Researcher Kate Stanton

The history of the East German women's movement is a topic that has only been researched in fragments so far. Under socialism, some women organized themselves in underground groups in the peace and dissident movements and also played an important role in the protests of 1989. In the early 1990s, activists fought for better access to abortion and were part of the emerging women's shelter movement. However, East German feminism is difficult to find both in GDR research and in European feminist history.

Kate Stanton wants to shed more light on this chapter of recent German history and feminism and is doing her PhD on the subject at Oxford University. Last academic year, she traveled to Berlin with the support of the Berlin University Alliance through the Oxford Berlin Research Partnership and worked at the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University as a visiting researcher.

She talks about her stay in Berlin, which gave her access to numerous important archives and to contemporary witnesses and activists from Erfurt, Weimar, Dresden, Leipzig and East Berlin, in a personal report and on the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies' gender blog.

More information

Read personal report

Read blog post

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