“THE TIME OF CHAOS WAS THE BEST”

Abstract
The women's movement in East Germany went through three phases—emergence, white-hot mobilization, and demobilization—in rapid succession. These stages are analyzed with regard to the resources, political opportunities, and personal meanings of feminism that activists had available. The postunification crisis of the movement is used to examine issues of collective identity between East and West, and to highlight challenges to dichotomies between public and private, capitalism and socialism posed by the movement.