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Czechoslovakia The Family
In the mid-1980s, the family remained a significant force in
Czechoslovak society, despite more than thirty-five years of KSC
rule. Families played a pivotal role, according to many
observers, in transmitting just those characteristic Czech and
Slovak values that have often been criticized by the regime,
e.g., the Czech penchant for political pluralism and the Slovak
devotion to Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, socialism has had a
distinctive if often unpredictable effect on family life. The
employment of the vast majority of married women of child-bearing
age has favored three-generation extended families, in which
grandparents (especially grandmothers) have helped women deal
with the often conflicting demands of work and child rearing
(see Workers
, this ch.). Family cooperation remained important because
child-care centers could not accommodate all children of working
mothers, nor would the centers accept children who were ill.
Extended families in which a relative played a significant
role in child rearing were more common in households where women
had a secondary school or university education. Presumably the
presence of a grandparent permitted these women to continue an
education or assume work responsibilities that might have been
precluded if they bore the major share of child care. Among urban
households in which the woman had completed only elementary
school or vocational training, relatives rarely played a role in
child rearing (in less than 5 percent of those households
surveyed, according to a 1970s report). In agricultural regions,
where women often worked at home on family garden plots or worked
only seasonally, the role of the extended family has been even
more limited.
Another factor encouraging extended family households has
been Czechoslovakia's endemic housing shortage. Although the
government's pronatalist policies favored married couples
(especially those with children) in housing allocation, many
young families (perhaps one-third) waited up to five years for
their first separate apartment. Most of these families shared an
apartment with a mother or mother-in-law. Divorced couples
sometimes continued living together simply for want of other
housing alternatives. For the elderly, who were expected to trade
their apartments for smaller ones as spouses died and children
left home, the situation was often difficult.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the number of marriages in
Czechoslovakia declined while the number of divorces increased.
Although marriages began to increase in 1982, the rate of divorce
continued to climb; it rose from 14 percent in 1970 to 32 percent
in 1985.
Data as of August 1987
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