Thirty-five years after the Wende, the interconnections between the two German states are coming under renewed examination. Not only do explanations of key similarities between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic require an integrated approach, but so too do explanations of how the two states diverged. Alexandria Ruble's carefully written Entangled Emancipation offers precisely such an account for the field of gender history. Taking up the framework of entanglement, or histoire croisée, Ruble argues convincingly that the relationship between the East and West Germany both catalyzed and impeded the development of women's emancipation between the end of the Second World War through the onset of the women's movement in the 1960s.

Bucking conventional wisdom throughout, particularly an overemphasis on the cultural and political predominance of the ruling SED and CDU/CSU parties in East and West Germany, respectively, Ruble crafts a history that is at once innovative and grounded in the bread and butter of political history. Assembling decades of legislative drafts, party correspondence and memoranda, petitions, and news media, Ruble positions gender history as a particularly fruitful site for thinking through the multiple entanglements of the two Germanys within their wider European context.

In order to track the development of the legal apparatus shaping (and constraining) women's positions in the two German societies, Ruble orders her book chronologically, with chapters taking increasingly broader temporal scopes to reach the West German legal reform of 1976. Chapter one tracks the heady days of the first two years of occupation, marked by both social upheaval as well as the possibilities offered by reconstruction. Central to reconstruction efforts was resolving the “crisis of the family,” precipitated by the war and ranging from demographic imbalance to soaring divorce rates. Ruble's investigation of the inadequacies of the Allied reform efforts deliberately eschews top-down analyses. While the Allies’ stop-gap measures to denazify the law and restore order relied on the most conservative elements of the 1900 Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB), “German women hardly needed an introduction to democracy” (32). Women's organizations developed their own proposals, from “traditional” to reformist, laying the groundwork for future debates. The second chapter takes up parallel reform efforts as representatives in the western and Soviet occupation zones began drafting competing constitutions—or the deliberately provisional “Basic Law” in the eventual case of the Federal Republic. Ruble deftly shows how, even as Cold War division started to cohere, these processes mutually influenced each other on multiple levels. Specifically, Cold War competition and women's activism marked two entangled impulses that ushered in the adoption of nearly identical equality clauses in both constitutions. So too did they shape its limitations through a simultaneous reliance on marital domesticity, manifest in the “family protection clause” of the Federal Republic's Basic Law.

While Ruble's reading of the importance of social pressure in East German decision-making could risk an overly rosy interpretation of state-socialism, her third chapter moves decisively away from such a claim. According to Ruble, it was conservative forces within society at large that postponed family law reform in the GDR, while in the FRG the ruling CDU/CSU faced societal opposition to its long-term restoration of the “traditional” family. Here Ruble sifts through the legal mess of the limbo years between 1949 and 1953 to chart the competing impulses on both sides of the German–German border, resulting in compromises like the 1950 Law for the Protection of Motherhood and Children and for the Equality of Women in East Germany, or the Federal Ministry of Justice's failed attempts to offer watered-down reform in the West. Debates in both states were framed by the Cold War, including the dwindling possibility of reunification. Chapter four similarly complicates an easy opposition between East and West, as the FRG was able to pass compromise legislation through the Equal Rights Act in 1957, while the GDR's ruling SED abandoned its socialist vision in 1954 for a revised family code. Between 1953 and 1957, family law politics were marked by a series of stalemates in both Germanys but one that involved heavy input, including opposition to ruling party proposals, from German citizens. Both proponents and opponents of legal change were deeply entangled. The East German Ministry of Justice attempted to discuss legal reform with its West German counterpart, which refused such overtures but closely monitored developments in the East. The structural unification of the Evangelical Church motivated political engagement that played out differently in divided Germany. Both moments present the chapter's most compelling evidence for Ruble's assertion of a “deeper engagement” (118) that took place across the border than previously acknowledged. The fifth chapter takes up the final stages of Cold War-era reform, resulting in the GDR Family Code's passage in 1965 and the FRG's First Law in 1976, which was shaped by a more uneven entanglement. While consolidating a welfare state in the face of an only recently stabilized border was a primary driver for the SED in revisiting reform efforts that had stalled out the decade before, West Germans took more passing notice. Instead, early 1970s Ostpolitik was only part of renewed possibilities for family law reform ushered in by the SPD-led government and new women's movement after 1969.

This book makes a larger and much-needed intervention into the complicated nature of East German dictatorship, eschewing reductive narratives that alternately cast the GDR as sexually progressive or politically repressive in contrast to its western counterpart. Such debates have left an indelible mark on the field, even as Ruble joins recent publications that increasingly look to connections across the German–German border (Jane Freeland, Feminist Transformations, 2022; Samuel Clowes Huneke, States of Liberation, 2022; Andrea Rottmann, Queer Lives Across the Wall, 2023; Teresa Tammer, “Warme Brüder” im kalten Krieg, 2023). Ruble produces a wealth of archival evidence to show the shifting and surprising limitations on implementing family law reform in both states and the work of citizens and policymakers in driving change. Ruble’s close archival reading opens the possibility to drive a new stance on East German governance overall, forcefully insisting here, as Ruble does in other moments, on the continued necessity for gender as a category of analysis. This possibility, however, speaks to the wider importance of this excellently written book. Ruble has explicated in its full complexity the nature of women's legal emancipation in divided Germany, demonstrating the need for ever more entangled histories.