Suchergebnisse

This article analyses the panorama of contraceptive technologies in Poland between the late 1950s and early 1970s. During this period, following the legalization of abortion for social reasons in 1956, the popularization of contraception became a public health campaign, which, at least officially, enjoyed direct support from the communist authorities. Using archival sources, popular medical literature and the press from this period, I trace the trajectories of female barrier methods and spermicides, the production and distribution of which was coordinated by Securitas, an enterprise funded by the Polish Society for Conscious Motherhood, the state-sponsored family planning organisation. This organisation used British and international family planning organisations to legitimise the contraceptive technologies it provided and present them as effective and scientific. The availability and quality of these contraceptive products fluctuated in the centrally planned economy, and were inscribed with at times contradictory values. In sum, the circulation of contraceptive technologies during the late 1950s and 1960s was shaped by concurrent processes of innovation and various forms of maladjustment, and these processes had, in fact, little relationship with communist authorities' declarations of support for contraception as an alternative to abortion. ; This research was funded by a National Science Centre (Poland) Polonez grant (ref. 2016/21/P/HS3/04080 and the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement no. 665778. Copy-editing was partially funded by the University of Granada.

This article analyses expert debates relating to abortion in Poland between 1956 and 1993, a period when the procedure was legal and accessible. Through the pages of the primary Polish journal for gynecology and obstetrics, Ginekologia Polska, I trace continuities and ruptures around three major intersecting themes: the procedure's indications, its (dis)connection to health, and the patient-doctor relationship. The journal became a forum showcasing interpretative tensions over indications for abortion and the malleability of the categories "therapeutic" and "social". In addition to these tensions, abortion was represented throughout this period as a potentially risky surgery, although this was initially nuanced with parallel representations of legal abortion combating maternal mortality. During the 1970s, abortion began to be linked to infertility, often in simplistic cause-and-effect terms. Simultaneously, opposition to abortion based on the idea of defense of the nation and fetal "life", surfaced in expert discourse. ; This research was funded by a National Science Centre (Poland) Polonez grant (ref. 2016/21/P/HS3/04080 and the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement no. 665778. Copy-editing was partially funded by the University of Granada.

Summary
This article examines popular medical discourses on contraception produced in state-socialist Poland following the legalisation of abortion in 1956, a time when the party state declared family planning to be a public health project. By analysing popular medical literature, I argue that the popularisation of family planning constructed and relied on gender norms that could ease anxieties about the mainstreaming of ideas relating to sexuality and contraception, as well as about gender equality in a state-socialist context. I show that the femininity constructed in Polish birth control advice was based in fertility and the physical attractiveness required to maintain a husband's sexual interest. Although masculinity was represented as distant, egoistic and violent, experts broadcast mixed messages about the effectiveness and usefulness of popular male contraceptive methods, some of which were at times utterly demonised.

This article examines popular medical discourses on contraception produced in state-socialist Poland following the legalisation of abortion in 1956, a time when the party-state declared family planning to be a public health project. By analysing popular medical literature, I argue that the popularisation of family planning constructed and relied on gender norms that could ease anxieties about the mainstreaming of ideas relating to sexuality and contraception, as well as anxieties about gender equality in a state-socialist context. I show that the femininity constructed in Polish birth control advice was based in fertility and the physical attractiveness required to maintain a husband's sexual interest. Although masculinity was represented as distant, egoistic and violent, experts broadcast mixed messages about the effectiveness and usefulness of popular male contraceptive methods, some of which were at times utterly demonized. ; This research has been funded through POLONEZ 2 grant no. 2016/21/P/HS3/04080 from the National Science Center (Poland). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665778.

