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Poland The Role of Women
By the mid-1970s, nearly half the Polish work force was
made
up of women. On a purely statistical basis, Poland, like
the rest
of the Soviet alliance in Eastern Europe, offered women
more
opportunities for higher education and employment, than
did most
West European countries. Between 1975 and 1983, the total
number
of women with a higher education doubled, to 681,000
graduates.
Many professions, such as architecture, engineering, and
university teaching, employed a considerably higher
percentage of
women in Poland than in the West, and over 60 percent of
medical
students in 1980 were women (see
table 2, Appendix). In
many
households in the 1980s, women earned more than their
husbands.
Yet the socialist system that yielded those statistics
also
uniformly excluded women from the highest positions of
economic
and political power. In the mid-1980s, only 15 percent of
graduates in technical subjects were women, while more
than 70
percent of jobs in health, social security, finance,
education,
and retail sales were filled by women. During the 1980s,
very few
women occupied top positions in the PZPR (whose 1986
membership
was 27 percent women). Similar statistics reflected the
power
relationships in Solidarity, the diplomatic corps, and the
government. By definition, women were excluded completely
from
the other great center of power, the Catholic Church. In
mid1992 , Poland elected its first woman prime minister, Hanna
Suchocka
(see The Suchocka Government
, ch. 4). Her
coalition
government included no other women. In 1992 the head of
the
National Bank of Poland, a very powerful position, was a
woman,
and Ewa Letowska, former commissioner of citizens' rights,
was
prominently mentioned as a presidential candidate.
Some experts asserted that the male power structure
protected
its dominance by limiting the opportunities for the
advancement
of Polish women to those that filled an existing need in
the
male-dominated society. Another factor in the role of
women,
however, was the high priority that Polish society
continued to
give to their role within the family and in raising
children (see
table 3, Appendix). In the 1980s, one in ten Polish
mothers was
single, and many single mothers had never been married. In
1991
over 6 percent of Polish families consisted of a single
mother
caring for one or more children. The extended family
provided
support for such unconventional arrangements. During the
1980s,
both the state (by adjusting school schedules and
providing
nurseries and substantial paid maternity leave) and the
church
(by its influential emphasis on the sanctity of the
family)
successfully promoted the traditional role of women in
raising
the next generation. In the early 1980s, a very small
women's
liberation movement began at Warsaw University, but in the
years
following it failed to expand its membership
significantly. In
1990 women in Warsaw set a precedent by demonstrating
against
church-inspired legislation making abortion illegal.
Even with the support of state institutions, however,
during
the communist era working women with families often had
the
equivalent of two full-time jobs because their husbands
did not
make major contributions to household work. According to
one
study, working women averaged 6.5 hours per day at their
jobs and
4.3 hours per day on household duties. In the times of
scarcity
in the 1980s, standing in line to make purchases occupied
a large
part of the latter category. Women without jobs, by
contrast,
spent an average of 8.1 hours per day on household duties.
The
increased unemployment of the early 1990s generally
affected more
women than men. According to official figures, in 1992
forty
women were jobless for every vacancy they were qualified
to fill,
while the ratio for men was fourteen to one. Women made up
52.4
percent of the total unemployed, a higher percentage than
their
overall share of the work force.
In 1992 women ran about 20 percent of Polish farms, a
much
higher percentage than in Western countries. In most
cases, such
arrangements reflected necessity rather than choice.
Nearly 70
percent of these women were single, and over 40 percent
were over
age sixty. In most cases, grown children had left the farm
for
better opportunities and the husband had died or become
incapacitated.
The end of communist government brought a new debate
about
women's role in Polish society. After 1989 many Poles
began to
associate women's rights with the enforced equality of the
discredited communist past. A significant part of society
saw the
political transformation as an appropriate time for women
to
return full-time to the home after communism had forced
them into
the workplace and weakened the Polish family.
The rights of women were central to the controversy
over
state abortion law that escalated sharply in 1991 and
1992,
although few women had policy-making roles and no major
women's
groups took advocacy positions
(see The Polish Catholic Church and the State
, this ch.). Some of the social policies of
the
postcommunist governments complicated the situation of
working
mothers. A 1992 national study revealed discrimination
against
women in hiring practices and payment of unemployment
benefits,
and no law prohibited such sex discrimination. Because
childsupport payments were not indexed to the cost of living,
the
payments many women received became nearly worthless in
periods
of high inflation. In the communist system, daycare for
the
children of working mothers had been cheap and widely
available,
but by 1992 more than half the Polish daycare centers had
closed.
Striving to become self-supporting, the remaining centers
raised
their prices sharply in the reform period.
Data as of October 1992
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