Abstract
This article examines the developments of family policies in four post-communist countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary). A general tendency has emerged of implementing familist, gendered policies that encourage women to leave the labor market to raise children. The interplay of the ideological, economic and institutional legacy of the communist past with new economic, social and political conditions coupled with shifts in values have greatly influenced these policies.
Acknowledgments
This study was written with the support of the Czech Ministry of Education (project MSM 0021622408 “Reproduction and Integration of the Society”).
Notes
1. Re-familization differs from familization in that familization policies are the general policies that a regime pursues, while re-familization connotes a direction. It implies that a country that once has carried out policies which to some extent have deviated from familization policies has now moved back toward policies that encourage increased familization.
As Hantrais (Citation2003: 204) writes about post-communist countries: “Family policy can be said to have been refamilialised. This does not mean that formal institutional structures for managing family policy are non-existent, or that they are not legitimised. It does mean they are underfunded, that support for families is often rhetorical rather than practical and that the state is not trusted to deliver good quality and reliable services.”
We use the term “re-familization” because before the war the Central European Countries pursued familist conservative social policies. Their policies were based on the conservative Bismarckian model: all family benefits were insurance-based including maternity benefits which were a part of sickness insurance that depended on the woman's employment record. Maternity benefits were limited to mothers and were only paid for 12 weeks (24 weeks in Hungary) at a replacement rate of 100 per cent (50 per cent in Poland). These countries did not introduce child benefits until after the war (except Hungary, where child allowance for state servants and low income groups existed in the pre-war period, and in Czechoslovakia, where they were only available for civil servants), and child care services did not exist. All in all, childbearing costs as well as child care have been assumed to be completely a family responsibility while caring duties were imposed on women due to the predominating male breadwinner model of the family.