Abstract
The 1930s and 1940s were a formative period in the development of family policy as a relatively independent branch of the state’s social policy in the Bohemian lands. During this time, several political regimes followed one another (liberal democracy, a conservative authoritative regime, the national socialism of the occupation, and postwar people’s democracy). Despite these political changes, family policy was determined by the discourse of the waning Western industrial society and intensifying nationalism throughout the period in question. The articulation of the national threat created the conditions necessary for active state intervention in the sphere of marital cohabitation and managed support of population growth. This entailed compensating families for preserving the nation as a whole by giving birth to a populous new generation. These efforts were often in conflict with the movement for equality among men and women and increased women’s participation in the labor market. The first part of this article describes the discourse of the nation under threat and its political consequences. The second half focuses on the formation of the social reform consensus during the Second World War and after peace was restored. The third part confronts experts’ proposals with political practice: despite the low number of positive legislative measures, this analysis reveals the evident continuity of efforts to create a conceptual, state-led family policy regardless of the vastly different ideologies of the political regimes mentioned.
On March 19, 1947, a deputy and chairman of the Czechoslovak Union of Care for the Young, Vojta Beneš, made a speech in the Constituent National Assembly. It was on the day that a landmark law on the organization of youth care was passed, which broke with the previous evolutionary tradition of voluntary charitable care for the youngest generation and replaced it with institutions subject to state control. Beneš told his audience that “The revolution that has ended today actually started about 44 years ago. Even then, all the noble people of the nation and state were aware that a child does not belong only to its father and mother, but to the country, and they campaigned for childcare to become a duty of the state.” 1 In his view then, the Czechoslovak state was now implementing, even in revolutionary fashion, a conceptual family policy that had long been in the making, and the postwar republic was living up to the long-term expectations and aspirations of Czechoslovak society in this context. This ringing declaration, however, cannot necessarily be taken at face value. We ask, therefore, to what extent was a conceptual family policy in Czechoslovakia really established just after the Second World War? In what sense can we talk about it qualitatively? Again, why did it happen right after 1945 and how?
The aim of this study is to explore the genesis of the political practice that we define as conceptual family policy. First, as we shall show, the key factors here were the articulation of the threat of national extinction and the state’s increased intervention in the sphere of family and education as a response to it. It must be stressed, however, that the “threat of national extinction” is used here as an analytical category that includes various types of fears shared by political and social players in Czechoslovakia during the 1930s–1950s. Its sources were mainly political upheavals, economic stagnation, and the demographic crisis that the society experienced almost constantly during this time. Second, political strategies could be pursued by means of a population policy that enabled the state to intervene gradually in areas formerly located outside the realm of government regulation. The growth of state intervention into the sphere of the family and childcare was made easier and accelerated by the existence of a strong political consensus based on the experience of the Great Depression and the Second World War, the symbolic goal of which was the creation of the universal national insurance and the nationalization of the existing system of philanthropic youth care organizations, which Beneš spoke about in the speech from which we started. Jytte Klausen’s general conclusion on the relationship between political elites and mass mobilization in the early postwar phase of establishing social states in liberated Europe can also be applied to Czechoslovakia: “State-expansion often preceded electoral mobilization in favor of the state and postwar elections and changing party alignments ratified a process of change that had started early on in the war, at a time when partisan competition was suspended and unprecedented executive powers founded on emergency legislation allowed governments to act without constitutional constraints.” 2 Third, the promise of a politically, economically, and socially safe world after the war brought with it inevitable conflicts between individual key goals. In terms of family and childcare, the collectively formulated demand for national self-preservation in the form of population growth was in conflict with individualistic demands for equality and freedom. The economic costs of child-rearing in a fast-growing nation spurred demands for the material compensation of families for the education of the future generations of the nation. There was a major tension between the declared goal of women’s emancipation, including equal pay and the expectation of the fulfilment of maternal responsibilities within the patriarchal model of a nuclear family. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of political programs and the legislation, the emancipation of women was ultimately sacrificed to the collectivist interest of national self-preservation.
