ShareThisA child seemed a welcome addition to the life of Jutta Hoffritz, who had expected her pregnancy to lead to a predictable chain of events: For a year, she would stay home and care for her baby. Then she would place him in a decent child-care center and return to work -- difficult, but surely not beyond reach.
After all, she had a well-established career as a business journalist for a national magazine, and she lived in Dusseldorf, Germany, a prosperous and liberal city in a major welfare state. It seemed like a natural progression.
But this is Germany, where the working mother is still considered bizarre and somehow unacceptable. When she sought child care, she discovered there was none. The two spots available for children younger than 3 at one of her city's few nurseries were reserved for single mothers. She had to hire a full-time kinderfrau (child-minder) at a cost that consumed her entire salary.
And even when her child turns 3, the hassle and expense won't end: Germany has only half-day schooling, in most cases right through high school, and parents are expected to cover the other half out of their own pockets -- or, more often, out of their own time.
"In Germany," she said, "we have an ideology of motherhood. I thought I would be back in my office soon, no problem, but then I learned that I was being forced to forget everything I knew, and take up the career of being a full-time babysitter, and talk about nothing but children all day. It was terrible."
Unbeknownst to most outsiders, Germany is the most difficult place in Western Europe to be a working mother, with a deeply ingrained culture of machismo that expects women to give up their lives once they have children.
"Starting in the 1950s and right up to the present, you could not talk about working mothers or child care without sounding like you were talking about communism," says Birgit Wintermann, a policy analyst with the Bertelsmann Foundation in Berlin.
"This created a real barrier to women entering the work force, because you had no possibility for child care."
The ideology itself was Hoffritz's biggest barrier. When she talked about her frustrations, her friends and relatives openly denounced her as a rabenmutter -- literally "raven mother," a woman who abandons her children, like the mythic ravens throwing their chicks from the nest. It is a term routinely applied to working mothers in Germany.
"When I got pregnant, even though I'd had a career for 20 years, everyone expected me to drop my job forever, to take care of my son and not do anything else all day for the rest of my life, and they got angry when I said otherwise," she says. "Friends just thought I should be a full-time mom."
Until very recently, this anachronistic approach to family life was a studied non-topic in German public and political life.
In 2005, when Angela Merkel was elected chancellor, a survey by the World Economic Forum found that Germany ranked 20th among 58 developed nations in women's presence in the work force, 28th in job opportunities for women and 34th in educational attainment -- poor for a country that is close to the top in most other business categories.
Now, things are beginning to change -- paradoxically, under Merkel, a conservative Christian Democrat seeking re-election on Sept. 27 on a platform that includes a dramatic expansion of family policy.
Part of the change involved people like Hoffritz, who recently published a widely discussed book, "Revolt of the Rabenmutter."
But the most dramatic motor of change is Ursula von der Leyen, Merkel's Minister of Family Affairs. In 2007, she introduced the Elterngeld -- "parent money" -- Germany's first substantial maternity-leave policy, offering up to $2,800 a month for a year (or for 14 months if the father takes time as well), familiar elsewhere in Europe but a vast change from the few weeks Germany had offered before.
And she is in the midst of introducing hundreds of thousands of state-subsidized child-care spaces.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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