AbstractThis article explores gendered notions of modernity in late socialist Poland in the context of the household. It examines the scenarios of modernity for the household that were developed by various expert bodies and popularised by the mass media, and women's memoirs written as competition entries that describe their everyday practices. The main aim of this analysis is to examine how the memoirists responded to expert discourses about gendered modernity at home. The article shows that although they appear to have understood how to produce their life stories to interweave their experiences with official political discourse, the memoirs can be considered a valuable source that describes how individuals understood modernity, and how expert discourses affected their value system.
This article deconstructs the politics of the home efficiency movement organization Komitet do spraw Gospodarstwa Domowego (hereafter the KGD), or the Home Economics Committee in late state socialist Poland. While doing so we focus on the organization's agenda of reshaping the lives of rural housewives from being irrational and backward to that of the normative social role of a rational nowoczesna gospodyni (modern rural housewife) by providing them with the knowledge needed to efficiently use home appliances. We argue that the KGD positioned itself as an expert group between the communist state apparatus and society as an intermediary actor that assisted in carrying out the state's social policy of improving living standards. We investigate how this organization exercised its authority through its power/knowledge as an expert group, and its strategy of enrolling other actors in its campaigns. Our article draws from archival documents of the KGD, the content analysis of its periodical, and that of several other relevant popular and expert publications.
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