Authors

KATARZYNA STANCZAK WISLICZ¹;  ¹ Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Scien, Czechia

Discussion

In 1983, the third year of the economic crisis, the Home Economics Committee, which was affiliated with the League of Polish Women, organized a nationwide seminar addressing the changes the situation had brought to Polish households. Coinciding with the Committee's 25th anniversary, the seminar gathered experts, primarily economists and sociologists, who diagnosed a significant decline in consumption levels and explored how individuals responded to the situation. The resulting edited volume was the first analysis of the relationship between individual households and economic depression, particularly the commonly developed adaptive strategies. 
In the proposed paper, I will examine how expert knowledge on home economics contributed to the processes of explaining, adjusting and developing individual coping strategies to the economic crisis of the 1980s in Poland. This will be complemented by a discussion of the Hungarian context, where concerns about the crisis were driven by inflation, despite the visible abundance of goods in stores. 
I focus on the sociological research conducted by Lidia Beskid and her team in the early 1980s, then on academic publications connected with the research program "Changes in the consumption structure 1986-1990" which was led by Teresa Pałaszewska-Reindl at the Warsaw School of Life Sciences. Through an analysis of media discourse, I will examine how journalists and "popular experts" mediated expert knowledge and disseminated it to wider audiences. Since home economics was a discipline that focused on promoting an equal division of unpaid labour by modernizing housework, the crisis of socialist modernity provided an important context for the development of expert knowledge. Economists as well as sociologists became increasingly interested in the impact of extreme supply shortages and crisis management strategies on the gender division of labour within households. Considering the growing interest in the home economics as a field of expertise in academic and public discourse during the 1980s in Poland and Hungary, my main research question is how the crisis impacted thinking about gender equality within the household.