IDEATIONAL CONSENSUS AND THE HISTORICAL PATHS OF MATERNALISM AND PATERNALISM IN THREE FORMER STATE SOCIALIST COUNTRIES:

HUNGARY, POLAND AND ROMANIA

DRAFT. Please do not cite without authors’ permission

Abstract. Maternalist political arguments and social policies that support the gender-segregation of care-work and parenting seem to be on the fall throughout the advanced capitalist world, and even more so in Europe, sustained ideologically by the mainstreaming of gender equality. How do Central and Eastern European (CEE) new member states react to the quest to say goodbye to the “old maternalism” and which are historical and cultural factors that shape their responses? Which were the blendings between maternalism and paternalism during the interwar period of nation-state consolidation and under the communist regimes? Are there enduring legacies of “old maternalism”, reviving against the counter-streams of feminism, gender-equality, and neoliberalism? This paper tries to comparatively explain the persistence and varying forms of state-maternalism in Hungary, Poland and Romania, three CEE countries that share the interwar ethos of the nation-state consolidation and the experience of socialist paternalism, yet followed different paths of historical development. We argue that the roots of moderate maternalism in Poland, redistributive maternalism in Hungary and differential maternalism in Romania can be traced back to the interwar period, and they are tightly linked to the nationalist-paternalist goals and the weak political power of women’s organizations, despite their active role in the instutionalization of social work and public responsibilities for childcare and the socio-medical protection of mothers and children.

Dorottya Szikra, Budapest Institute, Hungary, dorottya.szikra@ budapestinstitute.eu

Cristina Rat, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, crat@socasis.ubbcluj.ro

Acknowledgements:

This paper is highly indebted to our common research led by prof. Tomasz Inglot, Minnesota State University, within the NCEEER Grant “Continuity and Change in Family Policies of the

New European Democracies: A Comparison of Poland, Hungary”, conducted between 2008-2010. We hereby thank prof. Inglot for his insightful comments on earlier versions of this

paper. We bear responsibility for all possible mistakes.

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Introduction

Recent studies on family policies report that there is a shift in the focus from families as institutions to parents’ (especially mothers’) employment as well as gender equality in the “old” EU member states. Matzke and Ostner (2011) call this a new trend of “family policy utilitarianism” where economic and demographic (exogeneous) goals dominate family policy innovation, and economic rationale prevails over the issue of what is best for “the family”, defined as a basic institution of society. The emergence of “post-industrial policy risks” in general, and increasing maternal employment in particular, slowly leads to a “farewell to maternalism” in the words of Orloff (2006). Maternalist political arguments and social policies that support the gender-segregation of care-work and parenting seem to be on the fall throughout the advanced capitalist world, and even more so in Europe, sustained ideologically by the mainstreaming of gender equality. How do Central and Eastern European (CEE) new member states react to the quest to say goodbye to the “old maternalism” and which are historical and cultural factors that shape their responses? Which were the blendings between maternalism and state paternalism during the interwar period of nation-state consolidation and under the communist regimes? Are there enduring legacies of “old maternalism”, reviving against the counter-streams of feminism, gender-equality, and neoliberalism? This paper tries to comparatively explain the persistence and varying forms of state-maternalism in Hungary, Poland and Romania, three CEE countries that share the ethos of the nation-state and experience of socialist paternalism, yet follow different paths of historical development before and after the Second World War, and different routes of transition and EU integration. We argue that the endurance of state maternalisms is interlinked with the types of paternalisms existing in these countries, their quest to form strong nations and the historically well-entrenched institutions of social insurance and social assistance practices to protect mothers and children, the latter largely organized and performed by women. These remained stable despite the changing political ideologies and international contexts (the Soviet Union and later the European Union).

After the fall of state socialist regimes, a revived nationalist-maternalist ethos shaped the discourse of the 1990s. Birth-rates have been sharply decreasing and they are now among the lowest within the OECD (1.26 in Hungary, 1.33 in Romania and 1.38 in Poland in 2010). Frequent divorces and decreasing marriage-rates represent the change of the family structure, similarly to the West. High rates of long-term unemployment and unstable, irregular employment not only indicate the presence of post-industrial risks but also the fact that Central and Eastern European countries are widely exposed to the crisis of global financial markets. The new-old maternalist discourse and respective “public maternalist” (Fodor et al. 2002, Glass and Fodor 2007) measures were used to keep women outside of the labor market in Hungary, or, from another perspective, helped them to keep the status of “mothers” instead of the more humiliating situation of “unemployed” in Hungary. “Differential maternalism” along a clear divide between “deserving”, working mothers and “irresponsible”, long-term unemployed mothers marks Romanian family policies, with increasing favors for the middle class and indirectly restricted eligibility for the Roma. The concern to eliminate child poverty persisted, mainly as a counter-reaction to the devastating circumstances in child-care institutions that came to light with the fall of the Ceauşescu-regime. While other social benefits were rapidly scaled back in the context of the recent financial crisis (experienced harshly by Hungary and Romania, but successfully avoided by

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Poland), the social rights of working parents, promoted as mothers’ rights, were kept in place and even expanded, yet with different emphasis on large families (Hungary), low-income families (Poland) and the middle-class (Romania).

Right before the collapse of communism, female and maternal employment rates in Central and Eastern Europe were comparable to Scandinavian countries, yet parenting norms remained gendered and patriarchal relations ruled within and outside of the family. Communist regimes aimed at the emancipation of women solely via employment (Kligman 1998; Fodor 2003; Popa 2003b). Caring and housekeeping remained women’s business in the whole period of state socialism, leading to what feminist authors call the “double burden” of women (Einhorn 1993). The paternalism of communist regimes is arguably self-evident: “From the perspective of the paternalist state, all citizens, regardless of gender, were its dependent children” (Kligman 1998: 31). The concrete forms of this general “paternalism”, however, differed significantly within the communist realm and, at different historical stages, and the encounters between partenalist and the well-entrenched maternalist ideas led to different policies and institutional developments. Social policy remained more of a men’s business in Poland also during state socialism and the state was reluctant to interfere with family life directly. Family policy measures cropped up out of political emergency situations when the population was given “sticks and carrots” at the same time. A distinct characteristic of Polish family policies has been the usage of means-testing and the targeting of low-income families while also insisting on social insurance coverage. The conditioning of child allowance by employment, and differential protection for urban and rural families, with clear favors for the former, had been a constant feature of Romanian family policies under state socialism. Maternalist measures, driven as much by economic reasons as by the will to protect mothers and children, were central for the consolidation of the Kádár-regime in Hungary after the revolution in 1956. Women were, however, rarely asked about their own faith: Paternalism remained in place in all the three countries, where individual rights as well as organizations of women were banned and even communist women’s organization were typically not listened to.

