The societal and economic changes in Eastern Europe after World War II also led to a radical transformation of the social status of women. One of the most visible changes was their increasing participation in economic activities. However, women's employment in Eastern Europe had a number of peculiar features. First, the level of female employment was exceptionally high, particularly in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Romania and the USSR, where over two-thirds of the women of reproductive age were economically active (Table 4.7).27 In other Eastern European countries women were also an integral and indispensable component in the total labour force. The Eastern European economies could not have operated without the labour provided by women, and this circumstance had a substantial impact on demographic developments in the region.28 But the level of women's economic activity fluctuated over time, and there were also substantial differences between countries, depending on the state of the economy and governmental economic strategies. At certain times, especially during the Stalinist period of the early 1950s, when extensive industrialization demanded vast labour resources, women were mobilized to join the labour force; at other times, they were persuaded to withdraw to bear and rear children.
Secondly, there were large differences in the involvement of women in different sectors of the economy (ILO, 1980; Anker, 1985). Some industries and occupations were traditionally 'feminized' and notoriously badly paid; the textile industry, trade, mass catering, education, and health care are the most obvious examples. The female labour market was characterized by horizontal, rather than vertical, professional mobility and by generally bad working conditions. Women's wages were typically much lower than men's, and their work was
27 The economically active population is defined as those persons who constitute the supply of labour. Women on maternity leave were considered economically active in Eastern European countries. For details concerning collection and comparability of census data on the economically active population, see UN (1958b).
28 For empirical evidence suggesting that the labour force participation of women reduced fertility in Eastern Europe, through mechanisms operating similarly to those in the West, see Heer (1981), Gregory (1982).
Table 4.7: Percentages of women economically active in selected age groups in Eastern European countries, selected years 1950-91
Country Year Age group:
20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 Albania no information Bulgaria 1956 69.0 69.3 73.2 76.9 1965 72.1 83.8 86.4 88.0 1975 77.5 90.4 93.8 94.5 1985 — 91.0b — 96.4 94.8 Czechoslovakia 1961 68.2 57.4 59.1 65.4 1970 79.1 78.9 79.4 81.0 1980 83.4 90.7 92.0 92.8 1991 — 90.3b — — 94.4d —
East Germany 1964 72.1a — 68.0C —
1971 74.6 79.3 — 79.6d — 1981 84.6 93.9 94.8 94.6 Hungary 1949 55.5 45.0 33.8 30.9 1960 55.3 48.7 49.1 50.7 1970 66.2 65.3 68.7 71.0 1980 59.9 69.8 81.1 84.9 1990 59.3 62.9 77.4 85.2 Poland 1950 67.8 60.7 61.6 63.0 1960 67.8 62.8 63.4 66.9 1970 73.3 75.1 77.7 79.8 1978 68.4 75.1 79.5 81.9 1988 64.0 70.0 76.7 83.0 Romania 1956 78.1 74.3 — 73.6d — 1966 74.3 78.5 78.4 78.7 1977 75.6 83.1 83.5 83.6 1990 68.5 80.0 81.8 73.7 Yugoslavia 1961 62.0 53.2 1971 55.8 56.2 51.3 49.3 1981 57.0 64.1 62.7 58.2 USSR 1970 — 86.3b — — 92.7d — 1979 84.8 93.8 95.2 95.9 1989 77.2 88.2 92.0 94.1
Notes: a - age group 21-24, b - age group 20-29, c - age group 25-39, d - age group 30-39. Sources: ILO (1992), TERPLAN (1992), UN (1992c).
less esteemed and in general underprivileged.29 Thus, although women entered
the productive labour force in large numbers, they still suffered from various
29 For instance, Heitlinger (1979: 154) quotes Czechoslovak data from 1970, according to which the proportion of women in the lowest income category (up to 1,400 crowns monthly) was 45 per cent, compared to only 6 per cent for men and 20 per cent for the whole population. Anker (1985) reviews surveys from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in which many women declared themselves secondary earners and reported that they would withdraw from the labour force if their
forms of inequality. Women's income was, however, crucial to the survival of most families. The two-income family was both a norm and a necessity, and for the vast majority of women economic considerations were the primary motivation for seeking a job. This is clearly reflected in the results of surveys carried out in Eastern European countries which show that women, especially those more qualified, tended to return to work only a few months after the birth of a child (Srb, 1967; Ovchinnikova, 1973; Mazur, 1980).
The creation of equal opportunities in employment outside the home led in Eastern Europe to a multiplication of female roles, rather than to a reshaping of those roles. Unlike working fathers, the majority of working mothers had to undertake two jobs: one in the family and one outside the home. Surveys conducted in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in the late 1970s and 1980s show that working women spent on average more than four hours daily on housework and child care, compared to one-and-a-half hours for working men (Anker, 1985; Einhorn, 1993). Indeed Mazur (1980) quotes a Polish propagandist journal according to which the ideal type of woman should combine three duties: those of mother, gainfully employed person, and citizen. Among other things, this statement reflects the way women's social roles were portrayed in Eastern European mass media, which is perhaps not surprising in an environment in which home-grown feminism was suppressed and Western feminism derided because it did not give central focus to production and class relations.
