THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE 321
ing a sense of collectivity. At a political level, the overarching aim was to
foster the ideal “socialist personality” that was supposed to be achieved
by the programmatic inclusion of the family, or rather more precisely the
parents, in the state child-raising system. Simultaneously, social scien-
tists claimed, the social framework was diff erent from that of the West
because it fostered a considerably less emotional and more strongly ob-
jectifi ed parent-child relationship.^133
In contrast, the changes in the division of roles between husband and
wife within the family were less pronounced. A hotly debated topic in
West Germany in the 1970s was whether married women should work
or whether they should just be housewives. Employment among married
women was in fact on the rise between the 1960s and the late 1970s.
Whereas 34.6 percent of married women worked outside the home in
1950, which remained quite consistent through 1965, this fi gure had
jumped to 60.9 percent by 1979.^134 The employment quota among women
with children under the age of six, on the other hand, hardly changed at
all; it stayed at around 35 percent between 1973 and 1988. In contrast,
54 percent of women without children had jobs outside the home.^135 Con-
sequently, the rise of the “double-income household”^136 was really only a
reality for a minority of West German families in the 1970s and 1980s. Ac-
cording to studies conducted back at the time, this model was only found
in certain social groups: young married couples, upper social strata, less
religious families, and families living in cities. These families were con-
sidered to be the motors of social change because they had rejected pa-
triarchal family roles in favor of a relationship based on partnership. In
such households, both partners shared in the diff erent responsibilities,
tasks, duties, and rights. Accordingly, social change progressed at diff er-
ent speeds and strengths along four basic lines of distinction, namely city
versus country, social milieu, religious denomination, and age. Other ex-
perts pointed to self-employed men and academics as innovators when it
came to a new self-image of society because they supported their wives’
employment outside the home.^137 Profession and education were thus two
other important factors. In some West German milieus, at least, signs of a
shift in the division of roles within the family appeared. Nonetheless, one
role was not aff ected by these transformations, namely women’s roles
as mothers. For West German men, fatherhood was still at best a “week-
end job.”^138 There was no pluralization of social practices for these roles;
rather, a relatively homogeneous behavioral pattern remained fi rmly in
place.
As early as the 1950s, a long-lasting shortage of labor plus a trend
toward a decline in female employment, combined with ideological rea-
sons, led to a stronger push to foster women’s work outside the home in