Between the 1930s and 1950s, there was—as Beneš’s speech suggested—a fundamental shift. This was manifest in the expert discourse on the governing of family life and in political practice, which determined the future development of Czechoslovak family policy in the second half of the twentieth century. The almost twenty-year period discussed here was very politically turbulent. Political regimes and ideologies alternated in quick succession, and for this reason, Czech historiography has usually explored particular historical phases strictly separately. Until September 1938, the parameters of the liberal democracy of the First Republic (1918–1938) were preserved. After the Munich Agreement, the brief period of the Second Republic began, characterized by the regime’s rapid transformation into a conservatively oriented and authoritarian national Czech–Slovak state (October 1938–March 1939). With the German occupation of the Bohemian Lands in March 1939 and the declaration of the independent Slovak Republic, conservatively oriented government elites began (in different ways in each part of the former Republic) to seek a modus vivendi with the import of German National Socialism. After the end of the Second World War and the renewal of Czechoslovakia, the new regime of People’s Democracy promised to build socialism, among other things to remedy what were perceived as significant shortcomings in mother and childcare in the preceding two decades. First, the country would take the national route with limited pluralism until the Communist coup in February 1948, and then it would build a socialist dictatorship of Soviet type. Naturally, these radical political changes did not remain without impact on the control of family life. The impetus for these changes came both from the discourse on the supposedly imminent extinction of Western societies prevalent mainly in the industrialized countries of the West and the militant nationalism, which, in the Czech–German relations in the period under review, became the decisive determinant of political practice and dynamic in the formulation of ideas on the quality of the population in future phases. 3
In the following text, we will show the extent to which the discourse of national extinction and consensus on the legitimacy of the public authority’s interference in the sphere formerly reserved for private interests created the conditions for new forms of control over heterosexual adult cohabitation and youth education. In other words, we shall trace how contemporary discourse, political negotiations, and legal practice headed for a conceptual family policy in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s–1950s. Looking at these spheres over a long period, we will argue that the development of interventionism was linear. Regardless of the radical transformation of political regimes, and even during the Nazi occupation, the direction of change remained the same. The legacy of Nazi social policy in fact played an important role as a stabilizing mechanism that helped in the achievement of the swift postwar reconstruction of the state. The initiative for more decisive interventions accompanied the developing discourse on the threat, which was strengthened during the Munich crisis in 1938. It was not so much liberal democracy as successive authoritarian regimes that, in the context of national self-preservation, provided active power for intervention in the private sphere. The target, however, was the quantity and quality of the population. The dynamic of the changes was thus related to the discourse of the threat of extinction, which demonstrably continued almost until the 1950s.
As we will try to show, we consider the main motives for the creation of a family policy to lie in the discourse on the threat of the national extinction, and the demand for compensation for families that contributed to preserving the nation by having numerous offspring. At the same time, pursuit of this goal was often accompanied by conflicting efforts to promote strict gender equality. Despite the fact that these motives were historically older and were already well articulated in the interwar period, only the experience of the Great Depression and Second World War created the conditions for the emergence of a broad consensus across political parties on support for the introduction of a previously unseen level of public intervention in family life and child-rearing.
In the light of this overall interpretation, the following study is divided into four parts. We will start with the introduction of the demographic context of the 1930s–1950s. Subsequent parts will present our main arguments. The second section focuses on the period articulation of the population crisis in the form of predictions of extinction. The third part is devoted to the conditions of the formation of the postwar political consensus, which we believe was still influenced by the perception of a “threat of national extinction” and the political elites’ as well as the population’s acceptance of increased state intervention. The last part confronts proposals from scholarly literature with the reality of the reforms that established family policy as a central part of the state’s social policy.
The Demographic Context—A Brief Introduction
Even in the years before 1914, there were already indications that the period of rapid population growth on the continent was coming to an end. France in the 1870s was the first country where the fear of extinction drew widespread attention well before the war. At the turn of the century, alarmed voices were raised about the threat of depopulation in other countries. 4 In Czechoslovakia, the deep-rooted autostereotype of a small country surrounded by danger played an important role, especially since it was a nation whose population growth did not stand out within the context of the Habsburg Monarchy or Europe prior to the First World War. Czechs had the second lowest birth rate in the Habsburg Monarchy, directly behind Germans (Czechs had thirty-two children per 1,000 people, Germans thirty, while Ruthenians had forty-four, Romanians forty-two, and Poles thirty-nine). 5 This prewar situation continued in the ensuing decades.
Table 1 shows that the downward trend in birth rates was a long-term phenomenon, and comparison between the two interwar decades indicates that the existing trends continued during the crisis rather than slowing down. Decrease in mortality rates and the prolongation of life expectance meant that the population size increased throughout the period until 1945, when the Second World War ended, the war front reaching the territory of Czechoslovakia only in its last year. The year 1947 is shown separately in Table 1. This was the year when the forcible expulsion of the Germans was essentially completed, resulting in a sharp population decrease. By contrast, the increase in 1940–1944 is remarkable. Compared to 1937, the number of live births rose by 40 percent in 1940, and four years later by as much as 44 percent (from 155,996 to 230,183). The paradox of the population increase during the war years was largely due to the fact that it was the period when the people born during the years just after the end of the First World War with the highest birth rates began to start families. In the last years of the Second World War, moreover, people hoped that having children would make it easier for Czech civilians to avoid transportation as forced labor (Totaleinsatz). 6
Population Figures, Natality, and Age Cohorts in the Czechoslovak Republic 1920–1955.
Source: Demographic Handbook 1959, Praha: State Statistical Office 1959, p. 16, 20, 26.
Statistical data require interpretation to become a meaningful part of discourse. In the 1930s, contemporaries regularly considered the figures to be alarming, although there were significant regional differences. In principle, natality decreased in the country from east to west, and, in comparison with other European states, the Bohemian Lands were almost at the bottom of the list. In 1936, the Bohemian Lands, with 14.9 live births per 1,000, lagged behind France, which traditionally had the weakest birth rate, and which, at the time, reported fifteen infants per 1,000. 7 All this played into the hands of the pro-natalists who dominated Czech expert and political discourse. This is why the discussion of the neo-Malthusian controversy, which often became very heated in many Western countries before the First World War, did not resonate as much in Czechoslovakia due to the relative weakness of this camp, which opposed superficial quantitative pro-natalism. As Alena Šubrtová states in her book Dějiny českého populačního myšlení [History of Czech Population Thought], published in 2006, “It was widely believed that in 1918–1938 Czechoslovakia had far from reached its optimal population size because of the increasing number of families with one or two children, and hence its outlook was the future ageing of the population. With the exception of a few voices, the population prognoses were pessimistic.” 8 As a side note, some pro-natal radicals, such as one of the founders of modern Slovak pediatrics, Alojz Chura, were appalled by the increase in condom sales in the 1930s. 9
To make matter worse, unlike Western Europe, Czechoslovakia continuously struggled with high infant mortality. In 1945, in the Bohemian Lands alone, 110 infants of every 1,000 on average died, that is, 11 percent. These rates were the same as those in Czechoslovakia in 1931, after which infant mortality steadily declined for several years, reaching their lowest level of 95.6 in 1940, before rising again. With such rates of infant mortality, Czechoslovakia barely equaled Sweden at the turn of the twentieth century. 10 The situation was even more dramatic in Slovakia. 11 The reasons for this were a shortage of doctors and poor hygienic conditions during births, including the treatment of newborns and also a lack of goods for newborns and lack of counselling centers for mothers. Childhood nutrition was also problematic. A health education campaign and improved hygienic conditions in Slovak families especially were eventually to rectify a situation supposedly caused by the population’s very superficial health awareness. The years 1954–1957 were the worst for Slovakia—43.9 infants and 18.3 newborns died per every 1,000 births. Statistics for the Czech lands were around 26.3 percent or 14.6 percent. 12
The Discourse of National Extinction
The political and expert consensus reacted to the Pan-European population regression in the form of a declining birth rate. 13 Unlike in neighboring Germany, state interventions aimed at stimulating population growth in Czechoslovakia were made gradually and unsystematically, with corresponding limitations in effectiveness at the outset. The population crisis in Czechoslovakia had two key aspects: quantity and quality. The continuous decline in birth rates was accompanied until the 1950s by high coefficients of infant mortality, which as we have noted were much higher than Western European standards. 14 Therefore, experts envisaged pro-population measures designed not only to increase but also to improve the population by means of more comprehensive care. “A radical decline in the birth rate threatening to result in the rapid decrease in the population is creating a number of problems for us relating to the quantity and, more particularly, to the quality of the population,” claimed Antonín Boháč, a leading Czech demographer in 1936, who added a further dimension to the quality of the population, namely, economic growth, which in his opinion could only be generated by a sufficiently large nation. 15 By “quality”, Boháč meant both physical and mental qualities and the structure and stratification of the population, but others openly adopted the measures instituted in Germany after the Nazis seized power. They were becoming more attractive in light of their visible effects of tackling the population crisis.
