Comment

Abstract

Comment Peggy Simpson The essay by Renata Siemienska contains invaluable insights into the dilemma facing women today not just in Poland but throughout the former Soviet bloc countries in East and Central Europe. These insights are not necessarily apparent at first reading—perhaps because it is stiU impolitic to sound too much like a feminist in criticruing past or present maledominated government poUdes. Obviously, it is difficult to shed the political caution that was mandatory in the last four decades and that made it impossible to raise questions about pofides on "women's place" that had been heralded as progressive by capitalist as weU as communist activists. Between the Unes, what Siemienska describes is a system of gender equaUty gone awry. What she documents, perhaps too subtly in places, is the fact that for more than 45 years the state-controUed poUtical economies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did, indeed, respond to "the market." They used women as expediently as did the capitalist economies of the West. They adjusted women's workplace benefits according to their overaU economic needs: when they wanted more women in the workplace, they expanded the factory-related chüd care and kindergarten facilities. When they wanted women out of the workplace in poorer economic times, they put in place very rich maternity leave benefits as inducements for working mothers to take off, with pay, for up to three years and stiU be guaranteed of having their job upon return. To an outsider—espedaUy one in a country like the United States that stiU has no system of paid maternity leave guaranteed by the government —that sounds like progress. It sounds as if the 45 years of stereotypes about the benefits under gender-related workplace pofides were correct and that the communist centraUy-controUed economies gave women big advantages over their Western counterparts. A dose reading of this artide points to the flaws in that conventional wisdom. It is something that Western feminists need to learn, now, before they go much further in planning missions to help the women of Eastern Europe. For example, Siemienska makes dear the hazards when progressive pofides are put in place, from the top down rather than from grassroots pressure. The policymakers are not necessarily putting plans in place for the benefit of all women but for the benefit of their own economic goals—to get everyone on the job, working, for instance. She also spells out how the virtual absence of grass-roots groups in the past four decades put women at the mercy of poUtical manipulators and left them with few © 1991 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 3 No. ι (Spring) 1991 Comment: Peggy Simpson 127 mechanisms with which to promote poUdes, programs, or poUtical people of their own. In one particularly devastating passage Siemienska says that the women chosen for poUtical positions in Poland under communism were, for the most part, used as "fiUers." They were younger and relatively less educated than the party-connected men chosen for poUtical jobs. The women chosen for poUtical seats, she notes, "were more the objects than the subjects of poUtical processes." (117) In other words, they were tokens who were told what to do when. The women chosen as deputies came disproportionately from the official arm of the Communist party, such as the Women's League. "Feminist ideals did not motivate them," (114) Siemienska concludes. This wry understatement translates into: they were there to serve the party, not women as women. She notes that, even under this system of tokenism, women were not chosen as often as men because they very rarely had double or triple assets to bring to the playing fidd: they rarely were heads of community groups or party committees, rarely were workplace managers who would use their political role in a twofold way to influence events in a wider circle. As a result, women were the first to be deleted from the list of candidates when the poUtical bosses had another agenda to meet. When the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) held a conference in the early 1980s—at a time when the political threat from the SoUdarity union was readUy apparent—for the first...