510 SECTION 10 GLOBAL POLITICS AND THE STATE A woman named Riyanti might have been among the workers surveyed by the ILO. Interviewed by the Boston Globe in 1991, she told the reporter who had asked about her long hours and low pay: T m happy working here. ... I can make money and I can make friends." But in fact, the reporter discovered that Riyanti had already joined her coworkers in two strikes, the first to force one of Nike's Korean subcontractors to accept a new women's union and the second to compel managers to pay at least the minimum wage. That Riyanti appeared less than forthcoming about her activities isn't surprising. Many Indonesian factories have military men posted in their front offices who find no fault with managers who tape women's mouths shut to keep them from talking among themselves. They and their superiors have a political reach that extends far beyond the barracks. Indonesia has all the makings for a political explosion, especially since the gap between rich and poor is widening into a chasm. It is in this setting that the government has tried to crack down on any independent labor organizing—a policy that Nike has helped to implement. Referring to a recent strike in a Nike-contracted factory, Tony Nava, Nike representative in Indonesia, told the Chicago Tribune in November i 994 that the "troublemakers" had been fired. When asked about Nike policy on the issue, spokesman Keith Peters struck a conciliatory note: "If the government were to allow and encourage independent labor organizing, we would be happy to support it." - Indonesian workers' efforts to create unions independent of governmental control were a surprise to shoe companies. Although their moves from South Korea have been immensely profitable [see chart], they do not have the sort of immunity from activism that they had expected. In May 1993, the murder of a female labor activist outside Surabaya set off a storm of local and international protest. Even the US State Department was forced to take note in its 1993 worldwide human rights report, describing a system similar to that which generated South Korea's boom twenty years earlier: severely restricted union organizing, security forces used to break up strikes, low wages for men, lower wages for women—complete with government rhetoric celebrating women's contribution to national development. Yet when President Clinton visited Indonesia last November, he made only a token effort to address the coun- try's human rights problem. Instead, he touted the benefits of free trade, sounding indeed more enlightened, more in tune with the spirit of the post-Cold War era than do those defenders of protectionist trading policies who coat their rhetoric with "America first" chauvinism. But "free trade" as actually being practiced today is hardly free for any workers—in the United States or abroad—who have to accept the Indonesian, Chinese, or Korean workplace model as the price of keeping their jobs. The not-so-new plot of the international trade story has been "divide and rule." If women workers and their government in one country can see that a sneaker company will pick up and leave if their labor demands prove more costly than those in a neighbor country, then women workers will tend to see their neighbors not as regional sisters, but as competitors who can steal their precarious livelihoods. Playing women off against each other is, of course, old hat. Yet it is as essential to international trade politics as is the fine print in GATT. But women workers allied through networks like the Hong Kong-based Committee for Asian Women are developing their own post-Cold War foreign policy, which means addressing women's needs: how to convince fathers and husbands that a woman going out to organizing meetings at night is not sexually promiscuous; how to develop workplace agendas that respond to family needs; how to work with male unionists who push women's demands to the bottom of their lists; how to build a global movement. These women refuse to stand in awe of the corporate power of the Nike or Reebok or Adidas executive. Growing numbers of Asian women today have concluded that trade politics have to be understood by women on their own terms. They will be coming to Beijing this September [1995] ready to engage with women from other regions to link the politics of consumerism with the politics of manufacturing. If women in Russia and Eastern Europe can challenge Americanized consumerism, if Asian activists can solidify their alliances, and if US women can join with them by taking on trade politics—the post-Cold War sneaker may be a less comfortable fit in the 1990s. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This article draws from the work of South Korean scholars Hyun Sook Kim, Seung-kyung Kim, Katherine Moon, Seungsook Moon, and Jeong-Lim Nam. READING 49 Patriarchies and Feminisms: The Two Women's Movements of Post-Unification Germany MYRA MARX FERREE In the nearly five years that have passed since the Berlin Wail was opened with such hope and joy, there have been many accounts of enormous problems in the now-unified Germany. Unemployment and anomie in the East (ex-GDR), higher taxes and greater competition in the West, and a resurgent racism in both parts have tempered the mood of celebration. Although many foretold the costs, particularly for women, the extent of these problems has been sobering for all. The phrase "women are the losers of the unification" has become virtually a cliche; moreover, it does reflect reality. Women's official unemployment rate (over 20 percent) is twice as high as men's, rises in the cost of living and the end to subsidies for basic goods have widened the gap in standards of living, leaving those with lower incomes (often women) relatively worse off, and benefits such as child care leaves