One critic of German interventionism was the Czech economist Otto Schmidt, whose projections of population trends in Czechoslovakia until 1960 to1965 warned of a decline in the population and in the number of women of childbearing age, which Schmidt believed would peak as early as 1945 and subsequently decline inexorably. In his opinion, the analogy between the evolution in Czechoslovakia and the fate of Western societies was due to the numerical superiority of the Czech population and its economical status: “Today it is evident that in terms of the population we are Slavs more by name,” he observed then. Czech society would share the same fate as France or Austria, which exhibited signs of an inexorable process of shrinkage but in a different way. 16 Schmidt’s forecasts in 1939 estimated the actual developments in the territory of Bohemia and Moravia quite accurately, but unlike in other European states, the decline in the population came to a halt at the beginning of the Nazi occupation. It began to decline moderately in the years 1944–1945. The reason for this interlude of higher birth rates was the reproductive activity of the cohort of 1918 and the one immediately following, not the hasty pro-population interventions of the state, which neither qualitatively developed, nor essentially reduced, the care practices instituted during the First Republic. In 1947, sociologist Marko Weirich noted with a certain pride that “the Czech population growth was only slightly lower than the rise in the German birth rate, which was caused by the much praised Nazi population policy.” But in his study on the nation’s birth perspectives, he was pessimistic about its future development, writing: “this increased fertility is due primarily to its initial low level.” 17
The Munich crisis and the creation of the second Czech–Slovak Republic sparked an interest in the future of the Czech nation and the qualitative aspect of population trends and strengthened the influence of the example of state interventions in Germany. The authoritarian Czech–Slovak state was to follow their example and do away with population liberalism, which allegedly contributed substantially to the extinction of the nation. Government and other public authorities responded to the demographic decline documented by contemporary statistics with an increased interest in improving health service conditions. The nation was not to lose a single member of the community through insufficient care. However, most of the problems that doctors and demographers saw as the causes of the high infant mortality centered on the care for expectant mothers and postpartum care for mothers and children. 18 Experts therefore called for a family policy because it was “above all in the family that the nation is reborn and rejuvenated.” 19 The sociologist Marko Weirich quoted above was the first to name this qualitative change in family care when he emphasized the comprehensive nature of the care that should be provided to everyone for the duration of their lives. 20 The ideal that placed the family at the center of everything led Weirich to considerations of a class-based system, which he believed would be able to “harden the Czech nation economically and socially so that it could tackle all the tasks that confront it on the way to the future.” 21 The tasks lay precisely in the sphere of population policy.
In the 1940s, policies aiming to boost the strength of the Czech nation were conducted in the spirit of much greater perceived unity between the quantity and quality of the population. In practice, this was manifest in two ways: on the one hand, through the adoption of racial selection following the example of National Socialism, and on the other, through pragmatic calls for the improvement of social and health care. Eugenic thinking had already influenced Czech experts’ thinking at the turn of the twentieth century, but during the Nazi occupation, there was even more stress on the National Socialist notion of a healthy and strong Czech racial community. All the same, these ideas did not often go beyond the framework of social and health prevention, although they spoke openly of some “racial” aspects. 22
The potential for change during the events of autumn of 1938 as well as the nationalization of society was not exploited sufficiently for there to be any transformation of the established practice of sight over the family and education during the occupation. The reasons were not only the wartime situation of Europe, the reality of the occupation regime, and the Nazi “Volkstumspolitik” but also inadequate financial resources for large-scale projects of marriage loans or family allowances. 23 Family support was therefore organized on other levels, in particular, in care for mothers and children in the prenatal and postnatal period in counselling bureaux that had a social, health-related, and educational function.
