Jane Freeland’s Feminist Transformations is a history of feminist activism against domestic violence in East, West, and reunified Germany from the emergence of the West German “New Women’s Movement” in the late 1960s to the enactment of the 2002 Protection from Violence Act. Across six chapters, and against the background of Germany’s nineteenth-century patriarchal traditions and its postwar reconstruction, Freeland charts the successful establishment of shelter projects and of an antidomestic violence consensus in Germany. The book demonstrates how the fight against violence against women gained mainstream support also because patriarchal images of women needing protection and racialized stereotypes of predatory foreign men could be affirmed rather than challenged, leaving intact the status quo. This co-optation of the feminist struggle against domestic violence was, Freeland argues, the key to success, but it had ambivalent consequences, as it entrenched “a limited vision of women’s rights, one that acknowledges a right to bodily integrity only so far as to protect women from male violence, but not one that grants women a right to self-determination,” (191) accounting for the diverging trajectories of abortion rights campaigns and domestic violence activism.
The first three chapters trace the origins and development of the women’s shelter movement in the West. The failed campaign to legalize abortion in the early to mid-1970s was the backdrop against which feminists organized domestic violence activism. Aimed at garnering large-scale social and political support, feminists’ strategic alliances with the federal government and the Berlin Senate, as well as press coverage drawing on gender-conservative images of women as helpless victims, led to a deradicalization of domestic violence activism but were also, Freeland shows, central to the realization and funding of shelter projects. After two years of organizing, the first women’s shelter was opened in West Berlin in 1976—a major success that came at the very moment, which, due to the Federal Constitutional Court’s striking down of a reform that would have legalized first-trimester abortion, is usually interpreted as a moment of disappointment and defeat for West German feminism. Freeland now revises this widely accepted periodization by centering domestic violence activism. In the course of the mid- to late 1970s, chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate, this activism was not only transformed by the mainstream media and politics, but also by conflicts around class and race, with “battered women,” and especially migrant women, themselves, pushing back against racialized images about migrant men and demanding practical help rather than feminist ideals thus moving the shelter movement toward further institutionalization.
Chapters 4 and 5 are set on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In contrast to the Socialist Unity Party's (SED) official line that domestic violence did not exist under socialism and historians’ portrayal of the subject as taboo in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Freeland shows that violence against women was discussed in court (e.g. in divorce proceedings) and also in the media. Examining the obstacles women seeking a divorce for domestic violence faced in the 1970s and 1980s as East German courts prioritized socialist ideals of the nuclear family, chapter 4 demonstrates that the social and cultural liberalization that marked late GDR society and politics “had distinctly gendered limits” (114), thus relativizing the thesis that the 1970s were a “key turning point in sexual liberation under socialism” (135). Chapter 5 turns to East German feminist activism against domestic violence and explores how this struggle was complexly intertwined with challenges of the SED and eventually profited from the socialist state’s waning legitimacy. Drawing out the ways in which GDR women’s activism drew on feminist literature and theory from the West, Freeland here not only discusses similarities and differences across the Wall (e.g. regarding the relationship to the state and to men), but also further debunks the notion that there was no feminism under socialism, which historians have long held.
After the fall of the wall, domestic violence activism and shelter projects bloomed, also in the former East, while the renewed attempt to legalize first-trimester abortion was again struck down by the Federal Constitutional Court. The criminalization of the termination of pregnancies in the former GDR states after the Wende, where first-trimester abortion had been legal and covered by health insurance since 1972, has led to a widely accepted narrative of East German women as the “losers” of unification. From the perspective of domestic violence activism the last chapter challenges this view and also offers a compelling explanation for why one feminist core demand came to be widely accepted and supported and reproductive self-determination did not: While the feminist fight against domestic violence—“with its emphasis on women’s vulnerability and victimhood” and East German activisms’ critical positioning vis á vis the socialist state—fit with “the broader reinscription of patriarchal gender norms taking place during reunification” (168), abortion reform was associated with the delegitimized GDR and did not resonate with the Kohl government’s gender conservatism. The continuous juxtaposition and argumentative entanglement of the contrasting paths of domestic violence and abortion is one of the book’s many strengths and offers an important new explanation for the peculiarities of postwar German–German gender history.
Feminist Transformations is an excellently written book that relies on an impressively wide and diverse range of sources and makes several important interventions in the fields of German history, the history of feminisms, and the history of gender and sexuality. First, an integrated history of East and West Germany, the book, rather than offering formalistic comparisons between the two countries, takes seriously historical processes on both sides of the Wall and the Cold War context to better understand post-Wende developments. Treating each in their own right without eschewing their close entanglement, Freeland is nevertheless able to draw out important distinctions resulting from the very different social and political contexts of capitalism versus socialism, but also identifies similarities that point to the persistent effects of a shared patriarchal past reaching back to the Wilhelmine Empire. Second, a history of feminisms, the book’s insistence on acknowledging East German activism against domestic violence as feminism challenges long-standing definitions of feminism that narrow the concept to bottom-up social movement activity in Western liberal democracies, often erasing the histories of feminisms in non-Western contexts. Analyzing in-depth feminist activism around domestic violence in the late GDR, Freeland gives texture to East German women’s groups’ ideals and practices and reorients our understanding of what counts as feminism. Third, tracing how domestic violence came to be universally scorned and legally sanctioned in Germany, Feminist Transformations significantly contributes to our understanding of why and how certain women’s rights are attained while others are lost. Freeland delineates how domestic violence activism was successful because it was predicated on patriarchal and racist ideas and could therefore easily be coopted and stripped of its “critical feminist scaffolding” (80). The book thus sheds light on the often-unintended effects the strategic compromises and alliances needed to secure those rights can have not only for gender equality and sexual autonomy, but also in the context of race and migration.
