Feminist Transformation and Domestic Violence in Divided Berlin 1968–2002

Jane Freeland's Feminist Transformation and Domestic Violence in Divided Berlin 1968–2002 is, in her own words, ‘a book about feminism in Germany after 1968’. Germany, in this study, includes the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Federal Republic, as well as the reunited Germany after 1989. Focusing on the grassroots campaigns to open shelters for battered women in the city of Berlin, Freeland investigates how in the second half of the twentieth century, feminism underwent a process of deradicalisation and depoliticisation. Freeland argues convincingly that this development towards deradicalisation was a practical necessity and should be understood as a success rather than a failure of the movement to stand up to its ideals. The book takes an intersectional approach by considering race alongside gender, including the voices of immigrant women and problematising public media discourses that depict immigrant men as prone to violence. The first two chapters offer an overview of the emerging women's shelter movement, in the context of the new West German feminist movement and its struggle for legal abortion. Chapter three provides a history of the first West Berlin women's shelter. Freeland's primary sources consist of local newspapers, feminist press and material that gives voices to individual women in the shelter programme. It shows the everyday struggles that women in shelters faced, from drug addiction to legal and financial problems, and reconstructs how the shelters professionalised. This chapter also sheds light on the ambivalences of migrant women and women of colour, in contrast to white feminists’ representations of their partners as inclined to abuse. Chapters four and five form the highlight of this excellent study. They trace the debates and activism surrounding domestic violence under state socialism in East Germany. They demonstrate how, despite the state's official stance on equality, women faced both the threat of patriarchy and vulnerabilities imposed by an authoritarian regime. In the 1980s, fighting gender-based violence became a feminist act that challenged patriarchal structures and women's subordination, even in the absence of an organised feminist movement. It also brought about collaborations with Catholic welfare organisations which in West Germany were antagonists to the movement due to their contrasting positions on abortions. Chapter six provides a comprehensive reflection on how, after reunification, establishing a network of women's shelters in cities of former East Germany led to the merging of the divided movements. Freeland argues that, if we only look at the failed abortion reform, East German women might come across as losers of reunification. However, the success of the women's shelter movement questions this narrative and shows the complexity of the legacy of this historical development. Legal changes in the 1990s that proposed to criminalize rape within marriage, for instance, actually derived from the idea that women ‘have a right to personal security or self-determination’ (p. 169) and are entitled to protection from male violence. The general acceptance of this idea was accomplished in the Federal Republic. Freeland's study makes important contributions to three historical debates. First, it provides a valuable methodological intervention by presenting a broad definition of feminism. This approach allows for the investigation of feminist activism in societies where no institutionalised feminist movement existed. Freeland follows Lucy Delap's and Myra Marx Ferree's conceptualisation of feminism as ambivalent and fluid, without seeking a rigid definition. She uses this open concept of feminism as a gateway to examine and compare the campaigns against patriarchy and women's subordination in East and West Germany despite the absence of a large women's movement in the East. Second, the study gives equal attention to East and West Germany, as well as the reunited Germany after 1989, rather than focusing only on the GDR or the Federal Republic and treating the post-reunification changes as an afterthought. This approach highlights how the different political regimes shaped the structural differences between feminist activisms, and led to distinct collaborations between feminists, local authorities and charities. The book's structure serves as a model for how to write an integrated history of women and social movements in twentieth-century divided Germany. Third, the book offers a novel angle to the German debate on the transformation of the new social movements after 1968. Did the social movements that emerged out of the student movement of 1968 become depoliticised in the 1980s and 1990s, as movement scholars allege? Or can fighting issues like domestic violence or the objectification of women in the media still be seen as a radical political act? Freeland seems to confirm the former by tracing the processes of co-optation and deradicalisation that the women's shelter movement underwent, arguing that distancing themselves from their radical roots was a strategy to gain broad support for activists. Rather than interpreting this as a story of feminist decline, Freeland argues it was a sign of success–gender-based violence became a topic of public media debates, women's shelters received support from all political parties, and women affected by gender-based violence began to feel heard. Nevertheless, as Freeland points out in the conclusion, the price of deradicalisation was that it allowed for the racist co-optation of the debates on domestic violence in the 2000s, when commentators turned women's safety and gender-based violence into an argument against migration. The book offers a well-rounded overview of the history of feminism in both Germanies, and it engages with both German and English language historiography. It is very accessible to undergraduate students and complicates the history of German feminism by going beyond the classic narratives of West German activists and the abortion question alone. It is an important book that advances the field of German gender history from both a methodological and historiographical perspective.