The campaign to improve family support should be taken seriously; it was not marginal. Dissatisfaction with the institutional availability of care for mothers and children had been a theme of discussion among the political elites and experts since the end of the interwar Republic, and they returned to this subject again after the Second World War. In the war years, the principal spokesman of the reformists was a doctor, František Pachner, who stressed the need for a pro-population policy that would revive in the population the desire to have a child. In five key points, he summed up the objectives of the new program and the means for attaining them: increase in basic material benefits, including a plan for interest-free loans for subsistence and cheap flats for newlyweds, support for maternity through social insurance, wage bonuses and tax relief, provision of social advantages for large families, institution of maternal leave and maternity support, and, last but not least, the declaration of legal safeguards for the rights of children born out of wedlock. 24
Making a reality of these plans, which Pachner brought up again in 1945, was naturally a slow process, although his proposals called for immediate measures to eliminate the first of the key problems—infant mortality, which did not immediately fall after liberation from the Nazi occupation. The experience of the occupation and the postwar radical nationalism further developed the discourse on the necessary regeneration of the nation; this showed continuity with the declarations made during the First Republic but now within the context of seeking a specific national path to building Socialism. The drop in population caused by the expulsion of the German and Hungarian communities made the danger of depopulation all the more acute. The semantic field on which the discussions on the formulation of an interventionist family policy took place is evident just in the titles of the key demographic literature of the time: Otázka potomstva—otázkou národního bytí [A Question of Progeny—A Question of National Existence] (F. Pachner 1946), Náš populační problém [Our Population Problem] (L. Patočková-Horáková 1946), or Děti nám umírají [Our Children Are Dying] (V. Srb 1947).
In the months following the end of the Second World War, the key to the revival of the national health and population growth, besides the general improvement of living conditions, was the resolution of the acute housing crisis. The relationship between birth rates and housing culture was pointed out just after the war by the statistician and demographer Vladimír Srb who energetically discussed the repeated demographic decline and the poor social conditions that contributed to it. 25 In Srb’s view, the era of liberalism that had produced social inequalities and saw parental poverty as the best guarantee of procreation was long gone, and population issues would now be addressed in novel ways. 26 In this context, he refused unilateral measures, such as limiting the availability of contraceptives, calling rather for the creation of favorable conditions for family life. Sufficient and permanent income and good housing for a reasonable price were two fundamental conditions for increasing natality, as the problem was identified in the demography of the time.
The debates on the need for increased birth rates were further stimulated by the contextualization of the population question by the problem of the reproduction of the labor force. This theme had appeared for the first time during the Second World War in connection with the mobilization of women’s labor and was expanded by the constructive ethos of the liberated Republic. On the one hand, there was a widely shared demand for the social and economic appreciation of housewives’ work and their emancipation in the labor market, and on the other, there was the persistent idea that “the first patriotic duty of a woman is to protect and stoke the flame of national life! Ignoring or failing to heed this warning would be fatal to all other efforts, as it would deprive them of their purpose, which is the eternal existence of the nation!” 27 Promotion of state care for mothers and children and the more self-confident position of the employed woman-mother were the two levels of the debates that permeated the social and expert discourse in the postwar period, and for a long time, they could not be satisfactorily integrated. The reasons were understandable, as the distance between woman and the household indicated her insufficient commitment to the role of mother and hence persistent population decline or at least stagnation.
Building a Political Consensus
In the late 1930s and the early 1940s, the perception of an external as well as an internal threat created the conditions for a political consensus that accepted interventions in the private sphere in order to protect public interest to an unprecedented degree (with the exception of state governance during the First World War). The state’s anti-crisis policy significantly limited the functioning of market mechanisms (the cartelization of industry, bureaucratic price setting in arable farming) and popularized the idea of rational planning not only for the economy but also for the society as a whole. 28
A full program of active pro-family policies was only introduced in the Bohemian Lands in earnest after the Second World War. By the later 1930s, there was simply a plan for responding to the long-term unsatisfactory situation in the organization of family care reflected in high infant mortality and declining natality. The Minister of Health and chairman of the German Social Democratic Party in Czechoslovakia, Ludwig Czech, presented his departmental program to the Budget Committee of the National Assembly in November 1937. The correlation between the economic crisis and the health of the population was manifest in the long-term fall in birth rates in the Bohemian Lands as well as the health of children in the areas hit hardest by the economic crisis. The program envisaged the creation of an appropriate three-pronged legislative framework: state youth health care, medical inspections in schools, and improving social and health care for women and mothers. Debates on the level of organization at the core of the concept focused on care for mother and child in the prenatal period and hygiene and social care for children and adolescents. 29 One of the priorities was to reduce women/mothers’ ignorance and lack of information through counselling, along with regular prenatal and postnatal medical care. Evidently, the Czech program was a response to the criticism voiced by experts that preventive care was inadequate. The program’s rapid implementation, however, was due to the turbulent political events of 1938, which broke Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity and then destroyed the liberal democratic system of the First Republic forever, as it would seem.
