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Editors' Note Sexist and Racist: The Post-Cold War World's Emphasis on Family Values In the wake of the class and gang-driven Los Angeles riots, Vice President Dan Quayle remarked that "the anarchy and lack of structure in our inner cities are testament to how quickly civilization falls apart when the family foundation cracks."1 Attributing the riots by implication to "a poverty of values" in female-headed African-American families, he not only revived the Moynihan Report of 1965, but also echoed the political call heard in all of the recently liberated Central and Eastern European countries for a return to a type of family dating back only to the Industrial Revolution when men's work moved outside the home while women's became more confined inside the home. The demise of industrial-family values does not represent the end of western civilization as conservatives imply because such values came into existence relatively recently and have almost never been experienced by the vast majority of poor people in any time period. Until the nineteenth century (and later depending on when countries industrialized), both women and men worked inside or around the home. Quayle and conservatives in general are calling for a return to the "values" of an all but extinct conjugal unit in the United States—one in which the wife does not work outside the home. Less than 7 percent of American families currently have the husbands/fathers as the sole breadwinners.2 The same cry can be heard in countries formerly under communist domination. Is this simply coincidence or is there a relationship between the collapse of communism and the campaign to resurrect the nuclear family with the father as sole breadwinner? Now that communism is dead, has feminism taken its place as public enemy number one? Why does the New World Order seem to require a return to barefoot and pregnant women in countries as different as the U.S. and Poland? In both countries economic conditions are unstable and politics very volatile. In such times women become both an economic liabiUty and a political threat to the establishment; thus, the return of the euphemistic cry for "family values" which, decoded, means: women, go home and let men run things. Likewise, in both countries those who oppose women's right to choose to control their fertility want to reinforce second-class citizenship for half the population. The Catholic church, for example, supported by members of the Christian National Union (ZchN), is working to end both abortion and contraception in Poland. It has already initiated mandatory religious 1992 Editors' Note 7 classes and installed a national medical code (bypassing normal parliamentary procedures) that pressures Polish doctors not to perform prenatal examinations and abortions (which are the only effective form of birth control practiced in Poland).3 Religious conservatives in Poland ignore current realities; namely, that in communist countries since the Second World War, and now under democracy and burgeoning capitalism since liberation, women have had to enter the labor market—first, because it was required by the state and now, because of inflation and decline in national funding for social services affecting women and children. In Poland feminists groups are taking up the fight because they have been forced to do so by a sexist form of liberation that replaced a sexist form of communism. Under the transitional period of liberation since 1989, the legal position of Polish women has deteriorated. This was to be expected since it is a common pattern after revolutions and wars. That women were the backbone of the Solidarity Movement seems to have counted for little. Today, Polish women are the first to be fired in the massive layoffs now taking place; and job offers in those new positions resulting from privatization more often than not go to men. Terms like "equality" and "women's rights" were discredited by the communists who incorporated them into their constitutions but failed to enforce them. Returning to "traditional family values" sounds appealing to women at all levels of Polish society who had been forced to work whether they wanted to or not. The task for Polish feminists is therefore a daunting one, and...

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