen, and they feared that this figure was on the rise. The working mother employed outside the home, labeled an anomaly in discussion of "money-for-children" and family law reform, could be found on the assembly line, at the typewriter or stenographer's pad, or behind the retail counter.^[23]

Even under conditions approaching full employment, sex-segregated labor markets diverged little from patterns firmly established in the twenties. Female employment in agriculture declined dramatically—from 35.2 percent of all working women in 1950 to 19.7 percent in 1961—as did employment in domestic service—from 9 to 3.4 percent over the same period. This decline represented the flip side of the increase in women working in certain "women's industries," such as textiles, leather-working, and clothing, where women had always outnumbered men, and in some other industries—food processing and electrotechnical manufacturing—where female employment increased, but the jobs done by women and men remained sharply differentiated. Still more important was the expansion of employment opportunities in the tertiary sector, particularly retail sales and commerce. It was in the service sector that female employment increased most rapidly, from 31 percent of all working women in 1950 to 44 percent in 1961, and that vocational training programs for women workers expanded most rapidly. The removal of women from the isolated workplace of household service or agriculture meant that the visibility of women's wage labor increased more dramatically than the number of women working.^[24] In the professions, women continued to dominate education and health services, though administrative posts remained all but the exclusive preserve of men.

As the shifts in the location of women's employment indicate, there was nothing particularly traditional about some sectors where women were overrepresented; women often entered new areas because men had left for better jobs or because unskilled labor was in high demand. What was traditional was that no matter where women worked, their wages

were below men's, they were crammed into the lowest-paying job classifications, and they remained concentrated in a limited spectrum of employment possibilities to an extent far greater than men.^[25]

Analysts of sex-segregated employment patterns within the labor ministry continued to explain the apparently immutable distinction between men's and women's work as a reflection of differences in women's and men's capacities, defined primarily by women's bodily constitution. Writing in the labor ministry's official monthly publication in 1957, Maria Tritz echoed the language used to exclude women from joining Anneliese Teetz in the maritime industry. Tritz observed that women were smaller, more sensitive to heat, foul odors, poisons, and standing for long periods; they had a narrower grasp and hands that were more sensitive and flexible. Their dexterity, patience, and adaptability, their talents at counting and sorting, their capacity for repetitive work, while barring them from some jobs, made them particularly well suited for other employment—spinning the finest threads, making the thinnest wires, putting the filaments into electric light bulbs, working on the assembly line. It was up to employers to adjust the workplace to the "peculiar quality" (Eigenart ) of the female worker in order to minimize threats to her health while maximizing her productivity.^[26] To be sure, this catalogue of natural capacities was not uniquely German. However, its proclamation in the labor ministry's official publication was stunning evidence that the state would reiterate and reinforce entrenched attitudes rather than challenging or calling them into question.

Natural capacities also continued to register clearly in wage differentials for women and men.^[27] When individual women went to court to challenge this, claiming that it violated the Basic Law's promise of equality, the courts conceded their point, thus also acknowledging the political pressure of middle-class feminists, women within the SPD and the trade union movement, and at least the public pronouncements of their male colleagues.^[28] By 1955, a number of lower-court decisions on appeal had percolated up to the Federal Labor Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht), the final arbiter of cases involving labor relations.^[29] This body upheld judgments granting women and men the same wages when they did the same work. It unequivocally rejected employer arguments that mandating wage equality represented an unjustified intervention by the state into private contractual relations, which threatened the competitive position of West German industry. The court was also not convinced by employers' remarkably candid explanation that paying a

woman less than a man in the same job was justified precisely because she worked a second shift at home. Because she carried a double burden, employers reasoned, a woman would not appear at the workplace as refreshed and ready to work as a man, resulting in productivity declines that were further aggravated because a woman's thoughts would wander from one workplace to the other. Employers also proclaimed their altruistic intentions in maintaining wage inequality, a policy they argued was preferable to those proposals "inimical to women" (frauenfeindlich ) to pay women and men the same, because wage equality would result in massive layoffs of women workers.^[30]

The court determined that if women workers and the constitution had any enemies, it was trade unions and employers who negotiated contracts specifying different hourly wages for women and men in the same jobs. However, what this ruling gave with one hand, it took away with the other, by providing advice on how employers might circumvent the very principle that it claimed to uphold: employers would be completely within their rights, the court held, if they described in detail what belonged to a specific job classification and differentiated between "heavy" and "light" work. In the court's formulation, "Should such a method result in women being paid less because it is precisely women who do light work or predominantly light work, then there could be no legal objections."^[31] With this mechanism, wage inequalities were easily maintained, as women were relegated to jobs classified as "light" work. Women trade unionists protested that physical strength was by no means the best criterion for determining the difficulty of a job and argued that not all skills used to justify higher wages were learned in exclusively male apprenticeships.^[32] But the court's counsel that it was up to management and labor to determine standards for measuring comparable work provided no clear guidelines and was not systematically followed. Across all sectors of the economy, women continued to be employed in the lowest wage categories in numbers much larger than men. Even in those industries where women and men did the same work, collective-bargaining agreements negotiated between management and male-dominated trade unions reflected pronounced gender-specific differentials.^[33]

What most distressed analysts of women's growing labor-force participation was that no matter how light or how heavy, women's wage labor would unavoidably complicate women's weightiest job of all. Woman as real or potential mother was at the center of debates over how state

policy could mandate what employers might not otherwise do—tailor the workplace to woman's nature. This was the one arena where state policy attempted directly to regulate women's wage work in the fifties.

Even before the full employment levels of the mid-fifties, the increased visibility of women's wage labor intensified concerns about women's perceived needs. The fact that by and large women were not entering jobs dominated by men was little comfort to factory inspectors, trade unionists, labor ministry officials, and parliamentary representatives who zealously advocated protection for women workers. At issue was not just women's exclusion from certain jobs in heavy industry or, as in Teetz's case, at sea, because in an increasingly rationalized economy there were few occupations for which brute force was a necessary qualification. Rather, explained the champions of protective legislation, women needed special treatment in all forms of employment because they had specific physiological characteristics and because they worked a second shift. As more women entered wage labor, it was essential that they find employment opportunities adapted to these differences. State intervention was justified because the insatiable demand of an expanding economy might not otherwise accommodate these needs. The hot-house economic growth of the Nazi years was a case study in how the abuses of the labor market lay not in its apparent ability to bar women from certain occupations but rather in its potential to drive women into jobs for which they were not suited because of their bodies. Enforcing tough protective legislation would ensure that this did not happen.^[34]

For social policy-makers, concerns about women's work for wages outside the home were always directly linked to conceptions of women's place within the home. Protective legislation that acknowledged women's biological difference uncritically accepted women's socially constructed responsibilities to children, husbands, and other relatives dependent on unpaid domestic labor; it spared women from certain kinds of work in order to save them for work of a different sort.^[35]

There was a broad political consensus that though equality guaranteed women the right to work, economic prosperity and higher wages for men would allow mothers of school-aged children to stay at home. In the discussions of "money-for-children," the question was not whether mothers should stay out of the wage-labor force but what it would take to make stay-at-home mothers a reality; the answer was a male wage, bolstered by social insurance and family allowances. Protective legislation was the political response to the needs of women denied these sources of financial stability for whom wage work might remain

essential. For those women who did not have adequate providers, who worked two jobs instead of one, protective legislation represented the state's attempt to allow them to manage their double burden.