The political leadership of the new post-Munich Republic was considerably more conservative than its predecessors and showed a heightened sensitivity to social problems, to which government policy under the previous regime had paid scant attention. The arguments on the inadequate protection of the family, which the political left had increasingly focused on between the wars, were quickly appropriated after Munich by the new conservative political regime of the Second Republic. The model family policy of National Socialist Germany played a certain role in this. Rudolf Beran’s new program proclaimed on December 13, 1938, reveals a synthesis of the rhetoric of national unity, collective self-preservation, and protection of traditional values. 30 Family support and its protective and reproductive functions appeared to be one of the highest priorities of the national interest in the curtailed post-Munich republic and, later, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A similar language was used in the documents of the People’s Community (Národní souručenství), the only legal Czech political movement in the Protectorate founded on March 23, 1939: “We will stabilise and strengthen the family with the Christian spirit so that the child will grow up in a healthy and moral atmosphere. This has been hindered by the easy dissolution of marriage, which has deprived thousands of children of family support. Therefore, marriage-related legislation will be reviewed in its entirety, and the solidity of the family will be greatly reinforced. The new family legislation will support extra social care for the family and, more particularly, for the large family, to return due importance and dignity to this supporting pillar of the native community.” 31 National self-preservation played an important role in the rhetoric of the resistance (foreign and domestic), and, in the jargon of the Protectorate, political representation and family support appeared to be a desirable tool for attaining this goal.
The perception of a national threat, a tendency toward solidarity produced by the experience of an oppressive occupying power, and collectivist ideals articulated by leftist parties, which became prevalent in the milieu of the foreign and domestic resistance and in the preparations for a postwar renewal, laid the groundwork for a new concept of social policy that envisaged a massive growth in public expenditure and the state administration dealing with the social security of the population. 32 At the end of the war, a strong social consensus was forged in European countries, including Czechoslovakia, which determined the subsequent expansion of social expenditure and development of social services with different variations on a welfare state. Historian Geoff Eley observes that this consensus in the political rhetoric was centered on four thematic points: patriotism, social need, national interest, and the common good. In his opinion, the fact that most of the population agreed on these points was due to the ways in which it remembered the past, with the contrast of the years of crisis and war: “The 1930s signified a massive failure of the system—the ‘low, dishonest decade,’ the ‘devil’s decade,’ the ‘wasted years.’ […] The Second World War was a ‘good war,’ not just because of its anti-fascist character, but because the egalitarianism and social solidarities needed for victory also made an irrefutable case for equitable social policies in the world to come.” 33
In Czechoslovakia, this political consensus was formulated in the Košice Program adopted by the first postwar Czechoslovak government on April 5, 1945, following prior agreements between the representatives of the London-based exiles and the Moscow-based Communist resistance movement. It was not merely the dominance of leftist-, social-, and reformist-oriented political parties in the postwar political system, when the traditional First Republic right wing was ushered out of the political arena by the National Front, but also the ways in which the past was remembered that developed a high degree of consensus on postwar economic and social reforms in the population. According to an opinion poll taken in the spring of 1946, 62.9 percent respondents supported the program without reservation, while only 2 percent were firmly opposed to it. The remaining citizens voiced their reservations about certain points in the program. Similar results were obtained in a later poll in May 1947. 34 Apart from the pledge to nationalize key sectors of the economy and to carry out land reform, retribution, and the expulsion of the German population, welfare commitments were set out in particular in Article 14: “The government will make sure that all workers are financially secure in the event of unemployment, sickness, accident, disability, and old age, and that this care will be gradually extended to self-employed persons if they have no other means of subsistence. In the forefront of social care will stand intensive care for the mother and the child. Social insurance expenditure of all kinds will be financed from the state budget.” 35 Alongside universalism, this was a pledge to nationalize social expenditure, which is something usually ascribed to the import of the Soviet model of social security in the 1950s. The explicit provision on mother and child also opened up new possibilities in population policy.
There was thus agreement between the expert discourse on national extinction and the political consensus based on the expectations of the population that the suffering of the war years had created the conditions for the government’s immediate adoption of measures in accordance with its declared program to react positively to the call to combat the threat of population regression. Ambitions were high, because despite the destabilized social and health-care sector, politicians and experts envisaged a population revolution of the Czech nation. Persistent fears of national extinction were only one of the reasons for advancing a new concept of family policy.
