The study combines survey data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) to address the role of changing parental resources in explaining the long-run historical trend of women’s rising educational attainment in Germany. For West German cohorts, the analysis suggests a distinction between two historical periods: a first one for birth cohorts up until the mid-1960s, when daughters’ educational attainment increased uniformly across all social strata, and a second period among women from younger birth cohorts, for whom all observable change in educational attainment can be explained as a pure compositional effect due to rising levels of parental resources. Rising educational attainment among East German cohorts has followed a more complex historical pattern, however, as women first benefitted from rapid educational expansion and the equalization of educational opportunity during the first two decades of the GDR. With educational policies reversed since the 1970s, East German women saw their educational progress stalled, and class-specific educational attainment actually in decline up until the point of German reunification. With reunification, women’s educational attainment increased sharply, but, as among Western cohorts, mostly as a reflection of the growth of parents’ private resources. In both parts of Germany, parental education rather than class has been the key factor at the family level, and increasingly so the rising education of mothers.