Labor ministry officials, the community of occupational medical practitioners, Communists, Social, Christian, and Free Democrats, women trade unionists, and female factory inspectors supported these practices and in no way saw them as inconsistent with the constitutional guarantee of women's equality and the promise of individual fulfillment. Like the drafters of the Basic Law, they emphasized that the social and political equality they legislated must fully acknowledge a woman's special needs and not violate woman's nature. Left open was the question of where nature ended, where politics and society began.

Nowhere was the link between production and reproduction clearer, nowhere were the boundaries of natural difference less at issue, nowhere was the state's regulation of the conditions of women's work more extensive than in the 1952 Law for Protection of Mothers (Mutterschutzgesetz ). Maternity legislation for women workers in Germany—like other forms of protective legislation regulating and limiting women's participation in wage work—dated back to Bismarck's social legislation of the 1870s and 1880s. Nonetheless, before the First World War provisions for maternity leaves of up to eight weeks and restrictions on pregnant women's work had remained principles few women could afford to practice as long as there was no system to compensate them fully for wage losses suffered during absences from the job. Also, exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers denied coverage to the large numbers of women who worked in those sectors. It was only in the last years of the Weimar Republic that the terms of maternity care were significantly revised. Time away from work could be extended to twelve weeks. In addition, in 1929 payments from health insurance to women workers during maternity leaves were increased from 50 percent to 75 percent of basic wages. Still, most pregnant women did not take advantage of these measures. The level of compensation was not high enough to allow them to stop working before or to keep them from resuming work as soon as possible after giving birth. Women in domestic service and agricultural work—chief employers of female labor—were still excluded altogether.

The Nazis paid little attention to improving maternity benefits for women workers as long as they could afford to remain ideologically committed to the idea that women should devote themselves exclusively to the work of reproduction and leave the labor force permanently. Only

in 1942—under the very different circumstances of the wartime economy and intensified attempts to coax women into wage labor—did the Nazis introduce a new law. This measure dramatically extended coverage, most importantly by including women in the agricultural sector and by authorizing payments in the full amount of wages for six weeks before and six weeks following birth. The assurance that taking off from work would result in no loss in wages meant that for the first time, many working women could actually afford to claim the benefits to which they were legally entitled. At the same time, the Nazi law made claims contingent on the fulfillment of explicitly racialist criteria.^[36] It aimed at meeting a racialist, pronatalist agenda, while simultaneously mobilizing women for the wartime economy.

With the end of the war, the Allies suspended payments under the law on grounds that its intention was National Socialist in origin and more practically because of the impossible demands it placed on a health insurance system seriously weakened by war and defeat. Although West German labor officials and the courts maintained that pregnancy still constituted prima facie grounds for protection from dismissal, the Allies left the specific formulation of a new law to the first German parliament.^[37]

"One of the problems that we have to solve," the SPD's Liesel Kipp-Kaule explained in 1950 as she presented her party's proposals for reinstituting the Law for Protection of Mothers in the Bundestag, "is the woman question." Kipp-Kaule spoke with conviction, having found her own answers by working her way up from a job as a seamstress in the garment trades to a position after the war as a specialist in the problems of youth and women in the Union of Textile and Garment Workers. She warned against the traditional response to the "woman question" offered by the "propertied circles of our nation [who] were always prepared to do something in the arena of social policy when it was a matter of representing their interests in the battlefield." Rather, it was up to the parliament of a new West Germany to take progressive action without such ulterior motives.^[38] Highly critical of the Allied decision to suspend the payments provided by the 1942 law, Kipp-Kaule expressed her anger "that it should be women who first should feel that we lost the war."^[39] It was the Bundestag's responsibility to redress this injustice by reinstituting the protection of pregnant women without further ado.

Social Democrats demanded that a new law fully reinstitute the 1942 provisions; it should protect pregnant women workers from being fired, exclude them from certain jobs deemed too taxing, limit their hours of

work, grant them six weeks' leave at full pay before and after giving birth, and guarantee them the right to return to their workplace after the end of the maternity leave. New mothers who wanted to breast-feed should also be granted additional work-breaks for this purpose, though the law made no provision for how infants would reach their mothers at work. Beyond this, the SPD called for dramatically expanding the number of women entitled to maternity benefits by extending benefits to all pregnant women—whether workers for wages or unpaid workers in the home.

Although SPD supporters of a new law conceded that the racialist content of the Nazi precedent was totally unacceptable, they argued that there was no denying that under the Nazis "mothers enjoyed a high degree of protection"; however horrifying a totalitarian dictatorship had been in other respects, at least it had acted to protect pregnant women workers.^[40] In proposing new legislation, the SPD claimed a position of authority based on its historic ties to the trade unions' fight for laws regulating the safety of the workplace and its long-standing commitment to promoting the special concerns of working women. In this sense, Social Democrats could argue that the Nazis had only appropriated and perverted a Social Democratic tradition, which the SPD now forcefully sought to reclaim.^[41]

Social Democratic advocates of a new maternity law also justified their proposals by pointing to the increased number of women who would be driven into the labor force by the high costs of economic rebuilding after the war; they demanded that Germany subscribe to the principles laid down in the 1919 agreement of the International Labor Organization that had proposed guidelines for the treatment of pregnant working women, and they called for Germany to restore its reputation as a leader in the area of progressive social welfare legislation. Finally, they emphasized that special treatment for pregnant women would bring workplace practice into line with the Basic Law's Article 6, the constitutional guarantee that "every mother has a right to protection and care by the community."^[42]

Article 3, the Basic Law's promise of women's equal rights, was never invoked in debates over how best to protect maternity, though there were other types of protective legislation where balancing equality and special treatment was at issue. For example, provisions introduced in the war and extended into the postwar years in some states granted a monthly day off to women who worked at least forty-eight hours weekly and had responsibilities at home as well. Like the improved provisions

of the maternity law, these measures also dated from the wartime economy, but under the Nazis time off had been unpaid; in the postwar period, some states determined that women who qualified for the day off should also receive their wages. Justified as essential for maintaining the "national health" (Volksgesundheit ) after the war and a necessary response to the difficult circumstances of the late forties, many trade unionists were loath to relinquish the "housework day" (Hausarbeitstag ) once it was in place.^[43]

This provision, available only to women workers, came under attack from some trade unionists and middle-class feminists who contended that it hurt working women more than it helped. They argued that identifying unpaid household labor as an exclusively female responsibility sanctioned not immutable biological difference but social convention and tradition; it was in conflict with the constitutional promise of women's equality with men. Women workers should join men in the common struggle for a shorter work week for all employees, not for special measures that prompted charges that women received a dozen additional days of paid leave annually.^[44]