and kindergarten subsidies have been slashed (Bialas and Eni 1993). In addition, the change in abortion law has cost ex-GDR women their previous right to abortion on demand in the first trimester. In this painful situation, feminists both East and West have actively drawn attention to women's problems, but have found it surprisingly difficult to establish a common ground from which to combat such issues. This article attempts to analyze certain aspects of the problems of mutual understanding that have arisen between East and West German feminists in particular and East and West German women more generally. I argue that some of these Myra Narx Ferree. "Patriarchies and Feminisms: The Two Women's Movements of Post-Unification Germany, from Social Politics (Spring 1995). Copyright © 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Oxford University Press, Ltd. tensions and incomprehensions have their roots in the different structures of state policy and in the resulting differences in women's experiences and collective identities in the two postwar Germanies. In this sense, the conflicts between East and West feminists can be understood as a specific case of a more general problem of feminist identity. Other conflicts over feminist identity—such as those between White and Black feminists' in the United States or between First and Third World feminists' globally—both illuminate and are illuminated by consideration of the dynamics of this specific case. I suggest that these broad conflicts over interpretations of feminism are often rooted in different experiences of women with the state. States and state policies play a major role in systematically shaping women's experiences of paid work, marriage, and motherhood. Their effects may be seen in part in the interpretations of oppression and freedom that women construct based on personal and deeply felt experiences. It is important to clarify at the outset that I am not arguing for a simplistic translation of women's experience into the politics of feminism in general or in either part of Germany specifically. In Germany, both before and after unification, there has been a complex process of debate both among feminists and between feminists and others that has contributed to shaping the understanding of the kinds of goals the women's movement stands for and of the appropriate means with which to accomplish those goals (Hampele 1991: Gerhard et al. 1990). In each locus of debate there arose what I call a "collective self-representation" of feminism, that is, a shared and yet personal sense of the meaning of a feminist collective identity. Such a collective identity links an interpretation of the past (women's experiences) 511 - .■■,.-: 512 SECTION 10 GLOBAL } to an interpretation of the future (women's aspirations). Collective identity is thus neither simply a reflection of past experience nor independent of it, but an actively constructed interpretation of shared history (Melucci 1988; Taylor and Whittier 1992). Such feminist collective self-representation is different in important ways in each part of Germany; some of these differences arise from the nature of women's experiences with patriarchy when there were still two different countries. At the root, each system was organized around a fundamentally different sort of patriarchy. Following the lead offered by some feminist theorists of the welfare state (Sum 1987; Brown 1987; Jonasdottir and Jones 1988; Sassoon i 1987), I distinguish between what has been called public \ and private patriarchy. At an abstract level, most analysts of gender oppression would agree that patriarchal power is both private and public and that both intrafamilial relations and state politics are arenas in which women's subordination is constructed and male domination is exercised on a daily basis. At a practical level, however, one or the other form of patriarchy may dominate certain women's concrete experiences and thus carry a disproportionate weight in the explanations of oppression and aspirations for freedom that these women develop for themselves. Such collective explanations and aspirations are invoked whenever women refer to themselves as "feminist," Jane Mansbridge (1995) calls this the "street theory" of feminism and I refer to it as their collective self-representation. My core argument is that at least two such practical feminisms arose in postwar East and West Germany. Each reflected women's efforts to interpret experiences that were fundamentally different because each was predominantly structured by a different type of patriarchial state system: East Germany reflected principles of public patriarchy and \ West Germany those of private patriarchy. Because of this, mutual incomprehension, misunderstanding, and recriminations have become commonplace among feminists in unified Germany (Holland-Cunz 1990; Hampele, Helwerth, and Schwarz 1993; Rohnstock 1994). Even when there is a shared self-identification as "feminist," there are often different interpretations of what this term means. Some of the sources of these unanticipated communication difficulties are in the experiences of domination, competition, or recrimination in the period after unification; while these are also important, they are not my focus here (see Ferree 1992 for a fuller examination of these issues). In this article, I limit my discussion to factors that were already present before the Wall fell, problems that arise from the specific structures of state policy in each country, and the resulting differences in women's experiences and collective self-representations. LITICS AND THE STATE THETWO GERMANIES AND THEIR POLICIES The distinction between public and private patriarchy rests fundamentally on the role of the state as either supplanting or supporting the conventional authority and practical