There is a commonly used swear word in German for a feminist, Emanzi. It is a shortened form of the word emancipist: stemming from women’s emancipation. Sometimes it is said ironically or with humour, most often not. I don’t know if there are any parallel words in other languages or countries.

You have to understand that Germany has, except superficially, not followed the wave of social or political changes when it comes to promoting women in business, as has happened in the States or Canada and some European countries. When I came to Germany twenty-five years ago, about 6% of women were in management. Now, all this time later, there has not been any noticeably positive development.

As far as I know, over 90% of managers in German companies are German men: then there are some German women: a smattering of foreign men managers: I’ve never heard of any foreign women in management posts, though they must exists.

About seventeen years ago, I got involved in a professional women’s group in the company I worked in at that time. The first three or four years of working in the group were very exciting. We managed, with the extensive support of the company, to start up kindergarten and day care, change the company’s union laws to permit a seven year leave of absence for employees on extended maternity leave or those needing to care for ailing relatives (guaranteeing re-employment), introduce a flexible office/home work model, set up some summer camps for employees children, amongst other things. And along the way the company won a lot of public and media recognition.

Unfortunately, when it came time to see what could be constructively done about promoting equal career opportunity for women within the company, the group quickly ran up against some walls of resistance, and eventually, inner group intriguing rendered the group useless. After seven years, the group dissolved. This saddened me greatly. The experience of seeing this once vitally active group dissolve into a squabbling mess, made me realise that I never wanted to become politically involved in any large group or party again.

I decided instead, to take my political conviction back into my home, my circle of friends, and amongst those I work with. My words and my actions are what make me a feminist. My husband’s words and actions make him a committed feminist sympathizer. And I hope that our daughter and son will be positively influenced as a result: learning to treat others with respect and dignity, and, equally important, to treat themselves with respect and dignity as well.

What breaks my heart sometimes is knowing that even though many good changes occurred through the feminist movement, equal opportunity and equal pay does not exists today. Like Bindi in the article below, I’ve also met younger women who do not know what changes were made by their mothers’ generation and at what cost. This is a shame. Equally, some young women do not believe there is any acute need for change facing them currently. How wrong could they be?

Bindi from the epossums blog

This is a synopsis of a conversation I had with a young woman in my book club a couple of years ago. She was twenty-two at the time and had recently been married. We were discussing the book ‘Anything we love can be saved’ by Alice Walker at this particular meeting. Alice Walker is a feminist activist and the book focused on issues such as female genital mutilation, and her active role in its prevention. Feminist were portrayed in this book as activists.

Older woman: I enjoyed the book. It made me reconnect with feminist issues.

Younger woman: Do you mean that you took up feminist issues or that you reconnected? Were you already a feminist or did the book start you thinking along feminist lines?

Older woman: Um, I mean reconnect.

Young woman: Well, I don’t think feminism has had an impact on my life!

Older woman: But, things have changed a lot for women as a result of the feminist movement. Have you spoken to your mother about it?

Young woman: My mother stayed at home with her children. I think it’s perfectly natural for a woman to stay home with her children when she has them. This is what I intend to do also!

Older woman: When you have children, the power relations in the family can subtly shift. I took ten years off to raise my children. Despite the fact that we feel like we are free to choose, I have found that when you become a mother, power relations between couples can shift. Women can feel as though they are in a less powerful position and that their options do become limited.

When I married and had children I held the belief that parenting roles in my marriage would be equitable. I acknowledged that I was the one who could breast feed and took it as my duty to stay home with the children in the first years of their lives. I believed that my husband could take over the full time parenting role when my job was done, or that we could alternate some how. This never eventuated, partly because we had subsequent children. I ended up either pregnant or breast feeding for eight years. After that time, if I chose to go back to my teaching job, I would have been on the same salary I was on prior to taking leave. However in those years, my husband had become a senior manager in his field through a series of promotions. To afford to be able to pay our mortgage and feed four children on my salary, we would have had to sell our house, down size and move out of our inner city area, which by this time had become our community through associations with playgroups, kindergartens and primary schools. It just did not make sense to do this. My husband became the breadwinner and I became the house wife. This was stressful for both of us for different reasons.

A month later, at book club again, the conversation continued. The younger woman had been thinking about things in the meantime:

Younger woman: I had a chat to a friend of mine who has had children and she agrees that she feels less powerful in her marriage because she is no longer earning her own money and she feels that when decisions are made about how money will be spent she consequently has less of a say than her husband. So I do agree with you now that there is an issue there, but I don’t know what the solution is.

I don’t know what the solution is either, but I think this snippet of dialogue does raise a few questions about feminism and its project. Here are a few off the top of my head:

1. Why was the young woman oblivious to the ways in which her life has been shaped by the feminist struggle from a historical perspective?
2. Who can call themselves a feminist?
3. What is the project for young feminists in modern western society?
4. Does the feminist project need to move beyond the woman as an individual and look at social practices, such as work place practices and conditions, parenting norms and different way to do parenting, measures in society that support parenting options?
5. Does the feminist project need to broaden? For example, should fathers be enlisted in the struggle?
6. How does it and how should it affect our lives as women?

