A New Youth?: Young People, Generations And ... - Youth Nation

Daughters of the Women’s Movement 189as it were, and changes in aims, action, and actors. Could it not be that thewomen’s movement has become obsolete, has outlived itself, or at least, in awholly different form or unnoticed by us, underground, continues its influence?Because this question will be answered differently depending on age andexperience, various opinions on this matter will tend to be handled in terms ofgenerational conflict, with metaphors and images of movements as mothers anddaughters. With the help of Karl Mannheim’s ‘generational situation’(Generationenlagen) I will try to provide an answer (2) not least out of interest inthe question of where, today, the women’s movement for feminism stands.The Women’s Movement and Social ChangeEmpirical studies of attitudes and ‘lifetime planning of younger women’ in theFederal Republic of Germany (Geissler and Oechsle, 1996; Seidenspinner et al.,1996) produce a contradictory picture, characterized by a tense proximity ofconflicting orientations, incompatibilities and ambivalence that can be subsumedunder the idea of ‘unequal equality’ (Oechsle and Geißler, 1998). Nonetheless, wecan make out trends and clear alterations in comparison to the mothers’ generation.Today’s young women find it self-evident to prepare for a profession and begainfully employed, regardless of differences in class origin, academic orprofessional degree and independent of the manner in which they envision theirlives unfolding. In other words, in the last thirty years, regardless of educationallevel, diploma or other career preparation, girls and young women in Germanyhave, to an astounding degree, not only caught up with but even in some domainsovertaken their male peers. And as the latest Shell Study of Youth underscores,girls and women, not unlike young men, exhibit a strong career orientation (Shell2002). In higher education females also generally have better grades; they are morethan half of degree candidates (54.9 per cent) and since 1997 more than half ofthose who start university study (52.4 per cent) (Klammer et al., 2000). Yet, at thesame time, in all later career development, ranging from graduation throughdoctoral degree candidates to managerial levels in academia, business and politics,the proportion of women sinks dramatically (the nadir being a male quotient of 95per cent at full professorial level). This can only be a result of continuing structuralbarriers that have been analysed so many times already and therefore will not bediscussed here.If we wish to evaluate social change, however, we really should distinguishbetween these stubborn social structures and the altered aspirations and life plansof younger women. Even though women’s structural, gender-specific inequality isclearly visible in their worse positioning in business, in their lower incomes or, incomparison to men, in miserable social security payments in old age, youngerwomen’s projections for their lives can be viewed as nothing less than a ‘culturalrevolution’. Since today’s young women have experienced little to nodiscrimination before they entered a profession or founded a family – or at worst ina subtle, almost imperceptible way easily interpreted as individual failure – thegreat majority take it for granted in evaluating their prospects that they are