324 CHRISTOPHER NEUMAIER AND ANDREAS LUDWIG
women in particular tended to favor this kind of partnership as opposed
to a traditional marriage, and this group grew over the course of the
expansion of the university-based educational system in the 1970s. As
early as 1980, it had become apparent that professional women with
upper-level educations were consciously deciding against marriage and
choosing unmarried partnerships because the traditional division of roles
within a marriage did not leave room for self-realization outside the role
of housewife and mother. The appeal that nonmarital partnerships devel-
oped as an alternative type of cohabitation was not necessarily refl ected
in the way it spread throughout society in the 1970s and 1980s, but rather
in the rate of growth. According to estimates, there was a 277-percent
increase in these kinds of partnerships between 1972 and 1982. Among
those aged under twenty-four, the numbers of these relationships even
multiplied tenfold. These developments boosted the social signifi cance
of unmarried couples enormously between the 1970s and the 1980s.^149
In 1981, about 150 thousand unmarried couples lived together in the
GDR, which meant that they were about as common as in West Germany.
The number of single parents had also risen considerably, with an esti-
mate of about 340 thousand unmarried mothers with minor-aged children
in 1989. This statistically measured sociostructural transformation corre-
sponds to the opinions of the population. In 1987, 70 percent of women
agreed with the idea that a fi rst child could be born out of wedlock, but
that couples should marry if they had a second child. The changing at-
titude among citizens was encouraged particularly by the family policy
framework in the GDR. Unmarried mothers, for example, were granted
special benefi ts and preferred status in the assignment of living quarters
with the birth of their fi rst child. The introduction of a “baby year” for
single mothers from the fi rst child onward in 1976 further accelerated the
spread of alternative lifestyles because this paid maternity leave was only
granted to married women from the second child onward.^150 The eff ects
of family policy decisions such as these can still be felt today in that the
percentage of children born out of wedlock in East Germany went from
13 percent in 1970 to 61 percent in 2010 in the new federal states. In
contrast, the percentage of children born to unmarried couples in West
Germany was only 27 in 2010, which was considerably below the level of
the East. Despite these diff erences, it is still clear that the percentage of
children born out of wedlock in Germany increased on the whole, from
just 7 percent in 1970 to 23 percent in 2000. This fi gure then jumped
even further to 33 percent in the decade thereafter.^151
As of the early twenty-fi rst century, nonmarital partnerships were still
more prevalent among groups with higher educational degrees, although
this distinction has become less of a marker lately. Moreover, such a shift