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Minister in the Ampel-Coalition: Family should be a man's business

2021-11-25T09:17:19.644Z


Those who are serious about equality put a man at the head of the family ministry. Enlarge image Façade of the Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth: In Germany, family policy has all too often meant women's policy. Photo: Jens Kalaene / dpa We all know these photos: old white men in new black suits, lined up next to each other on official occasions, looking seriously at the camera. Women? Nothing. They are photos with a high gray value and an even higher symb


Enlarge image

Façade of the Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth: In Germany, family policy has all too often meant women's policy.

Photo: Jens Kalaene / dpa

We all know these photos: old white men in new black suits, lined up next to each other on official occasions, looking seriously at the camera.

Women?

Nothing.

They are photos with a high gray value and an even higher symbolic value.

For some time now, they have been a reliable source of amusement and indignation in social networks.

The ancestral gallery of the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs looks like this:

Christine Lambrecht

Franziska Giffey

Katarina Barley

Manuela Schwesig

Kristina Schröder

Ursula von der Leyen

Renate Schmidt

Christine Bergmann

Claudia Nolte

Hannelore Rönsch

Angela Merkel

Ursula Lehr

Rita Süssmuth

Do you notice something?

Good.

But where is the joy, where is the indignation?

Where are the demands that the traffic light coalition should finally put a man in the picture again?

The last man to be sworn in as Federal Family Minister was Heiner Geißler.

That was 1982. That was 39 years ago.

Chancellor-designate Olaf Scholz decided during the election campaign that at least half of the posts in his cabinet should be female.

Depending on the political location, this can be mistaken for identity-political Larifari and insisted on the difference between representation and representativeness.

Or refer to the great importance of symbolic political measures on the way to more gender equality.

There are arguments for both positions.

What is not possible, however, is to consider a gender-equality occupation of the ministerial offices to be the ultimate - and at the same time find it unproblematic if a woman should become family minister again.

The symbolic effect would be fatal: If for decades only women have been responsible for "family and fuss," as former Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder once put it, at the highest level of the state - how is that supposed to change in the families themselves?

Family policy in Germany all too often means women's policy

"It only works together!" Is the title of a book by the feminist sociologist Jutta Allmendinger.

At least she is right about the title.

But how do you manage to get more men on board?

Some men have the feeling that on the way to more equality and a fairer distribution of care work, something should only be taken away from them - and nothing new should be given.

A mistake, sure.

But a man at the helm of the family ministry could finally dispel this mistake.

And he could probably do this much more convincingly from his speaker position than a woman.

Especially since family policy in Germany has so far all too often meant women's policy.

That already sounds like in the name of the ministry.

Since 1994 it has been officially called the Federal Ministry for the Family, Seniors, Women and Youth.

The name sends two messages.

First, men are not really part of the family's domestic world.

Second: Women are particularly vulnerable beings who cannot look after themselves, similar to adolescents and the elderly.

As a man - and as a woman - you can't really like either.

Both are expressions of an antiquated role model.

Why not simply: Federal Ministry for Family and Equality?

Then women and men, young and old are part of it.

No matter how and with whom you live together.

After all, the family pictures in 2021 are different from those in 1994.

A contemporary policy aimed at equality would have to pay much more attention than before to the fact that there are two spheres of power: a public, professional (in which women rightly want more of the cake) and a domestic, private (in which they have to give up power in return). This is a failure of the female dominated, feminist connotated family policy of the past decades.

An example: The grand coalition of CDU / CSU and SPD did not manage in two legislative periods to initiate the announced major reform in custody, access and maintenance law. And so a mother and her child still somehow belong more closely together in the German imagination than a father and his child. The weekly newspaper »Die Zeit« wrote in an editorial on this topic as early as 2019: »You cannot demand the abolition of patriarchy and, where this would work to your disadvantage, fight for its continued existence.« The way to more equality is not a one-way street.

In the traffic light coalition, the family ministry will now fall to the Greens.

Gender equality was once part of their brand essence.

The party should take the chance and prove that this is still the case - and that it is by no means stuck in a misunderstood old-school feminism.

It would be proof that all those separation fathers were wrong, who are actually politically close to the Greens, but who made their mark in the Bundestag election with the FDP because they believe they have found the more modern family image there.

Anyone who is serious about equal rights is now putting a man at the head of the Family Ministry.

Political care work must be done by men.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-11-25

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