Some employers also challenged the provisions and took their case to court, arguing that giving female employees a paid day off violated the Basic Law's prescription of equality. A year before it advised employers to eliminate wage categories of women's and men's work, the Federal Labor Court upheld the right of a single woman employed in a hosiery factory to the "housework day." Her employer held that because she was not married and lived in a furnished room, she had no more claim to a monthly paid day off than male employees living in the same circumstances, but the court judged differently. In its decision, it determined that granting women equality would be meaningless if it left them worse off than they had been before. In addition, equality must accommodate not only biology but also those differences defined "sociologically or functionally," or more broadly, "generally recognized in the division of labor between the sexes." Even when a woman did not have specific responsibility for others in a family, she had a different role and a different relationship to the household. Whether single or married, the court judged, men did no housework; whether single or married, women did. Thus, "there exists a difference in the circumstances of daily life that permits a differential legal treatment of the employed woman vis-à-vis the employed man." Employers who sought to cut costs with the ostensible excuse of realizing equality were reminded that "the housework day for women was put into effect in order to provide some compen-

sation for women's double burden from occupation and household management."^[45] In its assessment of women's claims to equal wages, the court maintained that relegating women to the lower-paid ranks of those doing light work did not violate the principle of equality; neither did acknowledging the weight of the double burden, as its evaluation of the "housework day" made clear. The common thread tying together these decisions was the court's explicit identification of women as a different category of worker, one that diverged from a male norm.^[46]

Although the courts were called upon to decide whether biology or society made women into unpaid workers in the home, no one questioned that these powerful forces made women into mothers, or that granting pregnant women special treatment might violate the Basic Law's promise of equal rights to women. Elisabeth Selbert had addressed this issue head on in the debates of the Parliamentary Council. A conception of equality that "acknowledge[d] difference" incorporated a recognition of the particular demands of motherhood. CDU critics of Selbert's equal-rights language at the time charged that unequivocal guarantees of equality would threaten the protection of mothers in the workplace. Complete equal rights would mean "protecting 'male motherhood'"; because this was nonsensical, placing women on completely equal footing with men would mean eliminating their claims to special treatment. If men could not be mothers, and women and men were equal in all respects, then mothers could claim no special treatment. Selbert countered that the protection of motherhood in no way privileged women; rather, it represented only "compensation for the burdens . . . that arise because of a woman's natural obligations as mother."^[47]

Once the SPD's proposals for new provisions to grant pregnant women special treatment on the job began to make their way through parliamentary channels, it was clear that protecting motherhood was a political demand that no one would oppose. The official publication of the business community quickly dissociated itself from those "propertied circles" who sought to exploit women, not to help them, and claimed that "German employers have always made it their honorable obligation to bestow a particular measure of social protection upon wage-earning women and mothers."^[48] While generally accepting the SPD's position, the CDU/CSU echoed complaints from its agrarian and middle-class constituents that the rural and home workplace was of a different sort; protecting women working in these contexts, they alleged, would give advantages to some working mothers at the expense of others and would represent an unbearable expense for the employers of

domestic servants. There was also concern that in the home workplace, a pregnant domestic servant might present threats to the moral upbringing of young children; protecting one woman's family did not justify the moral endangerment of another's. Behind such objections was the class divide that had long distinguished the interests of women who were workers and women who were employers.^[49]

Ultimately, Social Democrats pushed through their measure by compromising on some particulars. They tabled the demand that all women be entitled to benefits but won on the inclusion of women employed in agriculture. Accepting the political expedience of defining special provisions for domestic workers, they agreed that women in these jobs could be laid off after the fifth month of their pregnancy. Still, once fired, they could claim their wages, paid out of health-insurance funds, and like other pregnant workers they were entitled to a paid maternity leave. Their inclusion in the law in any form extended coverage to an important sector of female employment for the first time.

"You know," proclaimed Kipp-Kaule as the Bundestag prepared to pass the legislation, "that hundreds of thousands of women have waited two years for this moment, and will all be thankful to us that they are no longer subject to the arbitrary measures of administrative officials, health-insurance offices, and employers."^[50] Kipp-Kaule's overly optimistic assessment reflected her exuberance at her party's imminent political victory, but there was no question that the Law for Protection of Mothers did much to address the needs of pregnant women workers. On balance, it embodied a significant expansion of Weimar measures and more comprehensive provisions than its Nazi predecessor.

A closer look at the debates over the law reveals that it also did much else. Without exception, supporters of Mutterschutz agreed that working women might need protection from arbitrary treatment by employers, but equally important was the "rising generation" (Nachwuchs ) that needed protection from the dangers of working women. The potentially deleterious effects of wage work on expectant mothers translated immediately into a "damaging influence on the physical development of the young generation." Kipp-Kaule estimated that in the Kaiserreich, the inadequacy of pre- and postnatal care for working mothers resulted in seventeen million infant deaths.^[51] Such figures took on particular significance in an atmosphere clouded by fears of the tremendous burdens already placed on women's health by the crises of the war and postwar years, a declining birth rate, and the widely accepted relationship between population growth and economic reconstruction.

Proponents of the new law were at considerable pains to emphasize why it was different from its Nazi precedent. The Nazi law showed no genuine concern for women but instead was a weapon in the "battle for births," intended to supply the war economy's demand for "cannon fodder."^[52] Such policies were common to all totalitarian states, proponents of the West German alternative argued. The specter of communist regimes, where protective legislation ruthlessly forced women to expand the population while they toiled in jobs for which they were ill-suited, once again hovered in the background. East Germans might claim that they sought to permit women to be both workers and mothers, but through the lens of the Cold War, West Germans could see only a perversion of equality in policies that granted women "equal rights to be exploited and left with no protection"; maternity provisions intensified the double burden rather than diminishing it.^[53]

Still, despite all disclaimers, concerns about population size were explicit in West German discussions of mother's work. It was not Wuermeling but the former Social Democratic mayor of Berlin, Louise Schroeder, who justified protection for working mothers, "not just [as] a question of labor protection; rather it is a matter of population policy that will benefit all people," especially given the war's demographic legacy.^[54] The combination of the war's devastation, the incomparably straitened economic circumstances faced by many women, and the need "more than ever for a healthy rising generation" made strict enforcement of mothers' protection essential, because "the rising generation of a nation . . . must not be endangered."^[55]

The Law for Protection of Mothers acknowledged that mothers might have to produce outside the home, particularly in the postwar period of recovery as they helped rebuild what the bombs had destroyed. To help rebuild a "healthy generation," women in wage work might also have to reproduce while earning their pay. The law adopted by the parliament in 1952 represented society's concern that they be able to fulfill both tasks; it ensured that women involved in production would still be able to carry out their responsibilities for reproduction. Women workers appeared in the debates around the law not as individuals who chose to work and bear children, but rather as a disadvantaged group, forced out to work while fulfilling their obligations as mothers at considerable risk to their own health, and more importantly, to the health of the next generation. It was precisely for this reason that employers should not use the costs of special treatment for their women workers as a justification for paying female employees less. The Mutterschutzgesetz not only

addressed the needs of women but also benefited children, "the rising generation [that] is a social responsibility."^[56]