While acknowledging important similarities, we detected clear differences in the maternalist and paternalist orientation of the three countries, and we tried to unfold their historical development from the interwar period, during the Second World War, throughout the communist regime, until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. The ways in which these nation states were created after the First World War and the role of family-related policies in their establishment formed important bases for maternalist and paternalist discourses and measures under communism. The newly established states, experimenting with democracy during the 1920s and early 1930s, were inherently paternalistic in all the three countries, and women agency could barely challenge the subjection of the “mothers of the nation”. Poland, for reasons outlined in the paper, did not engage in state maternalism, while the Romanian and the Hungarian states found it important to combine maternalist and paternalist discourses and issue maternalist and pro-natalist measures for their nationalist purposes.

1. Maternalism and paternalism in social policy

The concept “maternalism” explains three interlinked social-historical phenomena: First, it refers to the “overlapping and interlocking histories of the emergence of women’s social movements and welfare states” (Koven and Michel 1993: 2). Second, it explains how

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“maternalist strategies and discourses transformed motherhood from women’s primary private responsibility into public policy.” (Ibid.) Once “motherliness”, thus the capacity to nurture and care, were embedded within a political framework, these private qualities became the cornerstone of the public discourses. And third, it refers to public policies that aim particularly at mothers: these can range from protective labor policies to maternity leaves and health-care arrangements. Maternalist policies in the West had become central to gendered welfare analysis during the early 1990s (Bock and Thane 1991; Koven and Michel 1993.). Boundaries between maternalism and paternalism are blurred, especially, but not only, in Central and Eastern Europe. As Koven and Michel (1993) pointed out, men often promoted women’s (welfare) work and maternalist policies on behalf of children while the same men were often reluctant to promote women’s political and economic rights. “They put the interest of children – the nation’s future workers and soldiers – before the rights of mothers.” (Ibid: 5) These could be called “paternalist” policies, which always embed a strong pro-natalist goal and lay the emphasis on the direct responsibility of the state towards the children, which prevails over the relation between the state and the family. The French etatist pro-natalist policies serve a good example of state paternalism (Klaus 1993), as well as Romania’s striking case from the mid-1960s, when abortion rights were banned while motherly duties celebrated – all with the aim of an increase of the country’s population growth.

Norms over parenthood and parenting roles, as cultural construction well embedded in social practice and institutional settings, channel path dependencies, as they “restrict the spectrum of possible policies of a welfare state” (Pfau-Effinger, 2005: 4). In other words, “welfare arrangements are coherent and stable long term if they are anchored as norms” (Ibid.). If we look for the development of those norms in the three countries, we see that they were shaped by various forms of authoritarian regimes and fights for national independence. Ferge, in her analysis of state socialist welfare culture, argues that there is no such thing as “Homo Sovieticus”, but there are cultural patterns of the state roles in the “civilization process” including a relative weakness of rights-consciousness and a higher level of exposure to the will of the central states by the population. At the turn of the century and in the coming decades, women were especially exposed to the arbitrariness and coercion of authoritarian states, as they were trying to lay the basis for sui generis welfare states through charitable organizations and positions in public institutions (Koven and Michel 1993), while their political rights and power were still detrimental. At the same time, women, and especially mothers, were used as symbols of the victory and core elements for the “survival of the nation”, both between the two World Wars and under state socialism (Yuval-Davis 1997). Lynne Haney, in her historical-anthropological account of Hungarian welfare policies during and after state-socialism, labeled the period from late 1960s to mid-1980s “maternalist welfare state” (Haney 2002) one that especially rewarded “proper ways of mothering”. Fodor et.al. (2002) argued that post-socialist family policies in Poland can be called “private maternalism” whereas Hungarian family policies, relying significantly more on public resources can be labeled “public maternalist” policies. Romanian family policies were not included in their comparison, but we would argue that they present a case of differential maternalism, when the state offers protection only to working mothers and favors the middle-class, while social assistance is directed towards the children and not towards their families.

Excessive control of pregnancy and maternity, although it may sound counter-intuitive, is closer to paternalist rather than maternalist policies: we should clearly differentiate

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between control and coercion of motherhood (which has an inherent pro or anti-natalist dimension) and the promotion of motherhood through social measures. Fears over depopulation or the perception of military weakness often urges states to introduce coercive maternalist and pro-natalist measures. The aggressive control of pregnancy and maternity in Romania during the interwar period and especially under Ceausescu, we argue, were partly linked to the weakness of the Romanian state (Verdery 1991), and also its eagerness to create a strong, independent, unified nation.

An important but often overlooked thesis of maternalist politics as explained by Koven and Michel (1993) is a paradox: In countries where women occupied important positions in state bureaucracies (like in the early social assistance system of the US), and where individualist feminist movements (arguing for the same rights as men) were strongest (in the US and the UK), they found the least social protection of mothers. This holds the other way around as well: France and Germany champion in early maternity and child-care legislation, while women were hardly let close to positions to decide about matters of social policy. According to Koven and Michel “to an extraordinary degree, the French regarded family matters as a public concern, far too important for men to be left to women”. (1993: 21.) Feminist organizations hardly played any role in maternalist legislation that, at the same time, was “most closely resembling the endowment of motherhood” (Ibid.). Similarly, the freedom of policy initiation by women “was profoundly limited by (…) state bureaucracy and (…) the exclusively male civil service” in Germany, whereas the labor protection and social insurance measures (including health care during and after pregnancy) were most developed in this country. Thus, Koven and Michel conclude, countries with “politically ineffective women’s movements (…) offered the most comprehensive programs for women”. (Ibid: 26.) We will hereby engage in exploring the above three hypothesis of maternalism against Poland, Hungary and Romania since their formation as nation states until the end of state socialism: First, women’s place in building welfare states; second, the interlinked manner of maternalism and paternalism; and third, the connection between women’s positions and strong maternalist policies.

2. Nationalist maternalism between the two World Wars

How policies concerning the wellbeing of mothers and children, broadly labeled as “maternalist policies”, developed in Central and Eastern European countries from the turn of the century, is touched upon by some authors in relation with the professionalization of social work (Schilde and Schulte 2005). While it is clear that much more research is needed, it can be said that maternalist social work and social assistance existed in all the three countries before the Second World War, and was actually organized in a very similar manner as in the West. Women played a central role in the formation of Hungarian social work, and it was maternalism that drove their actions (Juhász 2005.). For example, public health programs protecting pregnant mothers and infants, that were developed with the help of the Rockefeller Fund during the 1920s, employed “district nurses” who were visiting families and provided care and advice not only in health but also in social matters (Johann 1938). The large-scale program of Productive Social Policy – the very first state attempt to socially assist landless agricultural workers –employed unmarried women to carry out the task of “social sisters” to control and help beneficiaries (Szikra 2009). University-level social work curriculum was created via this program in 1942 in Budapest, educating hundreds of

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(overwhelmingly female) social workers. One of the prominent social workers of the time, talking about the role of women in the settlement movement presented typical maternalist arguments when she discussed why it was women who were most fit for welfare work:

“The intuitive force of the female soul, her fast reactions, her capacity to integrate into foreign environments easier and her more instinctive drive to help others are united in a perfect framework by the settlement where women have to work on translating the ‘modern knowledge’ of the settlement idea into a form appropriate for women in her neighbourhood.” (Magda Tanay, 1936, quoted by Szikra and Varsa, 2005.)

