The Vanishing Hausfrau

Ah, the German hausfrau. There she stands in front of her beloved stove. Her mind untarnished by thoughts that do not concern the care of her family or the future of her soul, she is cheerfully dedicated to producing heartier dinners, cleaner floors, and more babies. From a life tightly bound by Kinder, Kirche and Kueche, she gazes fondly up at her worldly husband.

This is a picture comforting to any German male--but these days he is likely to find it only in an old movie. In fact, the traditional hausfrau is no more. Today's West German housewife, says Family Minister Franz-Joseph Wuermeling with a shudder, "prefers a secondhand Volkswagen to a second child."

To get it, she has gone to work. Women comprise a whopping 34.3% of the West German labor force, and often hold down jobs in formerly all-male provinces. Gas tanks along the Autobahnen are often operated by coveralled frauleins. Bonn has female barbers, policemen and butchers. Women outnumber men in 22 industries, from hatmaking to public relations, and they own one out of five businesses. There are 43 women in the West German Parliament, including the Minister of Health. Even a beer-hall political discussion is no longer safe; Die Zeit's Marion Dbnhoff, an attractive countess, is a widely quoted political columnist.

Although Germany had its suffragettes early in the century--and a woman in the Reichstag by 1919--emancipation on a national scale has come only since the war. The Third Reich borrowed its idea of womanhood from 19th century romanticism, when a German woman was considered "a happy, still oasis, a wellspring of life's poetry, a remnant of paradise." But cleaning up the postwar rubble of man-shy Germany was no job for a still oasis, and women took on a responsibility that has since produced a staggering social revolution.

Impetus now comes from the opposite direction. Only 13% of Germany's working mothers hold their jobs out of economic necessity. Most of the rest are furiously engaged in the race to keep up with the Muellers. with second cars, appliances and travel. One thing leads to another: appliances make housework more of a bore; travel and entertainment stir interests far from the Kueche. According to a recent study, four out of five formerly docile hausfraus consider their lot unhappy, and most of them because they are "fed up with housework." With the divorce rate up and the birth rate down, many a West German male is musing sadly about the old days, when a man may not have owned a car, but when he at least had his pedestal.

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