These larger themes could be read between the lines of the Mutterschutzgesetz , and they were fully articulated in commentaries on the law. The best known of these, Gustav-Adolf Bulla's massive treatise on the legal provisions regulating women's wage work, the standard source on the subject, explained that "the survival of a nation (Volk ), its health, and its capacity to perform is influenced to a large degree by the active care that it bestows upon its women as the bearers of new life." Protecting mothers work was not only an "ethical command" but was also the "fundamental prerequisite for sustaining and renewing the nation."^[57] A detailed explanation of the law prepared for the German Federation of Trade Unions by Thea Harmuth and Emmy Theuerkauf expressed similar sentiments, justifying the law as an indication of "respect for woman as the carrier of life," but not in the manner of totalitarian states in pursuit of population expansion. Rather, the West German measure met the needs of the woman employed outside the home, "who maintains the health of the family and also the entire people through her double burden as mother and working woman."^[58]

Laws are probably never implemented according to lawgivers' intentions, and the Law for Protection of Mothers was no exception. Because the law was under the supervision of the labor ministries of individual state governments, its enforcement and oversight have left a paper trail in official sources from which we can reconstruct the discrepancy between its letter and spirit and its interpretation by employers, workers, and the state factory inspectors charged with ensuring compliance. "Money-for-children" was likely to disappear into the paycheck of a male wage earner without an archival trace; how it affected the lives of the individual families who received it is only open to conjecture. The Civil Code's detailed description of a wife's unpaid domestic labor and its guarantee of a father's last word in irreconcilable marital disputes were of enormous symbolic significance, but these provisions were rarely invoked in divorce proceedings. To be sure, this book argues that both family law and family policy were important because they illuminate the political reconstruction of gender relations in West Germany after the war; they reveal much about how "politics construct[ed] gender and gender construct[ed] politics" in the Federal Republic's first decade.^[59] Analyzing debates around the Law for Protection of Mothers also serves this purpose, but the law directly affected many employers and working

women in ways that family law and family policy did not. A range of sources provides unusually rich glimpses into the ways in which paper prescriptions were actually understood and carried out.^[60]

Factory inspectors' accounts of the reception and implementation of the law made it immediately apparent that not everyone agreed that mothers needed protection. Even a decade after the law's passage, not all employers perceived an "honorable obligation" on their part to provide special treatment for their pregnant employees; in particular, small-scale factory owners, retailers, and employers of agricultural and domestic labor simply chose not to inform their workers of the benefits to which they were entitled or failed to register pregnant women who worked for them.^[61]

Reports also record frequent expression of fears that barring women from certain types of work only resulted in employers' reluctance to hire any women of child-bearing age. There were some indications that bosses found reasons to fire single women workers when they married, rehiring them with short-term provisional contracts that were not covered by the law and firing them should they become pregnant. In other instances, employers sought to avoid the law's consequences by demanding written agreement from single women workers that they would be subject to immediate dismissal should they marry; only such measures could prevent women from disingenuously exploiting the law by taking a job after they knew they were pregnant in order to reap the law's benefits with no intention of returning to work after their maternity leave elapsed.^[62] Still other women, employers charged, simply exploited the law's protection to be obstreperous and lazy on the job, because they knew they could be fired only with great difficulty.

Common complaints from employers also included claims that they could not comply with the law because their production permitted no alternative jobs for those whom the law prohibited from certain types of work. Restrictions on night work prompted similar objections from industries that operated on round-the-clock shifts, restaurants, bars, and firms confronting excessive demand and asking for overtime from all employees. Other businesses—beauty shops and retailers—worried that their customers would take offense at the sight of a pregnant woman, while owners of movie theaters expressed concern that pregnant employees would no longer fit into required uniforms. Less motivated by ostensibly aesthetic or moral considerations, still other bosses encouraged women to accept dismissal in order to establish eligibility for unemployment support—though by this action, workers waived all

claims to the more substantial payments and the right to return to their workplace guaranteed by the law. Once fired, the law allowed only a week for appeals, and employers gambled that women would fail to make this deadline.

Employers were not alone in their attempt to circumvent the law; women workers also frustrated well-meaning factory inspectors by revealing that they did not always share the Bundestag's conception of what was in their best interest. Women's resistance to reporting a pregnancy immediately might sometimes have reflected "false modesty," as one factory inspector speculated,^[63] but more often, silence could be explained by rational calculation. Because health-insurance payments during the maternity leave were based on average wages for the thirteen weeks before stopping work, women feared that a change of jobs or reduction of hours would mean lower wages and consequently lower payments. This financial concern, not women's "lack of consideration for their own health and that of the child," as one factory inspector maintained, created an unintended alliance between women and employers in their attempts to circumvent some provisions of the law.^[64] Women resisted their restriction from certain kinds of work, the mandatory reduction of the work week to forty-five hours, and prohibition of work past eight P.M. , which excluded them from shift differentials. They also complained that forfeiting the camaraderie of coworkers for new surroundings might have immeasurable psychic costs.

Maintaining high wage levels for as long as possible prompted women who worked for piece rates to intensify their efforts and those working for hourly wages to increase their overtime. The same objective could be achieved by the pregnant home-worker by enlisting other family members to credit her for their production in the months prior to giving birth. A troubled factory inspector could bemoan the fact that "in the first instance, the expectant mother does not think about her health and the health of the child, but rather exclusively about her earnings,"^[65] but for women workers, such action was intended to increase benefits under the law. Achieving this goal also led women to report pregnancies only when it was absolutely essential—either when they were clearly visible or when the maternity leave began, six weeks before the anticipated due date—to avoid potential transfer to a different job with lower wages. Employers who charged that this practice constituted "deceitful fraud" learned that according to the law, pregnant women should report their condition but were under no binding obligation to do so. Even establishing that women took up work only after they were pregnant was

no cause for dismissal. Verifying such charges was necessarily complicated, and women workers could insist on ignorance of their condition and still claim protection from the law.^[66]

Additional problems of enforcement came from women's resistance to mandated extra break times; factory inspectors reported that many women objected to potentially lengthening the workday with unpaid time on the job, thus cutting into the hours available for their household labor. For the same reason, women expressed a preference to work longer hours for five days instead of the eight-and-one-half-hour days called for by the law; shorter workdays meant stretching a forty-five-hour week into Saturday morning, time needed for their second shift.

The task of overseeing and guarding against attempts to circumvent the law was the special preserve of the relatively few women employed by state labor ministries as factory inspectors. Just as women officials were assigned as counselors for women job-seekers in state-run labor exchanges, so too it was primarily women who investigated other women's conditions of work. Factory inspectors were responsible for identifying potential threats to occupational health and safety. Unlike their male colleagues, the women in these jobs typically had a background in social work, not engineering; their expertise lay in identifying the particular problems of women workers, not in knowing when steam engines might explode. Their duties were tremendously expanded by the passage of the 1952 law.^[67]

Particularly time-consuming were detailed examinations of cases in which pregnant women had been fired and claimed protection from dismissal or employers requested exemptions from the law and permission to fire a particular employee. Although unauthorized layoffs were explicitly prohibited, even a pregnant woman could be fired "in an exceptional case," subject to the approval of the state labor ministry.^[68] Precisely what this meant was far from clear, and it was the responsibility of the factory inspectors and ultimately their superior, the labor minister, to make this determination.