The above quotation illustrates well that it was “relational” feminism that was closer to the efforts of Hungarian mid-war women’s organizations. “Relational feminism”, as discussed by Offen (1988) claims women’s rights as women, based on traditional female capacities and roles. “Individualist” feminists, however, put stress on the individual as the basic unit of society and its search for personal independence and autonomy is more “genderless”. The latter group, being involved in the democratic revolution of 1918, or the communist revolution in 1919, were dismissed from the public sphere after in Hungary after 1920. Most of them left the country and settled in Vienna and London This way, it was “relational feminists” and anti-feminist right-wing organizations that gained upper hand during the 1930s and 1940s in Hungary (Pető 1997, 2001).

Middle class women started to enter the labour market through caring professions, and they occupied relatively soon some public positions in Romania and Poland as well. In Romania, as is argued by Cheschebec (2005) and Cosma (2002a), their entrance to the positions in city councils was interlinked with women’s claims for political and economic rights, yet women got access earlier to appointed committee positions (1919) then the right to vote (conditioned upon education and social status in 1929 ) and be elected (1946). Importantly, Romanian feminists engaged in the national discourse vividly and placed the “nation’s faith” in the center of their argument for rights for women:

“[T]he women played not only the most important role within the family, as mother and educator, but was also the factor that could ‘raise or sink a nation’ given that she was the cultural and biological reproducer of the ethnie and, by virtue of her superior morality, its educator.” (Quoted by Cheschebec 2005: 163.)

Women as mothers were praised by Romanian feminists as the emphases was put on women’s ability to give birth to and raise “ethnic Romanian” children. In general, children and their protection were in the centre of mid-war social work activities in Romania (Diaconu, 2002; Stan, 2002). Such prioritization of children with poor socio-economic background was not present in the Polish or the Hungarian case, where activities of social work were more diverse. “The family” as a unit, rather than children were in the focus of Hungarian welfare work and policies. Other social groups and individual problems, for example, the situation of ex-prisoners, especially political ones, could receive support from many Polish organizations. Social assistance and food kitchens were also among the priorities of charity work. (Malek and Szczepaniak-Wiecha 2005: 30.)

The pre-occupation with children can be understood with a view to the strong eugenic movement, gaining official recognition in mid-war Romania. Here, a growing group of professionals, “initially mostly doctors, set out to change Romanian health care, society and

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the sate according to the gospel of eugenics”. (Bucur 2002: 2.) Eugenic research and discourse was stronger than in Poland or Hungary, and it did have a strong interest in educating young mothers in matters of child care, “for the well-being of the nation’s biological capital” (Bucur 2002: 15.) No wonder that one of the leading figures of Romanian (differential) feminism, Princess Cantacuzino also became affiliated with Romanian eugenicists and got even involved in scientific research to study the “hereditary characteristics in children”. (Cheschebec 2005: 266.) She tried to elevate the issue to an international level when she proposed the establishment of an international institute for research on children to the League of Nations in 1929. This project was never put in practice, while another important international endeavor was: Cantacuzino, together with her Polish colleague Helena Radlinska attended the first International Conference of Social Work in 1928, held in Paris. They proposed the International Committee for Schools of Social Work which was established in 1929 to the benefit of professional training of social workers. Radlinska, a major figure of Polish social work history, organized the first university level training program in Poland: The Social and Education Studies Program of the Polish Free University. She was the director of the school until 1944. (Szczepaniak-Wiecha 2009.) Radlinska, also being interested in child-protection, was against institutional care (as opposed to her Romanian colleague) and lobbied for a system of adoption in Poland as did her fellow social workers, marking an early difference between Romanian and Hungarian child-care policies that were more engaged in professional state-organized child-care institutions (Malek and Szczepaniak-Wiecha 2005: 25.)

While private initiatives were to a large extent merged to public assistance programs in Romania and Hungary, they remained more independent (and thus lacked state-financing) in Poland during the 1920s-1930s. One of the reasons for the independence of civil welfare organizations lies in the fact that before the formation of the nation state, during the times of partition they had “inseparatable connection with the independence movement” (Malek and Szczepaniak-Wiecha 2005: 25.) They often got involved with secret educational and cultural work, “especially during intensified Russification and Germanisation”. It might be said that women, already enfranchised in 1919 in Poland (as opposed to 1945 in Hungary and 1921 in Romania) organized more independently and in more diverse groups during the mid-war years in this country.

Public measures to protect mothers and children were introduced alongside with Bismarckian social insurance legislation in all the three countries, however, in different pace. Hungary pioneered with introducing paid maternity leave already in 1891, closely following German and Austrian legislation. Poland and Romania built up their social insurance systems soon after their unification and creation as nation states in the early 1920s. Women were granted eight weeks of maternity leave in Poland in 1920 paid at a full rate of their previous salary. The 1933 acts, unifying the system of social insurance and strengthening its bureaucratic capacities, was a major undertaking of the young Polish state. As Inglot (2008) argues, this core legislation became an extremely solid bases of Polish social policy lasting throughout the decades of state socialism and beyond (Inglot 2008). In neither of the two other countries was social insurance bureaucracy as united and professional as in Poland. This bureaucracy, however, was preoccupied with traditional forms of social insurance, regarding mainly male workers. According to the above mentioned 1933 legislation a clear distinction was traced between blue-collar workers who received 50% of their net wages and white-collar workers who received 100% of their previous salaries. This distinction between professions was maintained until 1972. By this time, Hungarian mothers received 24 weeks

