After a couple of days of researching and contacting women who have lived in the DDR and experienced the reunification, it is refreshing to see so many different perspectives. I´ve been warned against negative replies that may come from women who are antagonistic towards yet another curious westerner trying to get interviews to confirm their naive hypothesis of a typical woman from the DDR. Applying anthropological fieldwork methods in a open and critically aware framework, I hope that I avoid that trap. It is essential of course, to have a wide demographic research, speaking with both young and old women, those that have embraced the ideals from the DDR and those that have been more critical of the ideals perpetuated at the time and after through the reunification process. It seems that the emphasis on the socialist women being part of the class struggle and so the "women question" is no longer a separate problem, but unified with the struggle to overcome socio-economic inequality along with men. This is a good thing to strive for because it no longer isolates women and over-glorifies women-hood as so many feminist had done in the 1970`s, Germaine Greer to name but one in this cannon. Now I´m keen to dive into their experiences to discover if this ideal was really able to be lived.
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