A few years ago, I read an interesting article in the New York Times about how busy our society had become. The journalist described how his five year old daughter talked to her imaginary friend on an imaginary cell phone and how they (the daughter and her imaginary friend) were forever making and breaking play dates because they were either “too busy” or “didn’t have time” to meet.

I found the article so interesting, not because it sadly exemplified a current social malaise, but because it reminded me of my younger brother’s imaginary friend, Dobby, and how the two of them used to play together day-in-and-day-out. Endlessly long days. The two of them were inseparable. Wherever my brother played, you’d always find Dobby. (Perhaps I was a bit envious; for who wouldn’t want a friend who always is there when you need him?)

Reflecting on the difference between the cell-phoning-date-cancelling New York imaginary friend and my brother’s ever-faithful Dobby, I was overcome with a sentimental yearning for times long gone. Times when we would “take time” for family, friends, or important activities, creative activities: all of those precious integral parts of our lives we now so often neglect. Times when we “had” spare time, or even, horror of all horrors, when we sometimes wasted time. Times when our lifestyles included concepts such as meandering, setting a leisurely pace, feeling as though time had stopped, anticipating an event (e.g., Christmas) far in the future… the list goes on.

Now we need the Slow Movement (here and here), Slow Food (here and here), and Slow Sex (sorry didn’t want to navigate my way through the links from Google with these search words) to jolt us out of our madness. And we are mad to choose to live the way we are living, there’s no doubt about that.

charlotte of charlotte’s web blog

I am a feminist because without feminism women would not have the choices they have today. I am a feminist because I feel patriarchy, and its nasty little brother sexism, as dark and heavy weights that need to be lifted from the planet. I am a feminist because I care about fairness and equality and opportunity for all. And I’ll be a feminist until women and children are no longer abused and raped. Until a certain kind of man stops acting out his fear of women as violence. Until a certain kind of man can recognise all women as his equal, and not use a holy book, or a stick, or his body to beat them down.

I recognise my feminism as a process. I’ve come a long way, from competing with men, from trying to play as hard as them, from using them, from being virulently angry with them. I clearly remember the point when I let go my anger and decided not to bother with men until the right one came along. Falling in love with him softened me. It opened my eyes to the fact that there are good and kind men in the world, who also want fairness, non-violence and equal opportunities, and who not only pay lip service to those words but actually act on them. Having been around so-called “progressive” men who were just as sexist and idiotic as the next unreconstructed dude, it was completely refreshing to love a man who didn’t mess about with principles, but who was - and still is - kind.

So having found my love, it was an easy decision for me to choose to stay at home with our children. Much of it was circumstantial - had I been still in South Africa, where we would have been locked into a mega-mortgage that needed two salaries to service it, where home help is affordable, where grannies live, I think I would have stayed in the workplace. When we left, I was about to enjoy a promotion to editor of the inhouse magazine I worked on, and I imagine, had I stayed at that company, I would have make steady progress upwards.

Instead to my shock, I find myself a stay-at-home mother in Germany of all places. Instead of setting goals and dealing with politics and motivating employees, I’m raising three children, cooking nourishing meals, keeping things tidy without being obsessed, making sure people have clean clothes to wear and shopping for food. I am doing the jobs I once ridiculed and which I once saw as degrading drudgery. Yet I’m happy and I’m still a feminist.

How do I manage to reconcile all this? It helps to have a partner who does his bit domestically. Sometimes he has to be asked, but he never says no. It helps to have an astonishing cleaning lady who comes once a week and makes things sparkle. It helps to have part-time work that earns some money and gives me something else to think about during my day. It helps to have wonderful, inspiring, interesting friends who are doing fascinating things with their lives, who are trying to be positive and creative parents, with whom I can talk books, movies, life, men and the best cheesecake recipe. It helps to blog and have made fascinating and varied blog friends whose ideas inspire me daily.

It also helps to have a role model in my mother-in-law who went back to work in her late forties, started her own business in her fifties and now, twenty years later, still puts on her spiffy business clothes and goes to the office. Her success inspires me. We seem to think it’s imperative to build a career in our thirties. Not so! I’m delaying that gratification until my forties. I know without doubt that it will happen.

I think it’s possible to have it all. It’s just not possible to have it all all at the same time. That road leads to madness, or extreme dissatisfaction. With that knowledge, I am happy doing the jobs I do now, knowing that in ten years time the jobs I do will have shifted. I had my me-time in my twenties, and believe me, I’m going to have it again. Until then, I remain the stay-at-home feminist. And a happy one, at that.

Emil Erich Kästner wurde am 23. Februar 1899 in Dresden geboren und als Sohn von Ida und Emil Kästner registriert. Die Legende, Sohn von Emil Kästner zu sein, verbreitete Erich Kästner zum Schutz (des Rufes) seiner Mutter selbst weiter, unter anderem in seinem Werk „Als ich ein kleiner Junge war“, durch das er seiner Geburtsstadt, dem barocken Elbflorenz, ein zauberhaftes Denkmal setzte.

Meine nächstjüngere Schwester und ich haben Erich Kästner in unserer Kindheit regelmäßig zum Geburtstag geschrieben. Und jedes Jahr bekamen wir jeweils eine Antwort! Von ihm selber handgeschrieben und persönlich an uns adressiert. Ich hebe diese freundlich- zugewandten Grüße wie kleine Schätze auf … (more).