Factory inspectors were zealous in their efforts to resolve disputes, and there is substantial evidence of their success at achieving reconciliations between workers and employers through direct intervention at the workplace. In other cases, the two sides failed to reach a verbal compromise, and full-scale investigations ensued. In these cases, factory inspectors systematically followed up complaints from both fired workers and outraged employers, questioning all parties involved at the workplace and making on-site inspections of the home and work conditions

of the women involved. The record of their attempts to mete out just solutions provides exceptional insights into the lives and working conditions of the women they scrutinized and the ways they believed they could best protect mothers. In their decisions, they entered into an economic, moral, and legal calculus that reveals much about the conceptions of women's status, the sexual division of labor, and gender relations, which they read out of the law.

In theory, a pregnant woman could be fired only when the economic interests of the employer far outweighed those of the worker. What if the employer faced an economic downturn or even a complete shutdown of operations? In such instances, factory inspectors often reminded employers that it was the intention of the law to prevent pregnant women from confronting particular economic hardship. A pregnant woman would be unable to find another job, and employers were informed that by hiring a woman, they had assumed a "business risk" that denied them rights to fire her should she become pregnant.^[69] Determining an employer's obligations involved careful consideration of the firm's balance sheet, on the one hand, and the economic circumstances of the worker, on the other, in order to measure which was "economically the stronger partner." Typically, it was the woman denied the "protection of marriage," one who had recently married and was still securing essentials for her new household, or one whose husband was not in regular work who was guaranteed the law's protection—even if it meant keeping her on the payroll after a plant had completely shut down operations. When factory inspectors determined that women were in homes with male providers, when the employer's familial status was no less precarious than the worker's, or when the factory inspector judged that the employee was enjoying luxuries not appropriate for her social status—a new radio, or too many nights out dancing—or was neglecting her responsibilities to children she already had, the firm might well find that its interests won greater consideration.^[70]

Inspectors also had to evaluate allegations of insubordination and impropriety, which, employers claimed, could be threats to authority in the firm and thus to the firm's economic performance. Assessing competing economic interests was again crucial. The twenty-three-year-old unmarried cook in a small community tavern might stretch her employer's tolerance by breaking too many dishes and referring to a regular customer as "the asshole with the butcher's platter," but her single status, her mother's shaky economic circumstances, and the "honest and believable" impression she made on the factory inspector saved her from

being fired.^[71] And a woman married to a disabled barrelmaker, the mother of two children aged eleven and eight, kept her job in a radioparts company despite her employer's charges that she incessantly recounted intimacies from her private life, including sexual-performance evaluations of her first husband compared with her second ("who can do it much better") and tales of evenings when the children were asleep and she had intercourse with her husband "in the kitchen [and] on the sofa, in a variety of ways." The woman's categorical denial of all charges and the absence of witnesses to confirm the boss's allegations undercut the case against her and ensured her job security and a paid maternity leave.^[72]

Potentially as important as a woman's economic circumstances and credibility was her psychological state. There was general agreement that pregnancy transformed both the body and the mind. A worker fired because she had stolen soap from the store where she was employed as a packer was reinstated because she suffered from a "pregnancy psychosis" and had only taken the soap "when she really liked it, and it was something special." Pregnancy brought on an "unrestrainable desire for particularly good smells" and also might prompt a woman to take actions for which she could not be held responsible, "suspend[ing] legal culpability altogether." It was, the labor minister reminded her employer, "legally established that pregnant women, even those in well-ordered marital circumstances . . . out of their desire to care for their offspring adequately, often uncontrollably grasp at the most incredible means and steal in order to obtain what they consider necessary for the child."^[73]

In similar cases, factory inspectors reiterated that pregnancy caused greater sensitivity to "alarm and anger"; pregnant women were often unable "to control themselves from pursuing irrational resolutions and desires once formulated, and they lose a clear perception of the consequences of their decisions." Pregnancy might bring on attacks of ravenous hunger, which could easily lead to lavish expenditures, and even "fits of kleptomania." Employers were instructed to remember that "just at the time when they're pregnant, women are often unaware of the impact of their words and deeds."^[74]

Becoming pregnant while unmarried was certainly no grounds for an employer's moral condemnation, nor did it justify firing a woman "without the protection of marriage." In language that became almost formulaic in such cases, employers were informed that "all motherhood—the married as well as the unmarried—stands under the protection of

the community according to Article 6 of the Grundgesetz." Those who charged that protecting unmarried mothers was perhaps permissible under a Nazi law aimed at population expansion at all costs but not in a new Germany of "propriety and morality," or who claimed that a pregnant widow should not be tolerated in a "Christian cultural nation," quickly learned that they were mistaken.^[75] They need only recall "that with their primordial feeling for life, our forefathers said of pregnant women that they were of a blessed body and of good hope. Even if these very vivid expressions have increasingly been driven from our language by the materialism of our lives, it is nonetheless indisputable that everyone who confronts a woman in whom a new life grows will meet her with adoration and empathy."^[76]

As in their determinations of the "economically stronger partner," factory inspectors also measured which party was morally more vulnerable. Thus, a factory inspector was dispatched to investigate a movie-theater owner's charges that his employee had not only allowed her dachshund to defecate freely throughout the theater but more importantly had turned her small apartment in the theater into a "love nest" where she entertained young men after work hours and even during screenings. Exhaustive interviews with the boss, the employee, and the neighbors convinced the factory inspector that in fact there was no evidence that the pregnant worker had pursued intimacy at the expense of "good moral principles . . . and on the contrary her reputation in the neighborhood is up until now quite good."^[77]

A factory inspector determined that it was the psychological impact of her mother's death and an unsatisfactory change of jobs that had led a "solid and homey" sales representative with sixteen years of service to the firm to seek solace in the arms of an older married man, formerly a trusted coworker, who had offered his help after her mother's death and then had become her lover. He claimed that he could not fulfill his pledge to get a divorce because of his wife's refusal to end the marriage, further complicating the worker's life. These elements completely overshadowed the employer's charges that the woman's affair represented a "moral derailment of the most massive proportions," and her excellent work record provided further grounds for overruling her dismissal.^[78] Also worthy of protection was the worker whose female employer, the owner of a small trucking firm, had all but encouraged her to flirt with the company's drivers by giving her a room on the first floor where she daily came in contact with them. It was, the factory inspector judged, the boss's neglect of the "moral degeneration of the drivers" and the

"morally endangered" condition of the worker, not her "fresh and indecent" behavior and "very loose lifestyle," as the boss alleged, that was subject to censure by the factory inspector.^[79]

Judgments that favored women on the basis of such calculations prompted angered responses from employers who charged that any unmarried mother "was fully responsible for what she allowed herself,"^[80] or who asked rhetorically if the maternity law justified all actions and sanctioned "moral lapses of the coarsest sort."^[81] The answer was no, as a retail sales clerk learned when her firing was upheld after two years of hearings and court appearances. Her alleged offense was appearing at work with a swimsuit on under her clothes and offering to show it to a recently married male coworker. A second infraction involved entertaining a young male apprentice under her supervision with "amorous bedroom stories" and inviting him to inspect her upper body closely for any signs of pregnancy. In her case, her "jokes . . . so immodest that they could hardly be repeated at a men's bowling night" exceeded the limits even of a "pregnancy psychosis," and her fate was sealed when the factory inspectors determined that her fiancé's financial circumstances were solid.^[82] This evidence of her future economic security made it possible to allow her to be fired for her impropriety.