power of the individual male as household head. The state socialism of East Germany (German Democratic Republic, GDR) supplanted the individual male head and thus embodied principles of public patriarchy; the state policies I undergirding the social market economy of West Germany í (Federal Republic of Germany, FRG) are, in contrast, j strongly oriented to sustaining private patriarchy. The issue defining this distinction is not whether the state is more or less influential in women's lives, but rather the nature of the effects that it strives for and accomplishes. In the GDR, state policy tended to diminish the dependence of women on individual husbands and fathers, but it enhanced the dependence of women as mothers on the state (Ferree 1993; Bastian, Labsch, and Müller 1990). In the FRG, state policy instead followed the principle of subsidiarity and actively encouraged private dependencies. In particular, the state had a mandate to preserve "the" family, which it defined primarily as the husband-wife relationship as a context in which children can be raised (Moeller 1993; Ostner 1994). Thus, overall, the nature of the state's role in public patriarchy was to emphasize the direct relationship of mothers to the state; the nature of the state's role in private patriarchy was to encourage wives' dependence on husbands and children's on parents. In turn, this means that in public patriarchy women experienced their oppression as \ mothers and as more directly connected to the activities of i the state as patriarch; in private patriarchy, women experi- I enced their oppression as wives and as more directly con- I nected to their individual dependence on their spouses. To make these abstractions more concrete, compare the nature of women's ordinary life experiences in the two systems. In the former GDR, approximately one-third of all babies were bom out of wedlock, and virtually all women were in the labor force and worked essentially full-time jobs, where they earned on average 40 percent of the family income. Out-of-home child care for children under three and kindergartens and after-school care for older children were universally available at low cost (which, incidentally, is an exception among socialist as well as nonsocialist countries). State subsidies for child care, rent, and other basic necessities reduced differences in the standards of living between single mothers and two-parent, two-income families. Divorce was easy to obtain; women were more often the ones who petitioned for divorce; and the divorce FERREE / PATRIAR rate was the highest in the world.2 Dependence on an individual husband appears to have been' reduced to a minimum. In the FRG, by contrast, 90 percent of babies were born within marriages. Living together was not uncommon, but when the baby arrived, so did marriage (87 percent of cohabiting relationships were childless compared to 18 percent of marriages). Having a child was structurally inconsistent with holding a full-time job, given the short and irregular school hours and scarcity of child care for preschool children. There were child care places for less than 5 percent of the children under tnree years of age. This incompatibility forced women to choose between having a baby or having a job. Of women aged thirty to fifty, only one-third had full-time jobs; on the other hand, fully 15 percent of women aged forty to fifty remained childless. A majority of employed mothers interrupted their careers for at least six years; even mothers of older children (fifteen years and older) were less likely than nonmothers to be in the labor force at all, not even considering the reductions they faced in the hours they worked or the status of their jobs. Given their restricted labor-force participation, it is not surprising that West German women provided on average only 18 percent of the family income and that the majority of employed women did not earn enough to support themselves independently, let alone raise a child. Tax subsidies such as income splitting further widened the gulf between the standard of living of two-parent families and single mothers; if a mother was confronted with the choice of keeping her job or keeping her marriage, the economic incentives strongly favored the latter.3 Dependence on an individual husband was thus strongly institutionalized. These differences are well known. The way they play themselves out in feminist identity and analysis is less obvious. There are several distinct areas where I think the differences between public and private patriarchy, and thus the structurally different experiences of dependency and oppression, were expressed in the specifics of feminist consciousness and politics before unification and which still carry a residue into current interactions. FEMINIST IDENTITY AND THE STRUCTURES OF EXPERIENCE The most central difference relevant for feminism may be how women's identities are shaped in relation to the dominant form of patriarchy in general and how patriarchy has been institutionalized in particular. In West Germany, there was a conceptual package invoked by the phrase "wife- HIES AND FEMINISMS 513 mother": these two roles were inseparably bundled together. This conceptualization has not carried over easily to the eastern part of unified Germany, where motherhood was not bound so structurally to wifehood. Thinking about mothers in the FRG shaded easily into imagining them only as wives; one needed to specify "single mother" and, in doing so, one invoked the image of mothers who were politically and culturally deviant as well as impoverished. In the East, the imagery of single mother was not so necessary: women were mothers and workers and they may or may not have chosen to be or stay married. Being unmarried and a mother was not an identity that carried a connotation of