AT Ladies Against Feminism, Marzina Reich wrote an excellent essay in 2004 of growing up in Poland under Communism, which encouraged a mass exodus of women from the home. She wrote:

All those ladies, overworked past exhaustion, were always complaining that husbands and children were not cooperative enough, did not help out enough, and really no one appreciated fully the load they were carrying. They all believed a strange theory that the way to balance their job and their home was through the children taking over the housework. Every day I would hear about the eight-year-old prodigies who really loved their mom and welcomed her in a beautifully clean apartment with dinner hot on the table. It was pure fantasy, though – in real life most mothers could not bring themselves to trust nine year olds with irons, knives, making fires, and boiling pots home alone. The frustration produced contradictory expectations and mutually exclusive instructions, but in the end there was always more anger and disappointed complaints.

Summer vacations came, and, again, socialist superiority over the bourgeois societies manifested itself: our holidays would not disrupt our parents’ ability to continue working. We could go to state subsidized holiday camps for children. I often wondered why any thoughtful parent would subject their kids to that experience? Imagine a village school, often without basic amenities, with discarded hospital beds placed in the classrooms, twelve being the minimum number. I remember one occasion when, to let us have our one shower in the three weeks we spent there, we were all taken to a mental asylum in a nearby town. Then our bus broke down, and we were stuck in this strange, scary place for the whole day, worried that maybe we shall have to spend the night as well. Another year we discovered that every Saturday when our cooks wanted to get home earlier, the dinner was to be eaten straight from the oilcloth on the table; no plates and no cutlery, to save time on washing up. So much for the new, invigorating experiences holidays brought.

Please follow and like us: