Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780822306603
Google: lxoqAAAAYAAJ
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 1985-11-15T23:01:53.373211+00:00

Changes in the family and in gender-defined roles

Although women no longer require marriage for subsistence, neither the material conditions—inequalities in incomes and employment opportunities and housing shortages, for example—nor the social and legal norms concerning the importance of families encourage this independence. This does not mean, however, that the potential independence of women and the postwar policies discussed above have not changed the structure of families and male-female relations. The rise of a relatively effective state in maintaining internal order, the limitations on property ownership by individuals and families, the appropriation of resources for public use from work associations rather than families, and the expansion of opportunities to participate in community-based decision-making and politics have all reduced the functions families used to serve, above all those traditionally performed by men. Therefore, the institutions and customs that grew up to serve these functions, such as the blood feud, the code of honor, the hierarchical authority according to age and gender within the family, the displacement of blame for conflict onto women and the resolution of conflict onto brothers-in-law so as to maintain peace among lineally related males, and even the seclusion of women and male control over rules of sexual privilege, no longer had a base.

This was not the case for the traditional sphere of women’s responsibilities. Although the government declared its intention to socialize the household tasks of women, investment policies long ignored the development of such services. Combined with the rising expectations of domestic comfort that improved standards of living bring, the result was an increased demand for women’s unpaid household services.22 The socialist commitment to the free or subsidized distribution of necessary goods and services succumbed by the mid-1950s to the changes in economic system and the decision to allow enterprises to allocate their earnings freely and individuals to purchase what goods and services they needed or desired. This means that women enter the labor market at times of economic recession or stagflation, when purchasing power declines, in order to supplement family income. That is, women enter the job market for reasons of their family’s economic necessity, not self-liberation, and at a time when jobs are particularly scarce. Periodic stabilization policies designed to reduce the balance of payments deficits cut back increasingly on expenditures for services by local governments and by firms, transferring more and more of the responsibility for rents, food, childcare, and so forth, onto private incomes and domestic labor. The export orientation of the industrial growth strategy has led to periodic shortages in consumer goods and inadequate domestic links between the industrial and agricultural sectors. The resort to private, nonmarket means of obtaining necessary goods and services in response has been managed, as before the socialist period, by the family unit and usually women through extended networks among kin (between urban and rural relations and among generations). At the same time, the increasing use of the market for the allocation of most goods and services, unimpeded by governmental controls to influence distribution patterns, sets the

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