victim-hood, deviance, or struggle. The imagery of "woman" was more shaped by the wife role in the West; the "conventional" picture of womanhood was structured in terms of a woman's tenuous connection to the labor force, her need to attend to her appearance and to the care of the household, and to be sexually attractive to and able to depend on an individual man. Women's magazines instructed their readers in how they could achieve the current style of satisfying their husbands needs. Identity was expressed in "lifestyle." which for most women meant the nature of their consumer activities and personal appearances. For East Germans, the conventional woman was not at the disposal of an individual man but instrumentalized b> the state as patriarch. The image of woman was thus the "worker-mother" who contributed both reproductive and productive labor to a collectively male-defined state. The concept of worker-mother appears to have been as much a self-evident package as the Wests concept of wife-mother: the ability to combine paid employment and motherhood was not questioned any more in the East than the ability to combine wife and mother roles was in the West. In both the conventional image and the self-understanding of GDR women, wifehood was much less salient than the role of worker. Not only did the GDR woman's constant work at home and in the labor force take precedence over her appearance or the appearance of her home in others* perceptions of her, but she identified her children and her job. not her spouse or her home, as her achievements. Consumption was a chore, not a means to identify and self-expression. That this was an issue of identity, not mereh deprivation of consumer goods, is suggested by the collapse of westem-style women's magazines in ex-GDR markets: indeed, the West German firm that bought the largest existing women's magazine in the GDR and tried to use it to market "glamour" to women in eastern Germany largely failed to attract an audience. Within a year the magazine ceased publication. 514 SECTION 10 GLOBAL POLITICS AND THE STATE The exaggerations and stereotypes of each version of womanhood are distorted reflections of the differently organized patriarchal demands: on the one hand, the wife of leisure working on her appearance and waiting for her husband to come home; on the other, the single working mother who has the support of the state in attending to all of her responsibilities. Note that from each side, the dependency of the other woman is idealized; husbands support "their" wives, the state supports "its" mothers, and neither patriarch supposedly asks for anything in return. Envy of the "ease" and generous support offered to women in the other way of life is a theme that was used politically on both sides of the Wall. From inside either public or private patriarchy, it was never so simple, of course. The price for each of these "privileged" ways of life was more evident to the women paying it than to the women whose personal experiences were with patriarchy of a different sort. In reality, neither public nor private patriarchy constitutes liberation for women, but each tends to shift the focus of women's attention to different aspects of their oppression. In the context of private patriarchy, the family, sexuality, and marital relations are initially at the forefront of theorizing (Janssen-Jurreit 1976; Millett 1970; Friedan 1963). The initial feminist idea is that if relationships between men and women as individuals could be put on a different footing, it would lead to structural change and vice versa— the structural changes that are sought are those that would change the balance of power within familial relationships. Power relationships within the family are often problema-tized and are seen as "spilling over" into the rest of social organization. In fact, rejecting marriage and seeking full-time employment, in the context of private patriarchy, are ways for women to challenge the status quo—to struggle against the individualized dependency prescribed by gender norms and almost invisibly upheld by state policy. In the context of public patriarchy, the role of public policy and the state is more immediately central and obvious. The male domination of political decision making in all areas, the role of the state as the "guardian" who speaks for women rather than allowing them to speak for themselves, and the felt absence of collective political voice are all aspects of the sense of powerlessness that are directly evident in the experience of women's subordination by collective rather than by individual male power. Power relations within the family, if problematized at all are seen as stemming from more fundamental policies and decisions taken at the public political level. Private relationships— whether lesbian or heterosexual—are experienced as irrelevant or secondary in comparison (e.g., Merkel et al. 1990: Kahlau 1990; Hampele 1991). The common theme of feminist critiques is that women are "instrumentalized" by the state and that such state power must be challenged. Neither of these experientially grounded perceptions is wholly wrong. Both the family and the state are arenas in which women's power and self-determination are restricted and where efforts to reconstitute social relations along less patriarchal lines are essential to the feminist project. Both forms of patriarchal organization, however, tend to encourage a distinctively one-sided form of analysis, because each type of model "fits" and explains certain gut-level experiences of oppression better. What is particularly instructive, albeit painful, is the collision between these two understandings. THE DOUBLE VISION OF FEMINISM Unlike the other Eastern European countries, the GDR in the 1980s had a slowly emerging feminist movement that became mobilized during the