In this context, it must be mentioned that the policies of Eastern European governments always contained provisions to at least soften the contradictions between a woman's employment activities and her family interests. The measures most often used may also be listed as pronatalist policies. They included: paid leave to take care of a newborn child, with the woman's job being reserved and the period of leave being counted as part of her labour record; provision of childcare facilities; provision of jobs on a part-time or limited contract basis; the possibility of retiring on a pension earlier, depending on number of children and length of service; and several other special conditions related to the employment and health care of mothers of young children (Wynnyczuk, 1981). Yet in the profoundly male-dominated communist governments, the terms of these policies inevitably were set by men. In practice, therefore, they remained insufficient to promote 'more than a minimal restructuring of working and living
husbands' incomes were higher. Bridger (1992) cites a Soviet source claiming that in the mid- 1980s women received only 73 per cent of male average earnings.
arrangements within the home' (Heitlinger, 1980: 15). Marxist sociologists used to explain this failure by the fact that
the contemporary stage in social production development [in Eastern European countries] does not allow for a complete solution to the problem of creating social and economic prerequisites for a harmonious combination of work and maternal duties (Bodrova, 1978: 88).
In other words, despite official egalitarian ideology, the state colluded in the production of a sexual division of labour by permitting fundamental inequalities to persist in both the domestic and public spheres. Presumably it did so because such a policy was functional: it conformed to the supposed priority of economic and demographic growth over social considerations. One very important consequence was that women in Eastern Europe overwhelmingly enjoyed less autonomy than men, and tended to retreat into domestically-oriented roles of dependence and passivity;30 this was strongly in contrast to the formal commitment of communist governments to encouraging women's social participation. In all probability, this gender asymmetry marked not only economic and political relations, but also many other areas of behaviour bearing on family and sexual relations.
To be sure, there were genuine achievements in women's emancipation in Eastern Europe (Scott, 1974, 1976; Heitlinger, 1979, 1980). For instance, one of the most important policy initiatives taken by the communist regimes was a thorough elimination of legal inequality between men and women. More significantly, these regimes largely succeeded in broadening the accepted scope of women's education and work, and in creating a cultural milieu in which social provisions for maternity came to be regarded as an essential component of state social policies. But these advances were not achieved without a significant cost to women. They became full-time workers31 and fully-fledged citizens, but they also remained largely responsible for what earlier generations of women did as full-time mothers and housewives.
30 This is well illustrated by studies which show that women's participation in public life (and, specifically, their representation in leading positions in Communist Parties, which were the exclusive bases of political power in Eastern Europe) was rather marginal compared to men's, and also in sharp contrast to the significance of women in the production process (Field, 1968; Sokolowska, 1977; Heitlinger, 1979; Harasymiw, 1980; Rimashevskaya, 1994).
31 One of the things that differentiate what happened in Eastern Europe from what has happened (perhaps later) elsewhere in the West is that part-time employment was less of an option. Heitlinger (1979) quoted several surveys conducted in the USSR suggesting that working women considered the possibility of a part-time work to be generally disadvantageous, mainly because its income was substantially lower than that of full-time employment. Consequently, part-time work in Eastern Europe remained largely restricted to students and older people after retirement.
Demographie behaviour and women's status are concepts that cover a broad spectrum of ideas and practices. Heitlinger (1993: 280) argues:
At one extreme one sees married women whose motherhood (and very often the number of sons) is the principal basis of their self-identity, social standing and the respect awarded them by the wider community... At the other end of the spectrum is an elite category of women who have gained control over their bodies and their sexual relationships, who are able to have as many children as they want, and who have fulfilling, highly-paid careers that enable them to convert the high opportunity costs of children into lower direct costs.
Given that no useful summary measure exists to describe the social status of women as a group,32 it is difficult to make 'absolute' statements about the situation in European communist countries. However, available evidence suggests that most women in these countries occupied an intermediate position between the opposing models of a successful career mother and a 'breeder'. They were extensively occupied in paid work, and accordingly had to restrict their fertility and time spent in mothering; but they did so not out of a desire for emancipation, but mainly because of the household's need for a second income. At the same time qualifications, work, and income discrimination, problems of coping with both maternal and work roles, and apparently also the survival of male supremacy due to which domestic labour was not fairly divided; all these created a situation in which a large proportion of women experienced sex inequality. Innovations in family policy over the years, such as those aimed at increasing the protection of women as mothers, actually emphasized sex-role differences instead of eroding them, and further worsened the position of women in society. What these policies failed to stress was that rearing children, unlike childbearing, is not necessarily exclusively women's business. Rimashevskaya (1994: 275) put it succinctly when she wrote that the primary cause of male-female inequality under communist regimes was the 'over emancipation' of women.