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lie in July 1944, a series of decrees and constitutional changes announced immediate improvements in the position of Polish women. They were to have equal rights with men in social. political, and economic and cultural life. They were to have the right to work, and to equal pay for equal work: the right to leisure, to social insurance, education and public office. Laws were passed providing protection and facilities for mothers and children - maternity services, creches. nurseries, and other collective facilities, Pregnant women gained some security of employment and some rights to maternity allowances. Divorce became legal and easily available. Important though these changes were, they were little more than a caricature of the changes which had been made in the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution, (most of which were subsequently halted, reversed, or undermined). Thus, for exampic, the law forbidding abortion remaired until 1956. This was in line with the Soviet Union's law of that period. and was a capitulation to the pressure to increase the birth rate after the tremendous loses of the war years (รณ million dead, 2 million emigrants).
So how far have Polish women actually progressed in the past thirty years?
In a letter to the Polish Journal Kultura a working woman described an average day in her life. She would get up around 5:30 each morning. Her husband took his breakfast and left for work at about 7:30, while she got their son up, and ga ve him breakfast. She then took him to the creche, which was some long way from home, before dashing to work herself around 8:30 - often arriving late.
She was always tired. During the day she would have to Jeave her office to go shopping because the shops near to her home were very poor, and she had little time for shopping after work. At 4:15 she would leave work, collect her child (her husband hardly ever went to the creche) and return home. She hardly ever went out again and couldn't remember the last time she went to the cinema or theatre -who would look after the child?
Her husband had wanted the child. When she found she was pregnant she'd suggested that she should have an abortion, but held been very indignant about that. Now he didn't help her at all. The woman asked why there was so little help for working mothers - so few creches and other provisions for children - when so very many women work Gin her office 70% of the workers are women)
This woman 's experience is shared by masses of women in Poland today and is very similar to that of women in the other East European states: Her account shows with a betthe complete inadequacy of state provision and options persist amongst the post-war hoch at the level of the Communist oh Leapse of Women is this situation but Instead helps women to cope with it. Thus it provide educational and propaganda material to promote patriotism and civic responsibility amongst women. Through local circles it provides advice to mothers about child care and education, the organisation of housework, etc. It even does research into more efficient methods of housckeeping!
As in other Fastern European countrics, women in Poland have established their place in the paid work force - more rapidly and generally over a wider occupational range than have women in the capitalist countries. However, even in this sphere, they have not achieved equality in earning cupacity They remain concentrated in the lower levels of cach occupational hierarchy. But it is the double burden of work in paid employment and work in the still private and exclusively feminine domestic sphere which characterises their situation This double burden is particularly acule for both economic and ideological reasons: for example, the immense scale of the housing shortage - not enough houses, not cnough rooms, lack of basic facilities in much of the housing. The limited availability and high cost of household equip ment means that houschold chores for most women still involves heavy wark. And there is a shortage of creche, nursery school and after school study and play fucilities for children. The problems in getting abortion and contraception have again become greater as state concern to increase the birth rate has re-emerged. Men resist any idea that domestic or child care tasks are a responsibility of theirs, despite the clause in the family code stating that children are equatly the responsibility of mother and father. (One study showed that only 3 % of fathers supervised their children's meals and only between 18% and 22% played with their children!!
What structures the oppression of women and the development of the family in Hastern Europe?
The contradiction between socially organised general production and the private spliere of reproduction charucteristic of the bourgeois family is played out, but within the context of different social relations than those operating within capitalism. The family, fur from being replaced or transformed, particularly in recent years, has been consolidated. In the Soviet Union the family is often referred to as the 'small collective whose task is to prepare the young, in co-operation with the schools, for their part in the larger collective, the state. The family continues to structure a sharp social division between women and men In Eastern Europe gencrally. we can identify three phases
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dence on the man. These trends are all legitimated in the