course of the transition and played an active political role in the process of Germany's restructuring. This movement was largely demobilized as the reform of the GDR was transformed into its absorption into the Federal Republic (Fence 1994). In West Germany, there had been an active autonomous feminist movement and a variety of local feminist projects since the early 1970s (Ferree 1987). Each of these two differently grounded feminist identities that arose in these differently organized social contexts have been forced by unification now to share the same political space. Each has a tendency to disparage the degree of feminist understanding of the other with terms such as backward, hypocritical, arrogant, atheo-retical, callous, naive, hypersensitive, know-it-all (Rohn-stock 1994). The charges and countercharges go on and on and are unfortunately cast primarily in terms of the individual or collective personalities of the "other." Such attempts to define "better" and "worse" feminists, and in the process to defend one's own version of feminism as "more true," ultimately founder on the reality of difference. This reality is that the contexts of public and private patriarchy and separate national experiences, which were independently theorized and from which two different women's movements emerged at two different times, are in practice differing organizations of oppression. What "feels true" as a collective self-representation has to resonate with each woman's experience of her own oppression to be accepted, and that feeling "of authenticity varies based on the fundamental political structuring of personal experi- FERREE / PATRIARCHIES AND FEMINISMS 515 ence. Given such different ways of structuring experience in public and private patriarchy, what "feels true" to a woman raised in one system will likely "feel alien" to a woman whose identity has been formed in the other. Because an authentic feminist politics has to "feel true," it cannot—and should not—aspire to universal priorities or any single dimension of "correctness." Although sustaining a view of feminism as intrinsically multiple in its analyses and emphases is difficult, such pluralism enriches and strengthens feminist practice. This indicates the need to preserve as much as possible the perspective that arose out of the experience of public patriarchy in the GDR—not only for the insights it already generated into the contradictions and identity processes of such a system for women, but also because it continues to offer valuable insight into features of private patriarchy that women who live under it might otherwise tend to take for granted and allow to become theoretically invisible. Moreover, the comparison suggests the extent of analytical problems that women in eastern Germany will have to overcome as they attempt to grapple with understanding the costs and benefits of the new, imposed status of dependent wife. Contrasts such as these help to expose the experiential preconditions of feminist theorizing and thus broaden and differentiate theories. Western European and North American feminists have already learned much from such critical contrasts drawn by women in Third World countries and from the differences in experience and interpretation between women of dominant and subordinate ethnic and racial groups in the industrialized countries. The common ethnicity and developed industrial economies that existed on both sides of the Wall may have made German feminists underestimate the difficulties of communication and the gulf in experience and identity that was still to be bridged when the Wall fell. The sheer unexpectedness of such fundamental differences blocked many attempts to listen to and learn from theory grounded in a significantly different structuring of women's lives. Nonetheless, the contrast between public and private patriarchy now being painfully articulated in both parts of Germany is worth attending to. rather than wishing away, because it may bind together a number of common experiences across specific situations. One of the most interesting of these potential analogies is the way in which Black feminist thought has also attempted to come to terms with the greater significance of public patriarchy in African-American women's lives than in the lives of White American women. Using such an analogy should not be interpreted to suggest that African- American women's experience with a racist state is in any way identical to East German women's experience in the GDR, but rather to indicate that some of the elements that define public patriarchy, especially the direct relation of mothers to the state, may be responsible for observed similarities in identity and perspective that would otherwise be very surprising. Thus, despite dramatic differences in economic opportunity, family poverty, and social devaluation, among many other things, there are some points where African-American feminist thought touches closely on issues that women in eastern Germany have also been attempting to express (the best summary of the diverse insights from Black feminist thought is Collins [1990]). Such surprising commonalities need some explanation. One possibility is that they reflect some general characteristics of difference between public and private patriarchy. First, there has been a tendency for feminists in eastern Germany to talk more positively about the family and to see a challenge for feminism in integrating men more fully into family life. In comparison to women under private patriarchy, they did not see men's exclusion from the family as offering a good in itself, nor did they define single parenting as freedom from male oppression—but they were also not so willing to marry, unless men met their expectations for family participation (e.g., Rohnstock 1994). Men's relationship to