Scheidung in Ost- und Westdeutschland

This paper compares marital stability of East and West German women before re-unification in 1990. It is analyzed to what extent women in both countries differed concerning the risk to experience a first divorce and what factors caused these differences. The main focus is on the impact of women’s labor force participation on marital stability. While the GDR, in terms of women’s participatio in the labor market, was based on egalitarian role expectations, the social and institutional constraints of the FRG supported the male-breadwinner model. The oppositeness of these role models makes it possible to investigate whether the interrelation between women’s labor force participation and marital stability differs between traditional and egalitarian societies. The empirical analyses, based on the German Fertility and Family Survey (1992), show a significantly higher divorce risk for East German women that is primarily caused by the smaller number of religious people, a higher share of women that experienced a parental divorce and the higher number of employed women in the GDR. In both countries women’ labor force participation was connected with a higher divorce risk, but the effect was stronger in West than in East Germany. Thus, this study yields evidence for a weaker negative relationship between women’s labor force participation and marital stability in societies that are dominated by egalitarian in comparison to traditional role expectations.