No more sympathy was shown to a worker in a long-playing record manufacture who was witnessed as she interrupted the inventory in the warehouse by sitting on a coworker's lap and kissing him, then encouraging him to go to her colleague, "who has larger bosoms than I." According to the testimony of witnesses, the coworker had followed her instruction, laying the other woman on a worktable and kissing her breasts, while the first woman encouraged her to "feel what big balls [he] has." For the factory inspector, such behavior warranted dismissal, despite the woman's pregnant condition, and her appeals to the local labor court were unsuccessful.^[83]

Just as unworthy of special dispensation in the eyes of the factory inspector was the salesperson in a small firm that manufactured bandages and orthopedic supplies. Her boss charged that she was after his son's inheritance, and in pursuit of this goal she had seduced him during working hours. For the employer, proof positive of her deceitful intentions was her failure to fulfill her "obligation" to provide his son with a condom, "to press it in his hand." These allegations prompted the worker's rejoinders that romantic interludes with the young man were not on company time; they had been confined to breaks and reflected no seduction, but rather mutual desire. Charges that she had used her

sexual wiles as an older woman were groundless; her partner was only one year her junior and his social advantage as the boss's son surely more than compensated for their age difference. In rejecting her arguments, the labor minister avoided the question of who had seduced whom but did hold the woman responsible for providing her coworkers with a bad example and for endangering the "cleanliness and morality of the workplace in the rudest possible fashion." Her gender meant that she was more mature than her partner, and it was consequently her duty to "see to it that [her] workplace remained clean."^[84] She was left to ponder this judgment, pregnant and without her old job or maternity benefits.

In another case, not an employee's morals but her accusations that her employer was "more like a slave-trader than a socially concerned entrepreneur" exceeded the tolerable changes in a pregnant woman's "spiritual constitution."^[85] So too did the repeated insubordination of the unmarried worker in a small greenhouse and flower shop, who, according to her boss's account, ended a verbal exchange with him by calling him "'a bum' and 'Schweinehund,'" and inviting him to "'shut your trap, you [Sie ] idiot.'" "'You're a crazy Heini, thrice over crazy. . . . You're as dumb as shit, you're a bum, you idiot, you Polish pig, you Russkie.'" When she returned the next day, ready to resume work, her boss told her she was fired. As he advised, the factory inspector was not taken in by the woman's "madonna-like" appearance; rather, the official investigation determined that the worker "belongs to those elements who are convinced that the state or other people ought to take care of them." That the father of her child was in secure economic circumstances might make firing her easier, but in any event, she had "only herself to blame for an outcome that was unfavorable to her." In a series of appeals that ultimately reached the Federal Labor Court, the woman found no greater sympathy; the employer's decision was upheld.^[86]

In assessing conflicting claims, factory inspectors and the labor minister sorted through evidence and weighed competing interests. On occasion they also interpreted the intention of the Basic Law. The constitution's promise to protect every mother could be invoked in defense of unmarried mothers on some occasions, but a thirty-four-year-old typist-stenographer, who had been employed for seven years in the office of a cabinet-level ministry in Bonn, learned that she was not entitled to such benevolent treatment. Her relationship with a white-collar worker in the same ministry was no secret; in a notarized statement, she had iden-

tified him as the father of her two children. Expecting a third, she had applied for a larger apartment in the ministry-controlled housing where she lived. The father of her children, twenty years her senior, was married, but not to her. It was ostensibly this that prompted not only the ministry's rejection of her appeal for a larger apartment but also demands for her immediate dismissal.

Protesting both decisions, the worker argued that her case was exemplary of the plight of single women whose would-be husbands "now rested on the battlefields of the Second World War while single women . . . struggle for a solution to give meaning to their lives." For her, meaning lay in motherhood. Waiting for children until her lover could marry her was not an option; she might already be too old to fulfill her wish for a family. Women over thirty, she argued were "medically 'old' to be giving birth for the first time" and might run the risk of serious complications. The difficulties accompanying the birth of her first child only confirmed her belief that she had acted correctly by postponing pregnancy no longer. Why should she, who had the "courage—in full consciousness of her actions—to bear the cross of unmarried motherhood," not enjoy the protection guaranteed by the law to all mothers?

According to her employer, factory inspectors, and the labor minister, the answer was simple: married and unmarried pregnancies were to be treated equally, but in this case, something else was at issue—the constitutional guarantee of the protection of a legal marriage. Although her lover had been estranged from his wife since 1948, seven years later he was still legally married. It was not the state's responsibility to "make possible the legalization of a relationship initiated in the confusion of the postwar period," and the woman's behavior was nothing less than a "conscious attack on the institution of marriage." Her claims to the protection of the constitution were not compelling, "because no marriage relation exists that is in need of protection." It was her lover's legal marriage that the state was obliged to protect, not her relationship with him. No marriage was beyond repair until it dissolved completely, she was reminded, and "in any event, in this instance his marriage cannot be denied the protection of the state." She was explicitly informed that her adulterous actions—not the fact of her unmarried motherhood—constituted a "special case," justifying her firing. By the time this judgment was reached, she had given birth to her third child. A mother who had more than fulfilled her obligation to keep the German nation from

"dying out," who was "rich in children" and had amply provided for the "rising generation," she found herself without a husband, a job, housing, or the protection of the state.^[87]

As these cases indicate, the Law for Protection of Mothers was subject to more than one interpretation. Kipp-Kaule's confident pronouncement that the law would free pregnant women workers from all arbitrary treatment was at odds with the patently arbitrary fashion in which the law could be applied by individual factory inspectors. When the Mutterschutzgesetz was put into practice not all working mothers were protected, and for factory inspectors and the labor ministry more than the care of pregnant women was at stake. To be sure, in the majority of cases, employers accepted the law, and pregnant women received benefits without having to establish their moral character or their economic neediness. When conflicts arose, however, the law was open to interpretations not fully anticipated or prescribed by legislators in Bonn. It was in these instances that employers, factory inspectors, the courts, and pregnant women revealed their understanding of the legislation's meanings and limits.

From these judgments, there emerges a consensus that pregnant women needed protection because their physical and psychological capacities were diminished. Pregnancy explained a variety of shortcomings and excesses; it created dependence, and dependence entitled pregnant women to protection. Protection was not to be taken for granted. Where the claims of employers and workers clashed, pregnant women could establish their cases only by submitting to explorations of how they lived, worked, and played; much more than their on-the-job performance was assessed. In theory, employers were legally barred from asking questions about the private lives of their workers; in practice, factory inspectors made the private public, posing such questions as a legitimate part of their attempts to protect pregnant women. The evidence that they unearthed is an exceptionally rich historical source; it vividly illuminates how legal structures made it possible for some women workers to challenge their employers and defend their rights successfully. It also testifies strikingly to how state officials assumed the authority to examine a female worker's personal circumstances because of their commitment to ensuring her rights.