children was something that women valued and that the state ignored and actively marginalized. These are experiences on which African-American feminists have also had to insist and about which White feminists have been skeptical (Collins 1990). The experience of family as a support system in opposition to the culture at large, of withdrawal into the family as a form of privacy from the state, is another theme that presents family in a positive light in African-American feminist writing; it is also echoed in some of the descriptions of the role of the family in state socialism in East Germany and elsewhere (e.g., Einhorn 1993; Funk and Mueller 1993). Because private patriarchy has not been so dominant in the experience of Black women or women in East Germany, it may be easier for them to imagine bringing men more centrally into families, without conceding patriarchal authority to them, than it is for many White American women or West German feminists. It seems at least possible that political practices that simply exclude men. as if changing them were either irrelevant or impossible, do not make nearly as much sense from a vantage point of public patriarchy as they do for women whose experiences have been more shaped by domination by individual men. 516 SECTION 10 GLOBAL POLITICS AND THE STATE Second, women's labor-force participation is easy to connect to women's liberation in the context of private patriarchy since the extent of women's earnings are in practice directly related to their independence from individual husbands. This link is more problematic in public patriarchy, since women's labor is expected—even demanded— in the paid labor force as well as in unpaid domestic chores. For African-American feminists and feminists in East Germany, paid employment has provided a self-evident part of their identity as well as a burden—but it is hard to confuse it with "emancipation." The conditions of their integration into the paid labor force (e.g., ongoing discrimination), rather than the fact of employment itself, tend to draw theoretical attention and need more explanation. For many feminists in West Germany, labor-market discrimination has clearly been a problem but one that apparently could be explained by women's frequent and extensive exclusion from the labor force in whole or in part when they have children. From this perspective, marginality rather than discrimination is the problem and creating compatibility between paid employment and motherhood is the solution; from a perspective of public patriarchy, the issue is the conditions under which such compatibility has already been produced and why and how women are made to pay for it. Such ongoing discrimination needs explanation in terms of something other than women's intermittent labor-force participation. For women in eastern Germany, paid employment is certainly no longer self-evident. Thus, answering the question of what this growing exclusion from the labor force means is an entirely new issue, not a standard part of their feminist repertoire of self-understandings. As long as permanent or quasipermanent exclusion was simply inconceivable, it did not need to be theorized as a source of oppression. For women under public patriarchy, the idea of paid employment as somehow "an expression" of feminism did not make much sense, yet it was also not experienced as irrelevant to a feminist agenda. It was more the invisible precondition of experience and selfhood, parallel almost to the way literacy is taken for granted in industrialized countries.4 Third, within a framework of public patriarchy, it makes little sense to talk about doing politics that remains "autonomous" by virtue of keeping its hands out of the affairs of government for fear of being co-opted. Such a claim to autonomy has been a popular position among feminists in West Germany, albeit a stance that has been losing some support in recent years (Ferree 1987). Insofar as it is the state that is directly usurping the right of women to speak for themselves, as in public patriarchy, there is little alternative to pragmatically challenging this "guardianship" head-on. This means that women can and must find practical ways to restructure the state in less patriarchal ways. This concern with making policy and holding political office makes much less experiential sense to women in private patriarchy, who perceive their lives as being more directly shaped by nonstate actors and by cultural norms and expectations that are not formally enacted into law. Within the context of private patriarchy, the role of the state is more indirect and thus less visible, and the more obvious targets for action seem both more diffuse and more personalized. To those accustomed to public patriarchy, this focus can look like too much concern with symbolic issues, such as language, that are "trivial" compared to direct confrontations with policymakers. For women who have lived under public patriarchy, the direct tie experienced between mothers and the state means that the state cannot so easily be felt as remote and irrelevant. The specific demands leveled at the state will vary by political context, of course. US women of color have pointed particularly to the significance of welfare levels, access to health insurance, and affordable housing as feminist issues of great and burning relevance to their daily lives, and they have directed attention to state policy in these areas, which White feminists have more easily overlooked. Women in eastern Germany have raised issues such as public child care, the antidiscrimination law, and representation in state and national politics higher on the feminist agenda in the postunification state by highlighting the immediacy of their impact. While feminist practice in West Germany even before unification had increasingly emphasized