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of maternity payment according to the legislation in 1927. This measure was left untouched throughout regimes of different colors: maternity leave lasts for 24 weeks as of 2012. New, extended parental leaves have been introduced upon the “old” maternity leave under state socialism without touching the former legislation – as will be discussed later. In Romania, after the 1918 unification, the development of maternity leave had been tied to the legislation on the working conditions for women and children, and not so much the pension scheme, as they were administered by different institutions. State capacity was also much weaker than in Poland or Hungary, and the institutions rather unstable and fragmented: the ministries of labor, health, and their subordinate departments had been merging and splitting in an ad-hoc manner and leadership turnover was extremely high. The 1912 Neniţescu Law fro the “old” Romania (Moldova and Muntenia) covered all industrial employees and manufacture workers, according to their income range, but agricultural laborers and farmers were not included (see Marinescu, 1995: 106-115). The distinct social insurance systems from Romania, Transylvania and Bucovina had remained in place until 1933, when the prerequisites of the Neniţescu law where extended to the other provinces and the length of leave increased at 12 weeks, which was still half-shorter than in Hungary. The real reform of the social insurance system happened only in 19381, by increasing the minimum period of contribution and obliging mothers to stay out from work until the expiration of the 12 weeks leave, under the sanction of having to pay back the benefit. This indicates clear maternalist concerns, highlighted also by the provision of an optional stay in public hospitals and receiving only half of the benefit. Moreover, additional six weeks of paid leave for breastfeeding were offered (at a lower rate, yet), conditioned by regular medical consultations. Insured women who paid contributions for at least 26 weeks during the last two years were entitled to free medical assistance at childbirth and a newborn’s trousseau (Marinescu, 1995: 186-187). This framing of maternity as primarily a medical issue, the focus on the wellbeing of mothers and infants, fostering access to free medical assistance in both rural and urban areas (Diaconu, 2002) and the imposition of financial penalties for returning to job too early, created maternalist legacies that persistent well after the Second World War.

Family allowance was only introduced in Hungary in this period, where civil servants started to receive it from their separated social insurance fund as early as in 1912. Later, the idea was to imitate Italian and French examples to introduce “family wage” in the industry in the late 1930s alongside with the country’s preparation for the War (Bikkal 1939). However, what came out of it was a limited “child allowance” paid to all factory workers financed not from the social insurance but from the budget of large factories. In fact, owners of large factories, majority of whom were Jewish, were blackmailed by the government to give way to the new legislation in return of the protection of their economic rights. The family allowance was introduced in 1938, and only a year later anti-Semitic legislation hindered the ownership of factories by “Jews” while their political rights were also curtailed.

Meanwhile a comprehensive “family protection program” was launched for the agricultural poor in 1940 after years of experiments with the so called “Productive Social Policy”. In this program, families who were held “reliable”, “Christian” and “Hungarian” were provided with loans to build houses and buy land. Women and men were given separate roles in the program: while men had to engage in “productive work”, women were assigned “re-productive” tasks, to care for children and keep the household in the manner of middle

1 Mihail Ralea introduces the new Law on Social Insurance on the 22nd of December 1938.

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class women. This program, focusing on the “protection of Hungarian families” provided land on the expense of former “Jewish” owners. (Szikra 2009.)

Kindergarten and nurseries mainly operated in cities in all the three countries and approximately one-third of children attended kindergarten in Hungary as early as in 1938 (Szikra 2011). Officially, since 1924 the Polish government had regarded nurseries as the primary means of assistance for the still limited number of working mothers in industrial centers. In fact, however, only a handful operated, mainly in factories. Explanation of Hungary’s preoccupation with “family protection policies” as well as child care services must take into account the nationalist sentiments of its governors as well as the population. The early acceptance of legislation over kindergarten education (1891), as presented by Bicskei (2006) was due to the country’s will to extend Hungarian language tuition to its Slovakian speaking territories. After the Great War, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart and Hungary was punished by taking away two-third of its territories (known as the ‘Trianon Treaty’), sentiments about the “greater Hungary” and fears of the “disappearance of the nation” dominated public discourse. Intellectuals, especially writers and sociologists started to produce ethnographic research (party influenced by their Romanian colleague Gusti) to present the disastrous circumstances of those bearing the “true” Hungarian heredity in the rural areas. Discussion on certain groups of (more wealthy) peasant families having only one child in the Southern Hungary due to the legislation on inheritance became extrapolated and connected to the “fall” of the whole Hungarian nation. Thus the Durányi government introduced new benefits for workers and their families at the factory level in the atmosphere of national emergency that also stemmed from the alarming news of the lowest birthrate in Europe (Pietrzykowski 1939).

The social and the eugenic movements became strongly interlinked in Romania: Iuliu Moldovan, the most important proponent of the eugenic movement became the General Secretary for Social Welfare between 1918 and 1920, when he aimed at building up medical services and hygiene-education accessible to the rural masses (Bucur 2002: 27). Besides funding new hospitals in multi-ethnic Transylvania, he aimed at creating “health-districts”, similarly to Béla Johan in Hungary. The medical school in Cluj became an important center of eugenic thought, officially named the “institute of social hygiene”. Linked to the idea that the quality and the quantity of the nation could and should be controlled, poor, starving and abandoned children became of central concern: more than half of state budget on social assistance was invested in the protection of children in 1936. Restrictive measures (proposed by supporters of eugenics) were also passed: abortion was criminalized in the mid-1930s. As Bucur (2002: 228) points out, major paragraphs of the 1938 legislation were word-by-word imitated by the communists almost 30 years later when Ceauşescu introduced the strict ban on abortion. She argues that the pre-occupation with the “quality and quantity” of the number of children as the most important prerequisite of the independent and great Romania by Ceauşescu is rooted in the mid-war nationalist eugenic movement. We should add that concerns for differential fertility along the social strata persisted not only during state socialism (Mesaroş, 1975 and 1977) but also during post-socialist transition and EU integration (Gheţău 2004).

While Poland was not lacking nationalist sentiments, mid-war governments did not engage with explicitly family- or child-care related public programs, leaving that field to charitable organizations. Although the longing for the ethnically homogeneous Polish nation spelled out by the nationalist politician Roman Dmowski and his followers (Davies 1984: 138.), becoming one of the central concerns of Polish intellectual life, such ideas were not

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translated to social policy measures. The Left-wing government that gained power by the force of army headed by Dmowski’s main opponent, Marshall Josef Pilsudki, was more interested in building up a strong and unified social insurance system than in any nationalist maternalist policies. Nationalist, conservative forces were in opposition and thus eugenic discourses proponing the “purity” of the Polish nation (at that time, only 65% of the population was Polish and Catholic, as compared to 90% after WWII) did not gain official political support. The role of mothers up-keeping the nation during hardship remained the discursive terrain of the Catholic Church who’s idea of “Matka Polka”, the “Polish Mother and Patriot” who is “responsible for raising children in a patriotic and Catholic spirit” (Fidelis 2010: 25) was an important element of nationalism during times of repartition and remained so under the times of the newly united nation. However, an important reason lies outside of the terrain of politics: Overpopulation, as opposed to a decrease of the population in Romania and Hungary, was the main demographic concern of Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. As Davies spells out “the main obstacle to social progress lay in rampant overpopulation. In less than two decades, a natural increase over 33 per cent raised the population from 26.3 million in 1921 to over 35 million in 1939” (Davies 1984: 120). The great improvements of the newly created Polish state in fighting illiteracy and creating basic social institutions in urban areas was coupled with “an underdeveloped rural economicy (that) possessed insufficient resources to keep pace with the extra mouths” (Ibid.).

