MAX LAUTENSCHLAEGER / CORBIS FOR TIME Job: Lawyer Woman’s Work: The mother of five says it is usually women, not men, who criticize her for trying to combine work and family

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Posted Sunday, January 22, 2006; 10.33GMT
The new Chancellor still appears nonplussed by the male-dominated world she has inhabited since her native East Germany was subsumed into its capitalist alter ego. In the communist world of her youth, women went out to work — and often looked after the house, too. But when the Wall came down in 1989, Merkel found herself in a society that chanted the mantra of the famous "three Ks" — Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) — as a prescription for the priorities its female citizens were expected to observe.

Last year's elections showed how little attitudes have changed since reunification. Merkel's campaign manifesto mentioned policies for women just three times; she was subjected to media criticism of her fashion sense and her private life (she has no children and her husband shuns a public role); and Doris Schröder-Kopf, the spouse of her rival, then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, seemed to wonder aloud if the childless Merkel could really understand the needs of German mothers: "Frau Merkel doesn't represent most women's experiences," Schröder-Kopf sniped. Even among members of Merkel's own party, the Christian Democratic Union (cdu), support for her candidacy was weak. Some senior figures withheld their backing simply because they were "unable to accept a woman in this position," a senior cdu official told Time.

Having beaten tough odds to lead her country, Merkel now faces an even tougher challenge: shifting Germans' entrenched attitudes to gender roles. Dozens of women across Germany in all walks of life, interviewed by Time, spoke of persistent stereotypes that they say dictate and circumscribe opportunities for women. Most potent of these, perhaps, is an idealized image of motherhood still predicated on the three Ks. "The Mutterkreuz ideology still lingers," says Barbara Bierach, 50, an author from Munich living in New York City. That ideology, which has its roots deep in German culture and takes its name from medals for motherhood handed out during the Third Reich, holds that women are biologically predestined to bear and nurture children to adulthood.

Bierach, who wrote a book called The Stupid Sex (about women, not men) in 2002, says that German women are just as likely to propagate the idea as their male compatriots: "Career mothers' worst enemy is not the testosterone-ridden boss but the neighborhood earth mother," she says. "If a mother is not home at 1 p.m. to cook spaghetti for her kids she is judged to be a Rabenmutter." (The word translates as raven mother, a slur based on the misconception that the jet-black birds neglect their young.) It's a phrase heard often in German debates on the role of women. Says Renate Künast, 50, the co-chair of the Green Party's parliamentary group in Berlin, "The word must be dropped from the German vocabulary. The word Rabenvater [raven father] does not even exist."

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