Manuela Maier was branded a bad mother. A Rabenmutter, or raven mother, after the bird that pushes chicks out of the nest. She was ostracized by other mothers, berated by neighbors and family and screamed at in a local store.
Her crime? Signing up her nine-year-old son Florian when the primary school first offered lunch and afternoon classes last autumn — and returning to work.
“I was told: ‘Why do you have children if you can’t take care of them?’” Maier, 47, recalled.
By comparison, she said, having a first son out of wedlock 21 years ago raised few eyebrows in this traditional town in Bavaria, Germany’s Catholic and generally conservative southern state, she said.
Ten years into the 21st century, most primary and secondary schools in Europe’s biggest economy still end before lunch, typically around 1pm, a tradition that dates back nearly 250 years. It has powerfully sustained the homemaker-mother image of German lore and was long credited with producing well-bred, well-read burghers.
Modern Germany may be run by a woman — Chancellor Angela Merkel, routinely called the world’s most powerful woman in politics — but it seems no coincidence that she is childless.
The half-day school system survived feudalism, the rise and demise of Adolf Hitler’s mother cult, the women’s movement of the 1970s and reunification with East Germany.
Now, in the face of economic necessity, it is crumbling: One of the lowest birthrates in the world, the specter of labor shortages and slipping educational standards have prompted a reconsideration. Since 2003, nearly a fifth of Germany’s 40,000 schools have phased in afternoon programs, and more plan to follow suit.
“This is a taboo we just can’t afford anymore,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the German labor minister. “The country needs women to be able to both work and have children.”
A mother of seven and a doctor-turned-politician, von der Leyen baffles homemakers and childless career women alike, not to mention many men in her Christian Democrat Party.
For her, the spread of all-day schooling in Germany is “irreversible,” as women flock into the work force, whether they seek fulfillment, are single mothers or have partners whose income cannot sustain a family alone. In Germany, one-fifth of households depend on the income of women.
This trend makes childcare a question of competitiveness, notes Karen Hagemann, a professor of European and gender history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“High birth rates and female employment rates tend to move together,” said Hagemann, an expert on Germany’s system. “Child care and a school system that covers the working day is key.”
In 1763, Prussia was the first country to make education compulsory for the lower classes. The half-day system evolved in an era that depended on child labor. By the time France and Britain set up day-long systems a century later, the German way — which survives in Austria and parts of Switzerland — had grown deep roots.
GENERAL CULTURE
Germany’s middle classes long believed that they, not the state, should round out children’s general culture. No school, the thinking went, could improve on a mother.
Edith Brunner, 41, is that increasingly rare German model mother. A qualified tax adviser and mother of four, she went to part-time work after her first child and then gave up her job altogether. She spends afternoons checking homework and shuttling from flute and piano lessons to soccer training and gymnastics. Her husband is a well-paid physicist.
But the system discouraged more highly educated women from having children. By their mid-40s, one in three German women lives in a childless household, which gives Germany, along with Austria, the highest proportion of such households in Europe.
The old ways were also ill adapted to a Germany in which rising numbers of students were immigrants, many of whom needed more help in basic skills. In 2001, a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of the world’s most developed democracies with market-based economies, of the literacy skills of 15-year-olds stunned Germany by ranking it 21st out of 27, and near the bottom in terms of social mobility. Two years later, the government made US$5.7 billion available to introduce all-day programs at 10,000 of the country’s 40,000 schools by last year; 7,200 schools took part.
Mothers have responded strongly. Wolfgang Gruber of the Bavarian education authority uses words like “flood” and “avalanche” to describe demand for afternoon schooling. Between 2006 and last year, only 40 primary schools in Bavaria converted. This school year, the number of all-day programs rose to 150. The aim is afternoon classes in 540 of the 2,300 primary schools, Gruber said.
Yet the transition is not without its difficult moments, as Maier discovered. A caregiver for the elderly, Maier jumped at the chance of afternoon school but was soon taken aback by the reaction of some other mothers. In October, as she was shopping for a washing machine, she was accosted by the mother of one of her son’s friends who shouted insults.
ACTIVITIES
But she said the sneers soon turned to sheepish questions about her son’s exciting afternoon activities. Several parents tried to sign up in the middle of the term, but the program was already oversubscribed. Even the angry mother has become quite friendly, Maier said.
In 2008, 64 percent of German women were working, compared with 66 percent in the US, according to OECD figures. But for mothers with children under 12, the figure plunges to 38 percent, compared with 55 percent in France and 77 percent in Sweden, according to figures cited in a 2006 article by Hagemann. Only 14 percent of women with one child return to full-time work and only 6 percent of those with two. The birthrate is stuck at 1.38 children per woman.
Berlin is the only city in Germany where every primary school offers afternoon schooling. In the former East Germany, with its communist-era tradition of generous childcare measures, 37 percent of under-three-year-olds have nursery places, compared with 3 percent in Germany’s western regions.
That history of ideological conflict held things back, said von der Leyen, the labor minister. “Day care and all-day schools were long synonymous with communism,” she said.
But now, those same amenities are luring Westerners like Urte Dally and her husband, Ortwin, who moved to Berlin in 1994. Their daughters, ages 11 and eight, attend a school from 8am to 4pm, and parents get childcare from 6am to 6pm Monday to Friday, and on holidays.
As family minister in Merkel’s first term, von der Leyen introduced tax credits for private childcare, more nursery places and her signature measure, “parent money,” which can sound almost unfathomable to Americans, who are used to paying for private childcare.
Under parent money, mothers and fathers are entitled to a total of 14 months of parental leave at 67 percent of their salary. The months can be apportioned any way the parents want as long as the father takes at least two. If the father takes less than two months — one in five now do — the government only pays for 12.
At Siemens, the 163-year-old industrial symbol of Germany Inc, 638 employees took “father months” in 2008. Last year, 964 followed suit.
The move toward all-day schooling and childcare is just part of a broader shift in Germany. With demographers predicting a shortfall of 200,000 engineers in Germany by 2017, Siemens is courting women, and mothers, with reserved places in day care and high school science camps for girls.
Currently, 21 percent of Siemens’ staff in Germany is female, but among new recruits the proportion rises to 34 percent. Siemens is the only top 30 German company with a woman on its eight-person management board — Barbara Kux, 55, unmarried and childless.
If women’s advancement to date has been accepted by men, might conflict loom as calls for next steps — boardroom quotas and mandatory paternity leave — grow louder?
“Many obstacles remain, and a backlash is always possible,” said Hagemann, the history professor.
But in Germany and elsewhere, once unthinkable notions are now being entertained.
“All change,” she said, “starts with a change in the head.”
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