The hypothesis of Koven and Michel (1993) of the reverse connection between positions occupied by women in public administration and extensive maternalist measures seems to hold in the case of Hungary and Romania. While the presence of women in decision-making positions was almost non-existent in Hungary and maternalist measures were the most extensive, women’s presence in important positions of state bureaucracy was coupled with the relatively weak public protection for mothers in mid-war Romania. In Romania, as mentioned earlier in this paper, women have joined the consulting bodies of local and national authorities already in 1919, without being enfranchised at the time (see Cosma, 2002a). Women’s organisations played a crucial role in the functioning of state-subsidized, yet mostly private social and health care services for mothers and children, as well as the evolution of the legislation on maternity leave and benefits, on the rights of breastfeeding mothers, the creation of public infirmaries for infants, kindergartens and care facilities for abandoned children (first law in 1928, revised in 1937). Similarly to Hungarian feminism, Romanian feminism was also closer to the relational ideology, and thus concerns for the protection of mothers and children were crucial in their political agendas (Diaconu, 2002, Cosma, 2002b, Cheschebec, 2005 and 2006).2 The 1945 International Congress of Democratic Women in Paris gathered a rather large participation of Romanian organizations, including those belonging to the “old” feminist political agency centralized by Alexandrina Cantacuzino (the Orthodox National Society of Romanian Women), with some eugenistic connotations, the more social-work and services oriented Association of Christian Women led by queen Maria, but also the Association of Anti-Fascist Women initiated by Ana Pauker, with strong ties to the Communist Party, as well as trade union and professional organizations. Soon after this initial tolerance of the “old” women’s organizations, the Romanian communist regime marginalized their leaders and nationalized their patrimonies.

To sum up, Hungary, having lost two-thirds of its territories became preoccupied with the protection of the “Hungarian family” and introduced state-policies accordingly, whereas the two other countries did not engage in large-scale redistributive family policies. The

2 Women’s role in Polish state bureaucracy during the mid-war years remains to be further researched.

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Polish state focused its efforts to creating a strong social insurance system while the Romanian state was more mosaic and engaged in eugenic discourse and measures for the promotion of Romanian ethnicity in newly created multi-ethic state. There is an important commonality between Romania and Hungary: their nationalist ideologies were linked to the social representation of an “undeserved weakness” of the nation, as compared to his (sic!) glorious past (Hungary) or glorious future (Romania). Fears over the “decrease” of ethnic Romanians and Hungarians were fuelled by the negative evolution of demographic indicators. Racist and eugenic measures were interlinked with redistributive maternalist measures in Hungary and coercive ones in Romania in 1938-1939, which was not the case in Poland.

3. Maternalism and paternalism in state socialist family policies

Family policies were truly born under state socialism in Romania and Poland, and further extended in Hungary. Stalinist, coercive measures included a ban on abortion in all the three countries which was eased soon following the death of Stalin and the respective liberalization of abortion rights in the USSR. Following the workers’ rebellion in Poznan and the major political crisis in October in Poland, as well as the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, the first measures of the new leaders (Gomulka and Kádár) included the ease on abortion rights with Romania following suit. The second half of the 1960s saw a new wave of family policies in the region. In the words of Kligman “pronatalist policies became a general feature of the modernizing strategies of Eastern Europe’s socialist states” (1998: 20.). These policies, however, took different shape: Issues about fertility rates were not put on the political agenda in Poland, thus policies directed to the increase of the birth-rates did not appear, while some maternalist measures were still introduced. In Romania, however, ban on abortion in 1966 was central to the newly established Ceauşescu regime. The growth of the nation was instrumental for securing Romania’s independence within the Socialist bloc (Klingman, 1998; Pălăşan, 2009; Soare, 2010; Doboş, 2010). While similar concerns over the fate of the Hungarian nation alarmed Hungarian policy makers, they decided to engage in redistributive, rather than coercive measures during the late 1960s, and the combination of the two from 1973 when abortion rights was made stricter.

3.1. Moderate maternalism in Poland

Introduction of family allowance in Poland in 1947 signaled an important move towards the acceptance of “risks” related to families – administered by the social insurance system that was kept in place despite Soviet take-over. Reflecting the traditional male-breadwinner family, family allowance covered not only children but also non-working wives in Poland who were fully eligible until 1959, and with restrictions even until 2003. Nonetheless, in practice this program became a favorite tool for controlling and equalizing wages, especially useful during political and economic crises (Inglot 2008, 149, 171, 273). The formation of family policy as a discernible part of the Polish welfare state can be traced back to the introduction of the unpaid childcare (parental) leave in 1968. The reasons given for its introduction included the fact that public child care facilities (especially nurseries) did not follow the rapid increase of mothers in employment, while earlier family ties were weakened throughout the course of industrialization. Just like in Hungary, (male) employers’ raised concerns over “discipline”, because too many mothers took sick leaves (Piotrowski

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1968). Thus the answer to maternal employment was not to increase nursery places or include fathers in care-work but to give the “possibility” to mothers to stay at home without loosing their jobs. Another reason might have been the existence of female labor surplus in these years in Poland. Payment was attached to the long parental leave more then ten years later, exactly when the Jaruzelski-regime put an end to the open activities of the Solidarity movement with issuing the martial law. According to the negotiations with Solidarity, an 18-month, means-tested parental leave payment for both fathers and mothers was introduced. Following its introduction, amid a deep political and economic crisis, the number of women using the program jumped to a record of 92%. However, during the mid-1980s the situation reversed and the state needed more women on the labor market. This partly could be the reason why the government let the payment for extended leave deteriorate slowly throughout the decade. (Muszalski 1992: 86-87.)

Instead of being pre-occupied with demographic concerns (as the Hungarian and the Romanian communists), relief for poor families was an important aim of family policy measures in Poland. The 1981 payment of long-term child care leave was attached to an income test, and means-tested child care allowance was also to be extended gradually upon economic need. The same dynamics shaped the debate over family allowances, with the prevailing expert voices calling for the preservation of the general entitlement for everyone but with clear preferences for the poor – a basic continuation of the policy instituted in 1970-71. Eligibility criteria attached to means-testing and thus aiming at decreasing the poverty of families is a long-lasting feature of Polish family policies still present today.

Childcare services (nurseries and kindergarten) developed in a slow pace in Poland reflecting a continuity to the pre-war era. Communist Poland, despite experiencing rapid population growth never developed a clear child-centered orientation in its social policy expertise or agenda (Muszalski, interview, Warsaw, 2010) nor attempted to create any integrated system of childcare or family policies, falling rapidly behind many other Soviet bloc nations even during the best times of the 1970s (Klimkiewicz 1981). Instead, the ministries of health and education, respectively, always considered nurseries and kindergarten as their lowest priority, in comparison to their main missions of health care and elementary schooling. Thus, in 1990, when this responsibility shifted to the local governments without any further financial commitment, institutional stagnation and leadership vacuum set in for yet another decade beyond the fall of communism.

