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This chapter discusses the impact of social conditions and gender relations on women’s decisions about family, education and employment in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), on the one hand, and explores the dynamic interaction between women’s decisions and the policies of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), on the other. In 1970, women were at the center of the multiple economic dilemmas that confronted the SED. As women massively entered the industrial workforce in the 1960s, they reduced their birth rate and retreated into part-time employment. Given the GDR’s drastic shortage of labor, these practices alarmed the SED. Women’s decisions about work and reproduction contributed significantly to a major revision of social and economic policy in a mother-friendly direction. But this article argues that rather than solving the SED’s economic and demographic problems, state maternalist policies accelerated the privatization and individualization of subjectivities, especially among the rising number of educated East German women.