the importance of such state policies, this concern has been greatly accelerated by unification and its aftermath. It remains to be seen whether a national feminist organization aimed at influencing federal policy, such as originally favored by feminists in eastern Germany, will ultimately emerge as well. CONCLUSION The experience of family, paid employment, and state politics shows certain common threads between feminist concerns in East Germany and those raised by some women of FERREE / PATRIARCHIES AND FEMINISMS 517 color in the United States. These commonalities in theorizing and in critiques of pseudo-universalized theories that fail to reflect their experiences suggest that some common explanation might be sought. Such an explanation may rest in the different purposes that state intervention serves in public and private patriarchy. It is not a question of quantitative differences in the degree of state activism or state determination of people's life chances overall, but rather of the qualitative differences in the ends that such state intervention serves: either supporting the authority and power of an individual husband as patriarch or undermining it in favor of the collective authority of the male-dominated state for the benefit of men as a group. As more Eastern European feminists find a voice with which to articulate their concerns, we may find that their collective self-representation of feminism, structured by their experiences of public patriarchy, may be even more different from the feminism arising from private patriarchy than is now apparently the case in unified Germany. What some have advanced as the reasons why there is "no women's movement" in Eastern Europe may yet become explanations for why the feminism that emerges there will take a distinctive form (Tatur 1992). The experiences of the feminism articulated from "the other side" as not "really" being feminism, according to the standards of one's own collective self-representation, have contributed to the disillusionment and discouragement of both sides. The early efforts to deny differences, pointing instead to the always present indisputable commonalities, have over the course of the past five years largely been abandoned. The many practical experiences German feminists have had in conferences, workshops, meetings, and projects have provided ample evidence of difference. The model of public and private patriarchy outlined here suggests that the tensions and resentments that often accompany such expressions of difference are built up not just from political competition over scarce resources, new hierarchical relationships, and personal failures of empathy and understanding in the current crisis—important as such experiences have been—but also from threats to the collective self^representation of feminism itself. These varying self-representations may contain a large structural component reflecting the differently organized forms of patriarchy that women experienced. Thus, different aspects of feminist politics can "feel true" to women on each side of the now-crumbled Wall, and feminist authenticity for each set of women pushes them to reject and criticize claims that express understandings of what "women" are and need that are not validated by their own experiences. Ultimately, however, the reality of such diversity in women's experiences—not just in their interpretations of them—demands a definition of feminism that encompasses difference. What is now so often expressed as "better" and "worse" versions of feminism in Germany should not be understood so much as matters of women being naive or antimale or careerist or statist-in other words, not as expressions of deficiencies of feminist analysis—but rather as reflections of the differences in the organization of patriarchy and of women's lives. Theorizing difference in this context takes on a new meaning and a new urgency. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference "Crossing Borders," Stockholm, Sweden, May 1994. The research for this article was conducted with the support of research fellowship 3-53621 from the German Marshall fund of the United States and by a Provost's Award from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. The article has benefited from the comments of many of the conference participants. Still earlier versions benefited from comments and suggestions from Christine Bose, Lisa D Brush, Irene Dolling, Christel Eckart, Jo Freeman, Ute Gerhard, Carol Hagemann-White, Eva Maleck-Lewy, Natalie Sokoloff, Verta Taylor, Wayne Villemez. Lise Vogel, Jane Wilkie, and Brigitte Young. My thanks to them, even though I (perversely) do not accept ail the arguments they have offered. 518 SECTION 10 GLOBAL POLITICS AND THE STATE NOTES 1. Black and White are used here as political terms and thus capitalized. 2. For details and statistics on the status of women in the DDR, see Einhorn (1993); Helwig and Nickel (1993); Maier (1992). For a history of policy that discusses its objectives and how it has secured these outcomes, see Penrose (1990). 3. For more extensive and detailed data on the status of women in the preunification Federal Republic of Germany, see Helwig and Nickel (1993); Maier (1992); Kolinsky (1989). For a history of policy that suggests how these outcomes were sought and institutionalized, see Moeller (1993) and Ostner (1994). 4. For differences in specific attitudes and experiences relating to paid work and family relations, see Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach (1993). As one illustration of the substantial gulf in expectations between East and West, consider the level of agreement with the statement "an employed mother can give a child just as much warmth and security as a mother who does not have a job." While 66 percent of East Germans agreed, only 39 percent of West Germans did. In this regard, it is the East Germans who are closer to the European average (61 percent agreement). REFERENCES Bastian. Katrin, Evi Labsch, and Sylvia Müller. 