When factory inspectors judged that a woman's behavior went beyond what was excusable because of the psychological transformation accompanying pregnancy, in itself an arbitrary construct, pregnant women workers might find themselves without the law's protection.

Judgments indicated that when ignorance, innocence, disability, and dependence accompanied pregnancy, they were good excuses; knowledge and self-assertion were not. The law potentially extended significant benefits to pregnant women: it could keep them from being fired, it guaranteed that they could return to their jobs, and it gave them their wages during twelve weeks away from work. But the law could also be used to underscore certain conceptions of women workers' subordination, power relations within the workplace, class structure, and female moral propriety. For women workers, these elements were linked. Proper behavior encompassed moral dimensions, and women's sexuality and sexual knowledge—or ignorance—made them immediately subject to particular scrutiny.

Factory inspectors also revealed their conviction that the law embodied a conception of the family. Their deliberations reflected the belief that morally and economically, pregnant women were best protected not by the state but by marriage. The most effective way to lighten the double burden was to eliminate it—by leaving women at home with children, supported by an adequate male wage. Women who did not conform to this norm—who were denied the "protection of marriage," tied to a husband whose wages were inadequate, financially responsible for parents or other dependents, or on shaky economic legs at the beginning of a marriage—constituted precisely the group most in need of special consideration. However, a woman married to man with an income deemed sufficient to maintain a family might no longer receive the state's protection should her interests conflict with those of her employer. And a woman who questioned the sanctity of marriage or challenged it by her actions forfeited all claims to protection as a mother.

The political theorist Zillah Eisenstein observes that legislation intended to meet women's gender-specific needs is not "inherently problematic or progressive. It is made so by its aim and its political context."^[88] The aim of West German protective legislation for women workers in the fifties, the most important instance of the state's attempt to regulate women's work outside the home directly, was to acknowledge women's difference. In the political context of the postwar era, that difference was virtually synonymous with a woman's ability to bear children and her natural obligations as a mother; this was what defined her need for special treatment in the workplace. Anneliese Teetz was neither pregnant nor a mother, but it was the shape of her pelvis—her reproductive future—that was crucial for evaluating her ability to pilot a ship. Although by

1962, seventy-five percent of the 9.4 million women employed in West Germany had no children under fourteen,^[89] in the discussion of how the state should regulate women's wage workplace, problems of working women were reduced to the problems of working mothers , and problems of working mothers were problems of the Volk .

Once again all but completely lost in the shuffle—as they had been in debates over "money-for-children" and proposals for family-law reform—were divorced women with children, mothers who had never married, and women workers—married and unmarried—who were not mothers. Although in the late forties and early fifties, it was particularly the needs of these groups that initially focused attention on women's growing labor-force participation, by the end of the decade their fate had been categorized as a short-term legacy of the war. In the most widely cited study of working mothers in the late fifties, conducted under the supervision of Elisabeth Pfeil, a sociologist who also served as part of the family ministry's scientific advisory committee, mothers in "incomplete families" were not even considered.^[90]

Caught between demands for the labor required to build a healthy economy and the labor needed for "building a healthy generation," the political discussion of women's work was filled with tensions not easily reconciled. Nowhere was this more clearly articulated than in the programmatic demands of the women activists within the trade-union movement and the SPD, who claimed to represent the interests of all working women. They emphasized that women wage earners were there to stay, a constant in an industrial society. They stressed that the promise of women's equal rights in a new Germany must include better educational opportunities, greater access to a broad range of occupations, wage equality, and a forty-hour week. They argued that even those women who left the labor force to care for children would return once their children were grown and demanded that in such cases women's claims to social insurance not be diminished because of such family-related interruptions in their careers.^[91] They also demanded dramatically expanded representation in all decision-making bodies—from firm-level works councils and communal government to the national Federation of Trade Unions and the Bundestag. The protocols of women's caucuses, created after the war within individual trade unions and at the regional and national levels, provide ample evidence of a broad vision of a future society transformed by the active participation of women at all levels.^[92]

But while women trade union activists called for improved access to jobs, they also insisted that vocational training for young women in-

clude better instruction for their future work as housewives and mothers. Demands for legal safeguards of women's status "measured by their importance in the national economy" were tempered by avowals that "we do not wish to be blue-stockings"—a reference to those chimerical middle-class feminists who allegedly championed a brand of equality that would force women to be like men. While they called for a new social order where male-female relationships would be partnerships and where fathers would be actively involved in child-rearing, they continued to emphasize that "the power most particular to a woman's soul is the power to sacrifice," and this power revealed itself most fully in motherhood.^[93]

Aggressively debunking those studies that concluded that women's paychecks went for furs and other luxuries, advocates for working women emphasized that mothers might have to work; they stressed that working women toiled for wages to meet their families' needs, not to fulfill individualistic desires. However, even as they reminded young women that Article 3 ensured them the "same occupational opportunities as young men," they completely endorsed the proviso that equality be limited by a woman's "bodily constitution . . . before all else with regard to her natural obligations as mother of the future generation."^[94] It was the responsibility of employers to accommodate the workplace to woman's "peculiar nature" (Wesensart )—defined in physiological, psychological, and spiritual terms—thus avoiding the East German example where nature was disregarded.^[95] The solution was even more tightly controlled protective legislation that would take account of a woman's physical difference and "the motherly tasks and obligations that the woman has to fulfill for the family. . . . These facts will certainly no longer be disputed by anyone."^[96]

Women trade unionists protested the lack of day-care facilities, but in the same breath they joined ranks with those critics of working mothers who emphasized that no day care was an adequate substitute for a mother's love and who argued that mothers needed the bond with their children as much as children needed a deep attachment to their mothers. Children of working mothers faced enormous potential problems, and the child separated too early from her or his mother was subject to all manner of neuroses and a range of nervous diseases.^[97] Trade-union activists also accepted arguments that equated state-regulated day care with the attempts by communists to rob parents of their children while forcing women into wage labor. Lest there be any doubt, they cited the German Democratic Republic's Law for the Protection of Mothers and Children and the Rights of Women, put into effect in 1950, which called

explicitly for the creation of nurseries and day-care centers as part of the first five-year plan.^[98] Of course, communists were not alone in their attempts to undermine the family, and in strains familiar from the debates over "money-for-children," any mention of group day care was also associated with the Nazis, who shared with communists the goal of transforming children into loyal servants of the state. Initial proposals that the West German Law for Protection of Mothers include provisions for child-care facilities were dismissed as unfortunate reminders of National Socialist plans and were never seriously debated.^[99]