Weak representation of women is part of the reasons accounting for the neglect of child-care services. Before losing their independence from the Communist Party in 1949, the Women’s League from Poland engaged in lobbying for maternalist policies (maternity leave) (Fidelis, 2010) similarly to the activities of the Hungarian Women’s Association. Another source of female lobbying power would lie in workers’ movements: While Fidelis (2010) argues for the decisive role of female strikers during in shaping social policies, recently published documents (Mianowska&Tylski 2008, Lesiakowski 2008) show no evidence of any direct role of spontaneous women’s protests in shaping the agenda of family policy reforms, at least not in Fenruary 2071. Instead, the changes in maternity and family allowance programs, and later also birth grants and childcare leaves, can be traced to a relatively small group of experts of the Institute of Social Policy, under the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, sponsored directly by Prime Minister, Piotr Jaroszewicz, who personally negotiated the end of the 1971 unrest in Łódź and secured immediate Soviet financial assistance to help pay for socioeconomic concessions to the striking workers. Nevertheless, rebellious workers, male and female, did present explicit family policy demands for the first time during the

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August strikes of 1980 – most significantly in Gdańsk where three out of the famous 21 demands directly addressed family policy concerns: equalization of all family allowances to the level received by the party officials, the military, and the police), the extended and paid childcare leave, and the construction of new nurseries and kindergartens. The emphases on maternity and extended parental leaves, taken almost exclusively by women, and the overwhelming role of state-bureaucrats and politicians in shaping Polish family policies underlines the paternalistic elements of family policies under communist rule.

3.2. Redistributive maternalism in Hungary

Despite the regime change, the communist regime continued to be preoccupied with fertility rates in a rather nationalistic manner in Hungary. Family policies, including payments, periodical restrictions on abortion rights as well as services were called “population regulation” and were issued in several “packages” starting with one in 1953, under the female health-care minister Anna Ratkó. While it introduced birth-grants (one-time payment) it also limited maternity leave to only twelve weeks (at 100% wage) with additional twelve weeks of unpaid leave provided only when a nursery was unavailable. While the decree set the aim of doubling nurseries, the enrollment reached the target of 6% only by the end of the decade (Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1959&1960.). Until 1954, the majority of nurseries were located in factories. Kindergarten development slowed down considerably as well despite the fact that in 1953 the government mandated acceptance of all children of working parents from the age of two and a half. In 1955 enrollment reached 28%, just little above the pre-war level of 26.3% (1938) (OECD 2004, 14.). Coercion over reproductive rights was most evident in the tight control of abortion and the introduction of a new childlessness tax. In addition, the differentiation between industrial and agricultural workers provided incentives for women to seek work in factories and, to a lesser extent, to join rural cooperatives. Just as it was the case in Romania and Poland (Fidelis 2010, 191), a liberal abortion law was enacted after the death of Stalin, and the childlessness tax was abolished soon after the revolution, opening the way for a new, less coercive era of policymaking.

After the suppression of the 1956 Revolution, the regime of János Kádár adopted generous welfare measures to pacify the population (Ekiert 1996, 115; Inglot 2008, 185-87). In a famous speech at the 1962 Congress of the Party, Kádár explicitly referred to the difficult situation of families with many children, whose living standards “are to be raised more rapidly than the average”. He declared: “[W] e will increase maternity leave already in the following year and make it possible for mothers of small children to go on unpaid leave” (MSZMP 1963, 78.). The earlier report of the Committee of State Economies on the “population issue” argued that Hungary “had the lowest fertility rate in the socialist bloc and also – following Sweden – one of the lowest in the whole Europe.” As a remedy, the committee suggested the extension of paid maternity leave to six months and the expansion of nurseries. However, the Politburo decided that “cultural institutions, the media and the radio should deal with goals of our population policy more and on a higher level”.

Haney (2002, 91) argues that Hungarian demographers “launched an attack on welfare society” during the 1960s. Yet our research shows that their impact increased measurably only from the mid-1980s. Although the Party relied on their scientific expertise during the preparation of subsequent population policy instruments, only a limited number of their suggestions were implemented. While the newly emerging “rural writers” initiated the

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population debate, economists of the Central Planning Agency, backed by child psychologists, made the final decision on new pro-natalist measures. Writers, in an argument reminiscent of both the Stalinist period and the late 1930s, presented having children as a moral obligation to the (socialist) nation and (cautiously) accused the Kádár regime of losing touch with “socialist” values. Still, the conservative turn to keep mothers at home was only possible with a consensus about nationalistic maternalism, inherited from before World War II and now embraced by the Party leadership.

As fertility rates continued to decrease, the Politburo ordered a new, follow up report on the population issue in 1966. According to its “strictly confidential” minutes, it generated heated debates especially on the issue of abortion within the Party leadership (Előterjesztés, 1966.). Kádár himself agreed that the 1956 legislation on abortion was “too liberal.” When discussing stricter legislation, some members of the Politburo, however, agreed that Hungary should not follow the example of Romania under Ceauşescu’s coercive antiabortion measures. In the end Kádár refrained from banning abortion, but also rejected the demographers’ pleas for large increases in family benefits and services. Instead, the regime settled on a compromise solution consisting of a long parental leave (GYES) introduced in 1967, and the unification of family allowance for all employees. The new leave was paid on a flat-rate base set around 30 per cent of the average wage for two, and from 1969 on for three years, thus being the longest paid maternity/parental leave in the world. Its introduction represented a clear, conservative, maternalist shift of Hungarian social policies under state-socialism. Kádár, when announcing the introduction of GYES at the 1966 Congress of the Communist Party, argued that the leave represented that “the Party has to work persistently to make the emancipation of women”. Thus the official aim of emancipating women through employment was over, and was replaced by public maternalism.

Women soon raised concerns over their future employment prospects, as well as their status in the family. Many reported to the Women’s Association that their family now sees them as home-makers and they have to do all housework, whereas they received more help while they worked. The Association lobbied for extension of nurseries as well as increase in their quality. Such concerns, however, were swept aside and disregarded in the final design and implementation of new family policies, including the next, more comprehensive “population program” in 1973. The Party insisted on the separation of the “women’s question” and the “issue of mothers”, thus, “population”. The separation of policies regarding work and care represents the application of the “difference principle” in the communist politics of gender. As Fodor notes, protective measures directed to working mothers were based on their biological differences, and although they reduced male domination in the working sphere to a certain degree they “did relatively little to eliminate its practice” (Fodor 2003, 35). The 1973 program, reacting to the (again) very low fertility rates, announced the aim of the “three child family”, and while increased family allowances, the level of parental leave, it also restricted abortion. These policies already included some class and ethnicity dimension in that they favored “those whose fertility rates decreased, that is, higher educated women”, in fact discouraging Roma women to have more children. One of the “rural writers,” Domonkos Varga, even went as far as to argue for the need for “quality selection” in population policies (Heller et. al, 1988: 52) in a newspaper debate.