1990. "Zur situation von Frauen als Arbeitskraft in der Geschichte der DDR." Originally published in Zaunreiterin (Leipzig), reprinted in Streit 2:59-67. Bialas. Christiana. and Wilfried Ettl. 1993. "Wirtschaftliche Lage, soziale Differenzierung und Probleme der Intcressenorgani-sation in den neuen Bundesländern." Soziale Well 44. no. 1:52-75. Brown. Carol. 1987. "The New Patriarchy." Pp. 137-60 in Hidden Aspects of Women's Work. ed. Christine Bose. Roslyn Feldbcrg, and Natalie SokotolT. New York: Praeger. Collins. Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Einhorn, Barbara. 1993. Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship. Gender, and Women's Movements in East Central Europe. New York: Verso. Ferree. Myra Marx. 1987. "Equality and Autonomy: Feminist Politics in the United Slates and West Germany." Pp. 172-95 in The Women's Movements of the United States and Western Europe, cd. Mary Katzenstein and Carol McClurg Mueller. Philadelphia. Pa.: Temple University Press. ---------. 1992. "The Wall Remaining: Two Women's Movements in a Single German State." Paper presented at conference on German Unification. Western European Studies Program. Notre Pame University, South Bend, Ind. ---------. 1993. "The Rise and Fall of *Mommy Polities': Feminism and Unification in (East) Germany." Feminist Studies 19:89-115. -----. 1994. ""The Time of Chaos Was the Best"; The Mobilization and Demobilization of a Women's Movement in East Germany." Gender and Society 8. no. 4. Friedan. Betty. 1963. Vie Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell. Funk. Nanette, and Magda Mueller, eds. 1993. Gender Politics and Post-communism. New York: Routledge. Gerhard. Ute. Metchthild Jansen, Andrea Maihofer. Pia Schmid. Irmgard Schultz, eds. 1990. Differenz und Gleichheit. Frankfurt a/M: Ulrike Helmer Verlag. Hampele. Anne. 1991. "Der unabhängige Frauenverband." Pp. 221-82 in Von der Illegalität ins Parlament ed. Helmut Müller-Enbergs. Marrianne Schulz, and Jan Wielgohs. Berlin: LinksDruck Verlag. ---------. 1993. " 'Arbeit mit. plane mit. regten mit": Zur politischen Partizipation von Frauen in der DDR." Pp. 281-320 in Frauen in Deutschland, 1945-1992. ed. Gisela Helwig and Hildegard Maria Nickel. Bonn: Bundeszcntral für politische Bildung. Hampele. Anne. Hei wenn Ulrike, and Gislinde Schwarz. 1993. "Drei Jahre nach der Wende: Zum Stand der Ost-West-Beziehungen in der Frauenbewegung." Paper presented at the Goethe Institute. New York. Helwig. Gisela; and Hildegard Maria Nickel, eds. 1993. Frauen in Deutschland. 1945-1992. Band 3IS. Studien zur Geschichte und Politik. Bonn: Bundcszentrale fúr politische Bildung. Holland-Cunz. Barbara. 1990. "Bemerkungen zur Lage der deutsch-deutschen Frauenbewegung." Links Sept.: 35-39. Institut für Demoskopie Aliensbach. 1993. Frauen in Deutschland: Lebensverhältnisse. Lebensstile, und Zukunftserwartungen. Köln: Bund Verlag. Janssen-Jurreit. Marielouise. 1976. Sexismus. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. Jonasdoltir. Anna, and Kathleen B. Jones, eds. 1988. The Political Interests of Gender: Developing Theory and Research with a Feminist Face. London: Sage. Kahlau. Cordula. ed. 1990. Aufbruch.' Frauenbewegung in der DDR. Munich: Frauenoffensive. Kolinsky, Eva. 1989. Women in West Germany: Life, Work, and Politics. Oxford: Berg. Maier, Friederike. 1992. "Frauenerwerbstát i g keil in der DDR und BRD: Germeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede." Pp. 23-35 in Ein Deutschland—Zwei Patriarchate?, ed. Gudrun-Axeli Knapp and Ursula Müller. Bielefeld: University of Bielefeld. Mansbridge, Jane. 1995. "What Is Feminism?" In Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women's Movement, ed. FERREE / PATRIARCHIES AND FEMINISMS 519 Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Manin. Philadelphia. Pa.: Temple University Press. Melucci, Alberto. 1988. "Getting Involved: Identity and Mobilization in Social Movements." Pp. 329-48 in From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research across Cultures, cd. Ben Klandermans. Hanspcter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow. Greenwich. Conn.: JAI Press. Merkel, Ina, Eva Schäfer. Sünne Andresen, Frigga Haug, Kornélia Hauser. Jutta Meyer-Sicbart Eva Stäbler, and Ellen Woll. eds. 1990. Ohne Frauenistkein Staatzumachen. Hamburg: Argument Verlag. Mille». Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Moeller. Roben. 1993. Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany Berkeley: University of California Press. Ostner. Ilona 1994. "Back to the Fifties: Gender and Welfare in Unified Germany." Social Politics: International Studies in Gender. State, and Society I. no. 1:32-59. Penrose, Virginia. 1990. "Vierzig Jahre SED-Frauenpolitik: Ziele. Strategien, Ergebnisse." IFG: Frauenforschung 4:60-77. Rohnsiock, Katrin. 1994. Stiefschwestern: Was Ost-Frauen und West-Frauen voneinander denken. Frankfurt a/M: Fischer. Sassoon, Anne Showstack, ed. 1987. Women and the State: The Shifting Boundaries between Public and Private. London: Hutchinson. Siim, Birte. 1987. 'The Scandinavian Welfare States: Toward Sexual Equality or a New Kind of Male Domination?" Acta Sociologica 3/4:255-70. Tatur, Melanie. 1992. "Why Is There No Women's Movement in Eastern Europe?" Pp. 61-75 in Democracy and Civil Society in Eastern Europe, ed. P. G. Lewis. London: Maoni I Ian. Taylor. Vena, and Na.icy Whitticr. 1992. "Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobilization." Pp. 104-30 in Frontiers of Sochi Movement Theoiy. cd. Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller. New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press.