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When I'm drivin' in my car, and that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more about some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I saw that report a few days ago on PBS news, and my first thought about the woman that was interviewed was "how naive". She was poorly informed about the real motive for state-supported programs to benefit women in entering the work force and to support them after child birth. She gave me the impression that women were well cared for under socialist systems in the cold war era of Eastern Europe, because of some benevolent goals of the system.
After WW2, Germany had a demographic imbalance due to the deaths or severe injuries of millions of young men. In 1945, over a quarter of children in Germany had only one parent. Since there were many more women than men, women were needed in the workforce for post war reconstruction. In East Germany (the former German Democratic Republic), the situation became even worse in the 1950s. Millions of its citizens voted with their feet against living in the worker's socialist paradise, and moved to West Germany. This was before a wall was built between East and West Germany, and surrounding West Berlin. Women were needed to backfill for many of the open jobs of those that left the east, including many industrial type jobs that traditionally were held by men. None of this was mentioned in the interview.
There is a good reason the socialist state provided incentives for child care, women's health care, before and after childbirth. The state needed a big bump in population growth to make up for the losses to those people that left to the west. So yes, women were given incentives to enjoy sex and have multiple children, and the children were given a good, free education by the state. The purpose of this was to eventually move those well educated children into the military, government positions, state owned enterprises or other roles that benefit the socialist state. Once a person reached retirement age, and started drawing a pension from the state, a measure of their worth to the state was this: a retiree was free to leave the socialist state and move to West Germany, but they would lose their East German retirement pension. In other words, they were of no more use to the state, even though they had worked 40 or more years. This is a measure of how the state valued its citizens - they were essentially a commodity.
I was in Germany during the cold war era, while serving in the US Army. My girlfriend at the time was living in West Berlin but was born in East Germany, and we talked at length and in great detail about life under socialism in East Germany. Most of her relatives lived in East Germany, including 2 siblings. She stayed in close contact with them, and knew about their struggles with daily life. It was not a women's paradise or a worker's paradise.
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