Abstract
Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010; 280 pp.; £55.00 hbk; ISBN 9780521196871
Malgorzata Fidelis has made an important contribution to the debate on the changing relationship between female workers and the communist state. The book focuses on gender relations in the workplace in the period 1945–60 and provides a short epilogue outlining subsequent developments in the Polish Peoples’ Republic. It also briefly discusses the reframing of gender and work during the post-communist period.
Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, in-depth interviews with women workers and the expanding secondary literature, Fidelis provides a detailed account of how the party-state sought to justify female participation in different types of work and to limit the sort of work women were deemed suitable for. The author charts these changes across four different policy environments: the immediate postwar period characterized by coalition government (1945–8), the Stalinist period (1948–55), the period of de-Stalinization (1955–7) and the initial phase of post-Stalinism (1957–60), and highlights the connection between the party-state’s gender politics and its attempt to secure and maintain legitimacy.
Varying degrees of concessions were made by the party-state to traditional ideas about the appropriate role for women in society in the period 1945–60. These concessions allowed the party-state to form some unlikely alliances that ultimately helped to shore up its authority. In the first period of 1945–8, postwar leaders ‘all found common ground by emphasizing women’s maternal qualities’ (59), and this facilitated Catholic activists opposed to abortion to forming alliances with Stalinists who wished to increase the population following the losses of the war, for example. The period of 1945–8 is characterized as one in which few were willing to challenge the ‘primacy of women’s maternal and domestic functions’ (60).
In the second period (1948–55), with the emergence of the Polish United Workers’ Party’s hegemony, the focus on women’s maternal identity was broadened, and women of the ‘right’ profile were encouraged to enter male-dominated occupations. Fidelis provides a detailed discussion of the complexities and ambiguities of Stalinist employment for women through an exploration of three case studies: the established textile industry in Ż yrardów, a new textile factory largely staffed by young female migrants in Zambrów and the mining industry in Katowice. Fidelis highlights how women were able to manipulate dominant conceptions of gender to successfully go on strike and draw on pre-communist working class traditions to frame their demands, noting that ‘women, perceived by the authorities as backward and prone to irrational behaviour, were more likely to escape punishment’(89). Elsewhere, some women were able to work underground in mines but were prohibited from taking on the most prestigious jobs. Popular unease about women in some workplaces was increasingly voiced during the period of de-Stalinisation (1955–7) and focused on how the workplace inhibited women from subscribing to traditional gender norms and allowed problematic subjectivities to emerge. The young female textile workers in Zambrów were depicted as aggressively sexual without concerns for family life, for example, and some female miners in Silesia faced physical aggression from the wives of male miners. Fidelis clearly shows how ‘shared concerns about female sexuality offered ways for communists to reconnect with traditional communities’ (128).
The de-Stalinization period therefore had a double legacy. On the one hand, there was greater scope for criticism of the party-state, but on the other, greater emphasis was placed on women’s ‘psychophysical’ distinctiveness, which allegedly prevented women from performing certain jobs. Fidelis argues persuasively that critics of Stalinism drew on the ‘supposed immutability of gender … to expose stalinism as an alien and unworkable system’ (201). By 1957 the party-state sought to reconnect with the male rank-and-file worker following the trauma of the workers’ uprising in 1956 in Poznań. One way it did this was through the privileging of male workers ‘by keeping women in subordinate positions in the workplace’ (210). Traditional shop-floor hierarchies were restored and the Stalinist policy of allowing some women access to limited ‘male’ jobs was increasingly seen as unnatural. By historicizing the notion of the ‘double burden’ the author draws attention to the various discursive strategies employed to regulate the position of women and highlights how the domestic labour performed by women was undervalued.
The promotion of women as homemakers and mothers, unequal access to prestigious employment and differential wages allowed the party-state to connect with conservative traditions within Poland and to privilege the male worker, and thereby secure a greater degree of social support. Running through the gender politics of the communist period is the nationalistic vision which saw female participation in ‘male’ occupations as a foreign and frequently Russian practice. Restricting women’s participation in work outside the home, in this view, not only promoted family life but articulated an authentic Polishness in everyday life. How the dominant discourses linking gender and nationality affected women from national minorities in the workplace, and minority–majority relationships more generally, are issues which deserve further attention.
Fidelis’s book adds significantly to our understanding of gender and industrialization in postwar Poland and to the way in which gender politics played a key role in the creation and maintenance of the communist system in Poland. It deserves a wide readership.