This welcome translation of Christine von Oertzen's important and well-received monograph, Teilzeitarbeit und die Lust am Zuverdienen, originally published in 1999, will widen the audience that can appreciate and benefit from its findings. Von Oertzen significantly condensed, and slightly revised and updated the original version for an English-speaking audience, and Selwyn provides an excellent translation. Time has been kind to this well-organized and extensively researched book. Historiographical developments during the years between the original and the translation have strengthened and expounded many of its arguments and reinforced its prescient, if nascent, linkages among the histories of postwar gender, women, labor, politics, economics, social change, and consumption. Von Oertzen not only told the previously neglected story of women's part-time work in West Germany, but she also established it as a paradigmatic case study of women's employment in general and of broader social change in the period before 1970. As she notes in her introduction, subsequent studies have confirmed and elaborated her book's implications for the rethinking of larger narratives and periodizations of social change in both West and East postwar Germany. Originally conceived as one of two parallel dissertations comparing West and East Germany, respectively, the book draws explicit comparisons in its final chapter and offers many other implicit opportunities for comparisons with other countries as well.

Unlike previous histories that portrayed the gendered labor market during the 1950s and 1960s as largely uncontested and static, von Oertzen analyzed public discourses, legal developments, and statistical studies to document complex changes in gender and other social relations. By expanding the scope of her study beyond the “long 1950s,” von Oertzen was able to revise the “domestic caricature” (p. 2) of previous historiography and show how gender relations and government and corporate policies began to shift well before the 1970s. The book thus focuses on the period between the debates in the mid-1950s over part-time work in the midst of the economic miracle to the legislative institutionalization of part-time employment in 1969. This period witnessed a shift in political and social discourse from justifying women's work as an “economic necessity” within the context of the prewar breadwinner/housewife paradigm to acknowledging the legitimacy of women's “desire” for work and additional income, which could be used even for consumerist indulgences as women negotiated multiple identities as workers, wives, mothers, and consumers.

The book is organized in eight thematic chapters. Chapter one analyzes discourses from the late 1940s through the 1950s about paid employment for married women, placing them in the context of larger popular debates over the question of gender as a social construct. Chapter two explores the acceleration of the shift away from narrow, restrictive definitions of women's “family responsibilities” to justifying married women's part-time work for a variety of reasons, depending on political orientation, between 1959 and 1969. Chapter three examines the legal institutionalization of part-time work, including debates over tax, social security, and civil service laws. Chapter four delves into official government statistics to sketch trends at the macro level in which part-time employment became normal. Chapters five and six examine the introduction of part-time employment in industry and the office, respectively. The latter generally was significantly smoother and more successful than the former, with some notable exceptions that von Oertzen analyzes in case studies. Chapter seven brings to life the abstract discourses and macro-socio-economic statistics of the previous chapters by using interviews with women who worked part-time during the 1950s and 1960s. This methodology allows von Oertzen to explore and illustrate in compelling detail the more subjective, individual, and often ambiguous and multivalent dimensions—both at the workplace and at home—of women's experiences and motives for pursuing part-time work. The book's final chapter draws on Almut Rietzschel's work on part-time work in East Germany to provide a concise but very illuminating and suggestive comparison between the two Germanies.

The book successfully integrates an admirable array of methodologies and perspectives, deftly shifting between macro and micro levels, effectively illuminating rafts of statistics with poignant anecdotes, and combining the economic, political, physical, and psychological dimensions of interactions among women, their families, government officials, employers, and unions. The book accomplishes this by blending an impressive number and variety of sources, including the archives of women's organizations, unions, government agencies, and companies; decrees and laws; books and the media; and interviews with contemporaries. This combination of methodologies, perspectives, and sources helps von Oertzen strike a balance between structure and agency: while restricted by frameworks created by laws, governmental and corporate policies, and economic realities, women also helped to shape perceptions and practices of employment, gender roles, and social relations.

The book has some minor shortcomings. Some may object to certain assumptions and largely undeveloped arguments drawn from modernization theory, and English speakers with little background in German history and society will have difficulties understanding some arcane issues such as tax cards that are not adequately explained. But any weaknesses are far outshone by the book's brilliant contributions to the history of women, gender, labor, social change, and postwar Germany. This English edition will amplify the impact of von Oertzen's book and help it continue to resonate.