The last, 1984 population program represented the victory of the conservative-leaning coalition of demographers and welfare experts who viewed family policies and population policies as inseparable in the Hungarian context. Their ambitious aim was to reach a total

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fertility rate of 2.3 within ten years (starting from a low 1.76 in 1984), which would be sufficient for the “reproduction” of the population. A tangible remedy against low birth rates among better educated mothers came in the form of new earnings-related parental leave (GYED) with a more generous benefit close to an average wage. This represented the last significant step in the process of family policy development in Hungary under communism, targeting primarily mothers of young children until the third birthday but neglecting child-care services. Indeed, the 1984 program paid little attention to nurseries and kindergarten. This approach reflected the belief of decision makers that cash-transfers for mothers who stay at home would eventually lead to increased fertility. Emancipation of women was swept aside and the definition of the needs of women was reduced to maternity and child rearing both in discourse and in policy-making. (Haney 2002; Adamik 2000.) Family policies, and especially family allowance was used for poverty relief from the mid-1980s on. The amount of family allowance was rapidly increased during the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading to a spending on family policies to over 4.1% of the GDP, placing Hungary in a leading position in Europe (Gábos 2005).

3.3. Coercive, differential maternalism in Romania

The first decade after WWII was marked by an almost total neglect of issues related to the protection of mothers and children, and paternalistic Stalinist influence can be easily identified in the rewards for “hero mothers” (1950) and the combination of short maternity leaves with the development of public crèches and kindergartens, often on the premises of the old institutions run by interwar women’s organizations. The institutional instability that marked the pre-wars and interwar period persisted, and the changes in the structures of ministries responsible for work and social affairs reflects the departure from the principles of social protection towards a more disciplinary policy design, well illustrated by the removal of the very word “social” from the name of the ministry in 1967.

The interwar diversity of women’s organizations melted away rapidly under the increasing power of the Communist Party, and the juxtaposition of communist women leaders with the those of the Romanian Women’s Democratic Federation, actually the new name of the Association of Anti-Fascist Women initiated by the future Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ana Pauker. Their position diverged clearly from the maternalist ethos of the interwar women’s organizations:

“… we should not slip down on the road that the reactionaries try to open for us, namely that of separating women from men, of showing that today women have a certain separate organization with their own actions to fulfil. These are the old feminist organizations which under the hard times our country went through disappeared completely and you probably haven’t even heard about them. (...) These would be another split in the new camp of democracy, it would only create a new grouping to go separately…” (Liuba Chisinevschi, women member of the Communist Party, vice-president of the General Confederation of Labour, discourse from 1946 – see Tarau, 2002: 148).

Although the Constitutions of 1948 and 1952 asserted that families benefit from the protection of the state, between 1945-1960 family policies as such were not on the agenda. The system of cash transfers remained much less developed than in Poland or Hungary:

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there was no family allowance or paid child care leave, and birth grants (indemnizaţie la naştere) were limited to the tenth (Decree 106/19503) and later the seventh child (Decree 195/1951). Conditional family benefits aimed at promoting maternity by means of symbolic and, to a certain extent, financial rewards to “Hero Mothers” who gave birth to and were raising ten or more children, supplemented with other two categories for mothers having more than five children in their care (Decree 195/1951). Distinctions between these categories encompassed privileges similar to those received by the “Heroes of Socialist Work”, who were predominantly male. In the same vein of Stalinist policies, that pushed women into the labor force but maintained traditional gender divisions in family life, “hero mothers” were invited to various public manifestations, had priority at state credits for housing, and a state-sponsored holiday in the year of decoration (see also Albu, 1990; Kligman, 1998). At least at the level of political declarations, the state and the Party praised mothers raising many children and child care services for working women were recurrently stated as political priorities. While the regulations on maternity leave and benefits remained basically unchanged, in the early 1950s several decisions of the Council of Ministers address the expansion of crèches, kindergartens and other public day-care facilities. Similarly to the interwar period, the medical approach prevailed. The promise that child care facilities would be developed by the Agricultural Cooperatives of Production (Cooperativa Agricolă de Producţie - CAP, de Romanian correspondent of the Soviet „kolhoz”) remained an important element of the propaganda, but in the years to follow only a few CAPs set up créches or kindergartens for their members.4

De-stalinization brought along the liberalization of abortion in 1957, slight changes in the rights of maternity in 1958 and the introduction of family allowance for wage earners in 1960. However, workers from agricultural cooperatives (CAPs) and independent farmers remained outside of both social insurance schemes (including maternity) and family allowance until as late as 1977, and even afterwards they faced underprivileged entitlement conditions. At the same time, after the postwar baby-boom, fertility dropped considerably: from 3.14 children/women in 1950 (as compared to 2.60 in Hungary and 3.71 in Poland), to 2.34 in 1960 (as compared to 2.02 in Hungary and 2.34 in Poland). The results of the 1966 National Census revealed that the fertility rate in Romania (1.9) was second lowest among the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, comparable to Hungary (1.89) and much worse than Poland (2.43). Demographic concerns became thus a strong driver of family policies, but they did not necessarily embed technocratic visions, but rather the emerging nationalist grandomany of the recently elected Ceauşescu, in the quest for a big nation and a large labor force. The pronatalist goal, largely embraced in the communist realm as a whole, was pursued by the Ceauşescu regime through highly coercive regulations, which were rather unexpected for a country perceived at the time being as more liberal-oriented than the rest of the Soviet block. The decree 770/1966 prohibited abortion and withdrew contraceptives from the market, and it was shortly followed by the introduction of a celibacy tax and a financial penalty for childless couples, as well as an increase of the costs of intending divorce. Not only committing, but also assisting at or refraining from reporting to authorities abortions were criminalized (Decree 771/1966) (see Kligman, 1998; Popescu, 2004a and 2004b; Pălăşan, 2009; Soare, 2010; Doboş, 2010). As a result, the fertility rate jumped from 1.9 children/women to 3.66 in 1967 and 3.63 in 1968, then it gradually decreased at 2.19 in

3 Decree 106/1950 granted 20,000 lei to mothers who gave births to ten children, with the condition that at least eight of them were still alive (see also Doboş, 2010: 230). 4 For a detailed analysis of agricultural collectivization in Romania, see Roske, 2009.

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1989. However, the increase was not proportional for all social categories, but higher for manual workers and low-skilled service workers, while rather moderate for intellectuals and professionals. Mesaroş (1975, 1977), pointing out a paradox: a large part of the children were born in families that were not entitled to maternity benefits or family allowance. In 1982, child allowance was expanded for all first-ranked children and in 1985 the amounts increased both in rural and urban areas. However, at that time the material scarcity of the population was overwhelming and the poor quality of medical and child care services obliterated the wish to have a large family.

