Editors' Note and Acknowledgments: The More Things Change the Worse They Become for Women

Editors' Note and Acknowledgments The More Things Change the Worse They Become for Women Just before the Polish elections in September 1993, The New York Times Magazine featured an article on Prime Minister Hanna Suchocha claiming that she single-handedly "reinvented" the country's political system and economy (along Western lines, of course) only to find herself in political trouble after the government fell in May. Although she remained prime minister at the pleasure of President Lech Walesa until the fall elections, it was regrettably evident, according to reporter Stephen Engelberg, that Suchocha's coalition of the centrist Democratic Union and fundamentalist Catholic parties would lose these elections. When two parties, made up largely of former communists, won over a third of the votes cast and two-thirds of the seats in the lower house in September, the editorial page of the New York Times sadly declared it "the failure of success" because privatization in Poland was working better than anywhere else in liberated countries of Eastern Europe.1 While the number of women in Parliament increased only marginally from 10 to 13, the electorate seemed to seek out women candidates, going far down party slates to vote for the few who ran. Feminist groups did not actively campaign for any of the male or female candidates from the left and, therefore, remain peripheral to, and suspicious of, the political process . It remains to be seen if the left-of-center government elected in the fall of 1993 will actually keep its promises on abortion and the broader issues affecting Polish women. Within weeks of taking office the new government already appeared to be backing off from challenging the Church directly by modifying the 1993 antiVabortion law to permit abortions for "social conditions," as is common in most of Western Europe.2 Perhaps the local spring elections scheduled for 1994 will bring more Polish women into the political process at the grassroots level and ultimately into more power within the resurgent leftist forces. Engelberg also noted in his article that Suchocka had "few links with the country's nascent feminist movement." He attempted to obviate her vociferous anti-abortion stand and the antidemocratic way in which she defended it by quoting an anonymous friend of the prime minister who said she "does not really hold such views." After 1.3 million Poles signed petitions to hold a national referendum on abortion, Suchocka, the bulk of the Church-linked politicians led by the ultraconservative National Chris- © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol. s No. 3 (Winter)______ 1994 Editors' Note and Acknowledgments 7 tian Union (ZchN), and President Walesa himself combined to refuse to honor these signatures. "This is my greatest failure," Suchocka said in blocking one of few successful examples of grassroots democracy at work in Poland. "The referendum on abortion will pave the way for a social conflict in Poland. It will divide the public and could destroy the coalition of pro-reformatory forces which has been built with such great difficulty."3 Eva Nowicka Wlodarczyk, a former assistant to one of the former female members of Parliament and now a lecturer at the University of Lodz, said of this undemocratic decision: 'To reject the referendum, as a way of making difficult decisions on socially controversial issues. . . . [created a] situation in which we are strained between [the] caricature of having equal opportunities under [a] communist regime, and being devoid [of the] occasion to even discuss seriously ... equal opportunity of men and women under [the] new political system."4 For women, in particular, equality under the law prevailed in name only under communism and now does not prevail at all. They were and remain second-class citizens as communists and as democrats. The example of Polish women losing rights, jobs, social services, and access to abortion in the wake of the fall of communism is not an isolated one. Only the pervasive presence of the Catholic Church in government affairs and public policy makes Poland unique in Eastern Europe. Yet Western governments and the Western press have largely ignored the uniformly antiwoman attitudes and policies unleashed under the guise of capitalism and democracy in all of the newly liberated...