Innovation and Maladjustment: Contraceptive Technologies in State-Socialist Poland, 1950s–1970s

2022 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 182-208
Author(s):  
Agata Ignaciuk
Keyword(s):  
State Socialist

Poland

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Pope John Paul Ii ◽  
National Values ◽  
The Impact ◽  
State Socialist ◽  
The Church

The chapter on Poland focuses on two questions. Why, in contrast to all other state-socialist countries, did the church’s capacity for integration actually increase rather than decrease despite persecution and discrimination during the communist period? And why has this capacity also remained more or less constant (albeit to a lesser extent) in the period since the end of communist rule? The authors have identified four key factors in the remarkable resistance of the Polish Catholic Church during the period of communist persecution: the fusion of religious and national values, the specific conflict dynamics of the church’s struggle with the state, the structural conservatism of agricultural production in Poland, and the actions of Pope John Paul II. Explanations for the surprising stability of religiosity in Poland after 1990 point to the behaviour of the Church itself, to the internal pluralization of Catholicism, and to the impact of a homogeneous religious culture.

Goods and States: The Political Logic of State-Socialist Material Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 426-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Fehérváry
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
The City ◽  
State Socialist

In the two decades since the fall of state socialism, the widespread phenomenon ofnostalgiein the former Soviet satellites has made clear that the everyday life of state socialism, contrary to stereotype, was experienced and is remembered in color. Nonetheless, popular accounts continue to depict the Soviet bloc as gray and colorless. As Paul Manning (2007) has argued, color becomes a powerful tool for legitimating not only capitalism, but democratic governance as well. An American journalist, for example, recently reflected on her own experience in the region over a number of decades:It's hard to communicate how colorless and shockingly gray it was behind the Iron Curtain … the only color was the red of Communist banners. Stores had nothing to sell. There wasn't enough food… . Lines formed whenever something, anything, was for sale. The fatigue of daily life was all over their faces. Now… fur-clad women confidently stride across the winter ice in stiletto heels. Stores have sales… upscale cafés cater to cosmopolitan clients, and magazine stands, once so strictly controlled, rival those in the West. … Life before was so drab. Now the city seems loaded with possibilities (Freeman 2008).

“The Minor Would Hinder the Mother in Finding Employment:” Child Protection and Women’s Paid Work in Early State Socialist Hungary

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 818-839 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter Varsa
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Residential Care ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Control Approach ◽  
Early State ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Residential Care Institutions ◽  
State Socialist

This article discusses the role of child protection and residential care institutions in mediating the tension between women’s productive and reproductive responsibilities in early state socialist Hungary. At a time when increasing numbers of women entered paid work in the framework of catch-up industrialization but the socialization of care work was inadequate, these institutions substituted for missing public child care services. Relying on not only policy documents but more than six hundred children’s case files, including Romani children’s files, from three different locations in Hungary as well as interviews with former children’s home residents and personnel, the article examines the regulatory framework in which child protection institutions and caseworkers operated. It points to the differentiated forms of pressure these institutions exercised on Romani and non-Romani mothers to enter paid work between the late 1940s and the early 1950s from the intersectional perspective of gender and ethnicity. Showing that prejudice against “Gypsies” as work-shy persisted in child protection work across the systemic divide of the late 1940s, the article contributes to scholarship on state socialism and Stalinism that emphasizes the role of historical continuities. At the same time, reflecting on parental invention in using child protection as a form of child care, the article also complicates a simplistic social control approach to residential care institutions in Stalinist Hungary.

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