After the change of the regime, the bleak legacies of institutionalized children, high rates of infant mortality and child poverty, along with differential fertility rates (higher in rural areas and in the case of the Roma minority) kept the focus on the vulnerability of children, defined from a child-rights perspective. The Constitution of 1991 mentions explicitly the rights of children to receive child allowance.5 This approach was backed by the international support (and pressure!) to address the problem of institutionalized children, by reforming state institutions and reintegrating children in their families of origin or in foster care. The National Authority for Children was set up in 1997 as a separate institution, independent of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection. The salience of a stepwise, comprehensive reform of family policies was overshadowed by the “emergency” (Inglot, 2008) to reform the protection of children, by restructuring the role of the state as a legal guarantor of child rights and outsourcing child care services. The two major changes in family policies from the first years of transition had managed to pass possibly only because they fulfilled the same criteria of “emergency”, and were framed in terms of protecting child-rights and maternity: the introduction of paid child care leave (concediu plătit pentru creşterea copilului) in January 1990 (Decree-Law 31/1990) and the new law on the universal child allowance (alocaţia universală pentru copii) in 1993 (Law 61/1993).

Conclusions

In this paper we explored the linkages between maternalist and paternalist policies in Hungary, Poland and Romania, inherited partly from the interwar period, when these countries consolidated as nation-states and women tried to gain political power while being already active and influential in the field of social work, as an expanding dimension of public responsibility and a newly emerging professional domain. The ethos of protecting mothers and infants strengthened in this period, though typically not as the outcome of women’s agency but rather as paternalist policies initiated by men out of nationalist and health-related concerns. We argued that the endurance of interwar maternalism and its changing forms during the communist regimes are strongly tied to the persistence of nationalist goals. Histories of the three former socialist countries compared here revealed different forms and paths of paternalism and maternalism.

After the First World War, Poland and Romania were established as nation states and gained an unexpected possibility to unite territories formerly possessed by neighboring states. Hungary as a nation state was created through huge losses of the former territories

5:„(1) Children and young persons enjoy a special regime of protection and assistance for the fulfilment of their rights. (2) The state grants child allowance and aid for taking care of sick or disabled children. Other forms of social protection for children are established by the law” (Art. 45, the Constitution of Romania, November 1991).

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of the Hungarian Kingdom within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Fears of Hungarian irredentist sentiments and of the non-compliance of the Hungarian and German minorities in Romania fuelled the eugenic movement which gained widespread state-recognition and influenced restrictive abortion legislation in the late 1930s (Verdery 1991; Bucur 2002; Turda 2009) and also led to the early preoccupation with the “quality and quantity” of (ethnic) Romanian children. Such policies were exchanged for women’s newly ascribed roles as workers building Stalinist Romania in the years of massive industrialization. When Ceauşescu seized power, he not only returned to pre-War nationalist sentiments of the great and independent Romania, but also inflicted traditional peasant visions over the family and sexual norms, prohibiting abortion as an extreme measure to impose women compliance to their vocation of motherhood, while maintaining their obligations as workers (Kligman, 1998; Pălăşan, 2009). Poland, while also created as a multi-ethnic state, did not engage in coercive or redistributive family policies during the mid-war years due to political and demographic reasons: nationalism based on ethnic difference was not elevated to official governmental politics while overpopulation constituted a major problem, leaving no room for natalist policies. The Hungarian state, similarly to Romania, engaged in nationalist maternalist discourse while longing for gaining back recently lost territories also from Romania. However, it possessed more redistributive means and had greater bureaucratic capacities to implement redistributive maternalist policies than Romania. These policies were also linked to anti-Semitic legislation well before the German occupation of the country in 1944.

During state socialism, the decisive years of family policies were the late 1960s when Poland introduced unpaid long parental leave and Hungary issued the same type of leave but with payment attached. While Romania concentrated its economic production to the re-payment of foreign dept so as to gain more independence (Verdery 1991; Chirot, 1978; Popescu, 2004a; Ivan, 2009), Poland and Hungary increasingly used welfare measures to pacify the population during the 1980s. Family policies as means of cushioning economic hardship remained an important feature of Hungarian social policies of the 1990s, whereas they were rolled back in Poland in the same years. The strength of Hungarian maternalist policy culture, deeply rooted in its interwar history, makes is difficult for this country to depart from the compromise made by the Kádár regime over long parental leaves. The Polish state, while engaged in explicit family policies for the first time in its history during the late 2000s, is still reluctant to finance it. Romania seems to depart from its past more firmly, as it is discursively and policy-wise engaged to fight child poverty and ensure gender equality, influenced also by European expectations. Following Pfau-Effinger (2004), we may say that Romania is an illustrative case of “path deviation” fostered by its “ambivalent welfare culture” (Pfau-Effinger, 2004: 4).

Paternalist and maternalist compromise over family policies of the 1960s was most successful in Hungary and this is why post-socialist path-departure is most difficult here. The three-year-long parental leave, established under state-socialism, is still serving not only the supposed “early ties” between mother and child, but also constituted a rescue from unemployment. Meanwhile, nurseries have not been extended over 10-11 per cent for decades, and discourse over “the family” prevails over “gender equality” or “children’s well-being”. Poland, as a latecomer in family policies, slowly extended its services: kindergarten coverage increased from 50 to 70 per cent in a decade and new legislation fosters flexible forms of care for small children. Long parental leave is only paid for the neediest families while traditional (social insurance based) maternity leave is today longer and more complex

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than in the other two countries. Here, the state’s limited involvement in family policies remained an important feature, and thus private (formal and informal) solutions of care dominate. The strong imprint of paternalist maternalism fuelled by the Catholic Church has remained in place for almost two decades in the form of strict legislation on abortion. Romanian family policies seem to include the most innovative elements and react to the work-family tensions in a more flexible way than the other two countries, yet the protection of unemployed mothers is rather ineffective. After a gradual decay throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, public child care facilities started to receive more attention and financial support after the EU integration (partly with European, partly with local financing), especially in the larger cities. The focus on children’s rights, originated in the early 1990s concerns over the situation of abandoned and institutionalized children, persists and the universality of child allowance is maintained despite the significant budgetary expenses. However, conditional benefits for low income families are very modest and allow the state to maintain paternalistic control over the family through means testing and imposition of school attendance. Successors of Romanian nationalists with coercive sentiments remain a political minority as of 2012, however, anti-Roma sentiments play out in family policies as well. The strongly embedded model of dual-earner families and the increasing political voice of the emergent urban middle-class make Romanian family policies more receptive to European ideas, including gender-equality, levels of child-care as well as flexibility in care-work.

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