The few women who were delegated to attend the congresses of the national Federation of Trade Unions were typically called on to make presentations that focused on how most effectively to create a social order that would grant women choices between wage work and motherhood, allowing women to shed the double burden. Addressing the first postwar national meeting of the women's caucuses of the trade union movement, Liesel Kipp-Kaule asked, "Where can we find a genuine mother today? Women who work come home tired at night without even a smile on their lips for their children. At home, housework is waiting for them. I would like to see . . . how we can once again become the human beings whom we have lost."^[100] Male trade unionists and the Social Democratic leadership were far more likely to join women in search of "genuine mothers" in the home than in pursuit of equal wages and job opportunities for mothers and other women in the workplace. Women's demands received greatest support from their male comrades when they focused on the need for improved social services for families and secure incomes for male providers.^[101]

A sociological study based on one thousand interviews with working mothers in West Berlin in 1956 confirmed that many women shared these objectives. Those questioned reported that they were working not for fast cars, cosmetics, or vacations in Majorca. Rather, most used their legally mandated paid days off for relaxing and "really getting enough sleep" at home, not trips to the sunny southern climes that were ubiquitous in the lyrics of popular songs in the fifties.^[102] The earnings of these women were a "necessary supplement" to the family income, and while necessity might be an elastic concept, aspirations extended little beyond a modestly appointed household, perhaps including a refrigerator—that birthright of every West German, according to Ludwig Erhard—or a television set.

The interviewees were by no means ignorant of the weight of their double burden; more than half of those living in "complete" families

reported that between their two workplaces, they were busy for more than ninety hours a week, and another 31 percent worked between eighty and ninety hours, with variations directly related to family size. When asked how best to solve their problems, one-third unhesitatingly demanded higher wages, both in absolute terms and relative to men. Only one—"a mother in a good position with considerable help in the management of her household and the care of her children"—charged her "sex-comrades" with "begging for gifts" by asking for special treatment, exhorting them to "enter into the labor process just as completely as men." Far more common were calls for increased wages and job security for employed men so that "mothers won't be forced to take up employment," improvements in "money-for-children," including extension of payments at least to the second child, and the desire to "have more time for our children" by eliminating night work, shortening the workday by getting rid of unpaid lunch breaks, and guaranteeing Saturdays off.^[103] Interviews with young women workers in the fifties and early sixties echoed these views. Those questioned articulated a general frustration with available training programs and job opportunities and hopes that marriage would provide an alternative to paid employment. Behind this conception of a world of options and choices, championed by trade unionists and assumed by sociologists, was the same vision of the "normal family" that was at the basis of family policy and family-law reforms as a choice that should be available to all women.^[104]

While East Germany continued to provide a convenient negative point of reference, a model of how not to regulate women's work-force participation and a society where the "normal family" was not even an ideal, it did offer at least a partial solution to West Germany's dilemma of how to fill the growing demand for labor without fully mobilizing the silent reserve. More than ninety percent of the population increase in West Germany in the decade after 1950 consisted of returning expellees and those choosing to leave the east, and one-third of them came from the German Democratic Republic.^[105] Indeed, it was not lost on women trade unionists that East German women with extensive vocational training and skills could cross the border and enter jobs for which West German women did not have the requisite qualifications.^[106]

By the late fifties, the West German government also began exploring potential sources of "guest workers" (Gastarbeiter ) from other countries, because of the general consensus that the limits of mobilizing married women had been reached. Foreigners living in West Germany in

1961 numbered roughly 686,000. Twenty years later, the figure had increased nearly sevenfold. In 1961, only 2.5 percent of workers in West Germany were foreigners; little over a decade later, they made up slightly more than 10 percent of the labor force.^[107] Expanding part-time work for women was another alternative, though when working mothers were asked about this option in the mid-fifties they overwhelmingly rejected it, for the obvious reason that reduced hours meant reduced wages.^[108] Nonetheless, from 1960 to 1984 the percentage of women working part time more than doubled—from 14 percent to 33 percent—and part-time jobs were held almost exclusively by women. By the mid-eighties, 90 percent of those working under twenty hours weekly—and thus not entitled to the medical, unemployment, and retirement benefits of full-time employment—were women. Women's demand for part-time jobs far exceeded the supply.^[109]

To be sure, the political categories for assessing women's labor force participation did not remain constant. In the sixties, Soviet scientific achievements awakened West German fears of the "educational catastrophe" (Bildungskatastrophe ) that began to compete with fears of the declining birth rate, intensifying pressures to expand women's educational opportunities and job qualifications. Not only the "political standing of the nation" but also its "spiritual potential," argued Georg Picht, an educational expert and a philosopher of religion who wrote extensively on these problems, depended on how well the population was schooled. While foreign workers could fill some of a growing economy's labor needs, they were not the well-educated domestic work force West Germany wanted to meet the demands of a "technological age."^[110] Still, not until the late seventies did the state introduce initiatives to put "girls in men's jobs" (Mädchen in Männerberufen ), returning to the agenda proposed but never systematically implemented by the Allied forces of occupation three decades earlier.^[111] It is beyond the scope of this book to evaluate the success of these programs at dissolving gender-based wage differentials and the lines dividing a sex-segmented labor market, but at the very least, such initiatives indicate that in the sixties and seventies, state labor-market policy aimed explicitly at improving women's minds.^[112] In the fifties, by contrast, it was primarily aimed at maintaining women's bodies.

The Law for Protection of Mothers and other forms of state intervention to regulate women's wage workplace in the Federal Republic's first decade were not solely responsible for positioning women at the cross-roads of production and reproduction. The West German state did not

invent a labor market segmented by sex nor did it create firmly entrenched social attitudes that located a woman's destiny in her body. Where the state did intervene to regulate women's labor force participation, however, it did not challenge established patterns and attitudes; rather, it reinforced them. There is no question that for the women who fought hard for women's special treatment in the workplace, protective legislation represented a significant victory. Nor do the cases of firings appealed under the Mutterschutzgesetz summarized here leave much doubt that for those women who had access to this protection, it met some of the needs of working women with responsibility for dependents.^[113] But in the political climate of the fifties, protective legislation also protected much else: it protected conceptions of women's work and the sexual division of labor; it protected an elevated image of a nuclear family, best supported by a male wage; it protected pronatalist sentiments; it protected notions of sexual difference, grounded not only in biology but also in society, function, and accepted practice; and it protected conceptions of women's natural obligations as wives and mothers. This larger ideological context restricted the possibilities for formulating additional policies that would permit women to be both mothers and workers.

Anneliese Teetz's "entire hope" was the Basic Law's promise of equality for women. Where the state protected women workers in the fifties, however, it was not, as Teetz put it, because "in reality the two sexes are really not so different," but precisely because women were not like men. It is particularly telling that when the standard legal commentary on the Basic Law, completed in the late fifties, took up the topic of protective legislation for women workers in its volume on "The Constitution of the Economy and Work," it addressed protective measures not under the right to work or the right to equality, but rather under the elaboration of Article 6, the protection of marriage, family, and motherhood. The special treatment of all working women was collapsed into the protection of motherhood. As the author explained, "The protection of mothers . . . serves population policy. . . . By keeping mothers healthy, it promotes the healthy and hearty rising generation, needed for maintaining the nation."^[114] In the fifties, women as workers could claim protection because they were also potential mothers. The "Constitution of the Economy and Work" for women was inseparable from the constitution of their bodies.