Authors

Mart Chmielewski¹;  ¹ Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia

Discussion

During the state socialist period, the cooperative sector constituted a major part of the Polish economy. By the late 1980s, over 15 million people were members of various cooperatives, such as agricultural, banking, labour, housing, or consumer ones. Nearly two million workers were employed in them, more than half of whom were women. Despite the cooperative movement’s near monopoly in food services, retail, or urban housing, and its important role in women’s employment, it remains marginal in both gender and labour histories of state socialism.
This paper explores how women activists within the cooperative movement developed and circulated forms of expert knowledge about women’s everyday lives that addressed both productive and reproductive labour and sought to modernize domestic and consumer practices within a socialist framework. I analyse in particular the National Cooperative Women’s Convention (Krajowy Zjazd Spółdzielczyń), held six times between 1956 and 1978, which gathered hundreds of women from both rural and urban settings, working across different cooperative sectors and levels of organisation. Organized by the Cooperative Department of the League of Women (Wydział Spółdzielczy Ligi Kobiet), the largest women’s organisation in state socialist Poland, and later by the Central Cooperative Council (Naczelna Rada Spółdzielcza), the event’s discussions revolved around recurring questions: (1) how to engage women more fully in the cooperative sector to achieve equality with men in organisational and leadership roles, and (2) how the cooperative movement could help address women’s everyday, gendered challenges.
The paper focuses on the international dimensions of the Polish state socialist female cooperative experts networks. Polish cooperative women maintained connections with the International Cooperative Alliance and its Women’s Consultative Council, as well as with their counterparts in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, and even India and the UK. While the cooperative sector in socialist states lost much of its formal autonomy under central planning, it became an arena where gendered notions of socialist citizenship were defined and contested. By situating female cooperative experts and activists within the international landscape of socialist and postwar global cooperation, the paper rethinks women’s expertise in state socialism beyond the binaries of emancipation and control, highlighting the cooperative movement as a crucial site of transnational feminist and economic imagination in twentieth-century Poland.