This paper explores fertility management practices in state-socialist Poland and investigates post-war demographic change through the lenses of gender and modernization. Using personal narratives from oral histories and memoirs, we examine reproductive decision-making processes from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on motivations, norms, and the means employed to achieve desired family size. Our analysis reveals the ambiguous nature of both modernization and women's emancipation in regard to reproduction. We argue that acceptance of the two-child model and the need to effectively manage fertility increased in Poland through the second half of the twentieth century, but was highly dependent on levels of spousal communication and equality. Personal narratives demonstrate how social pressure shaped women's reproductive choices, and how at times these choices were considerably limited by male violence and domination. As our analysis shows, gender relations in marriage and the modernization of fertility management in state-socialist Poland were deeply interrelated.

In this article, we examine personal narratives on premarital sex by two generations of Polish men and women—one born in the 1950s and 1960s, and their parents' generation, born in the 1920s and 1930s and coming of age during or after World War II—and place these in dialogue with discourses surrounding young sexuality in state-socialist Poland. Using sociological surveys, popular sexological literature, and Catholic marriage preparation material, we contextualize accounts of premarital heterosexual experiences, provided through oral history interviews and contest memoirs—ego documents submitted for autobiographic writing competitions in the 1960s and 1970s. We show there was no clear division between public secular and Catholic approaches to premarital (hetero)sexuality, with both opposing sexual experimentation before and beyond marriage throughout the state-socialist period (1945–1989). However, across the same period, young people's acceptance of premarital sexual experimentation increased and the importance of a woman remaining a virgin until marriage declined. Our analysis of discourses and experiences reveals the connections and intersections of secular and Catholic realms. While secular experts did not conceptualize premarital sex as a sin, they often mirrored Catholic views by framing their discourse in terms of love, sex, responsibility, and potential risk. Young people negotiated various elements of these teachings in their premarital sexual practices, which, during the final decades of state socialism, were largely normalized, especially when couples were planning to marry.

This special issue uses Catholicism as a thread to bring together five contributions to the transnational history of contraception. The articles, which cover examples from Western and East-Central Europe, East Africa and Latin America, all explore the complex interplay between users and providers of birth control in contexts marked by prevalence of the Catholic religion and/or strong political position of the Catholic Church. In the countries examined here, Brazil, Belgium, Poland, Ireland and Rwanda, Catholicism was the majority religion during the different moments of the long twentieth century the authors of this special issue focus on. Using transnationalism as a perspective to examine the social history of the entanglements between Catholicism and contraception, this special issue seeks to underscore the ways in which individuals and organisations used, adapted and contested local and transnational ideas and debate around family planning. It also examines the role of experts and activist groups in the promotion of family planning, while paying attention to national nuances in Catholic understandings of birth control. The contributions shed light on the motivations behind involvement in birth control activism and expertise, its modus operandi, networking strategies and interactions with men and women demanding contraceptive information and technology. Moreover, through the use of oral history, as well as other print sources such as women's magazines, this collection of articles seeks to illustrate 'ordinary' men and women's practices in the realm of reproductive health.

This paper scrutinises the relations between different models of family planning advice and their evolution in Poland between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, focusing on their similarities and dissimilarities, conflicts and concordances. From 1956 onwards, the delivery of family planning advice became a priority for both the Polish Catholic Church and the party-state, especially its health authorities, which supported the foundation of the Society of Conscious Motherhood and aspired to mainstream birth control advice through the network of public well-woman clinics. As a consequence, two systems of family planning counselling emerged: the professional, secular family planning movement and Catholic premarital and marital counselling. We argue that reciprocal influence and emulation existed between state-sponsored and Catholic family planning in state-socialist Poland, and that both models used transnational organisations and debates relating to contraception for their construction and legitimisation. By evaluating the extent to which the strategies and practices for the delivery of birth control advice utilised by transnational birth control movements were employed in a 'second world' context such as Poland, we reveal unexpected supranational links that complicate and problematise historiographical and popular understandings of the Iron Curtain and Cold War Europe. ; Agata Ignaciuk's research was funded by the National Science Centre (Poland) Polonez grant (ref. 2016/21/P/HS3/04080). This project received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement no. 665778.