The Promise of a Population Revolution
The discourse on the regeneration of the nation in 1945, stemming from the occupation experience, was very influential with the public as a result of the social crisis of families with children and the constructive ethos of the liberated republic, despite the incongruity between these phenomena. Already there was palpable tension between the priorities for the maximum mobilization of the workforce and the requirement for increased birth rates. By this time, Czechoslovakia was characterized by the relatively high degree of women’s participation in the labor market, which was expected to rise. According to statistics from 1946, women already accounted for 39 percent of the active labor force in the country. 36 The postwar first two-year economic plan (1947–1948) envisaged the creation of 600,000 new jobs, representing a more than 10 percent increase in the number of workers. The law left no doubt as to where the new workers would be recruited in the goals in Section 1: “to increase the number of women in gainful employment” (Act No. 87/1947 Coll.). It reveals much about the social climate of the time that in the National Socialist Party, which among the legal parties probably expressed the most respect for individual rights in the postwar period, there were those who held that a collectively conceived common good justified the principle of forced labor. An editorial in the party weekly National Republic of November 8, 1946, called for unmarried women to be legally obliged to take up employment. At the same time, it declared categorically: “Hands off the Czech mother! Let us block emphatically all attacks, concealed or in the open, unleashed against the Czech family. No two-year plan or other material interests must be more sacred to us than the family, whose inviolability is the indispensable prerequisite for the healthy development of the nation.” 37
In 1945, the government came up with measures designed to accommodate women and families. In July, the Ministry of Social Care issued a decree on equal wages for women (No. 74/1945 Ú. l.). Although employment experts, such as the Bohuslav Glos quoted above, presumed that wage equalization would increase over the next few years, 38 actual developments confounded this expectation. At the end of the 1950s, women’s average wages in the socialist sector were only 66.1 percent of men’s, 39 not very different from the figures reported in the interwar period (estimates ranged from 55 percent to 65 percent). 40 For the party leadership, or the era’s social science, this did not pose a serious problem. In their explanation, it was a relic of the discrimination against women that had been typical of education under capitalism. This was why women held inferior positions in the socialist economy and the elimination of gender discrimination in the education system of a people’s democracy would solve the problem rapidly. In fact, in the following decades, gender discrimination in wages remained constant, and such comparisons ceased to be published in Czech scholarship. 41
Families’ living standards were taken into consideration for family allowances introduced in December 1945 (Act No. 154/1945 Coll.). This was not a complete novelty in Czech legislation. In the interwar period, there had been special allowances for civil servants and the Protectorate government instituted allowances for large families by Ordinance No. 441/1941 Coll. In both cases, the grant of an allowance was subject to the social need of the household. The allowances starting in 1945, however, were universal and egalitarian allowances for all employees (but not self-employed persons), although the Communist party demanded in its social and political program the institution of allowances “for all children of all parents.” 42 The structure of the allowances lacked any pro-natal implications, and lawmakers did not expect any, even though in the pages of the main Czech expert periodical for social policy, Social Revue, the measure was designated as “a new instrument of our social and population policy.” 43 Their sole function at the time was to react to the continuing inflation pressures in the economy in order to partially equalize the costs of the basic necessities of life and wage levels. Pro-natal stimuli began to appear in the system only after an amendment to Act No. 58/1947 Coll. in the form of a progressive increase in the allowances for families with many children. Subsequent scholarship found the structure of the progression wholly inadequate in terms of stimulating birth rates, although more radical versions were discussed when the act was drafted. 44
Families were treated similarly in housing policy. Strict rent regulation was inherited from the wartime era and adopted by the postwar regime. The July Ordinance No. 175/1939 Coll. forbidding price increases froze rents as of June 1939. In the rent regulation, there was no explicit preference for families with children. Any benefits for the later were only indirect, arising from the fact that, during inflation, the ratio between rents and total household expenses decreased as a result of the rent freeze. Just after the war, the normative ratio was considered to be 15 percent. As the government wished to settle the border regions soon after the Germans left, it introduced the possibility of applications for reasonable rent reduction, further lowered by the presence of dependent children in the household. The 15 percent threshold gradually lost any meaning. In the end, mandatory rent regulation caused accommodation expenses in the 1950s to become a marginal item in family budgets, averaging a mere 2 percent to 3 percent of total expenses. 45
In 1939, preferential treatment had been introduced for families living in flats built with the state’s financial participation according to the number of dependent children when the flats were allotted. A similar logic guided the postwar legislation. An act on state support for residential buildings (No. 41/1947 Coll.) reserved one-quarter of the flats in new buildings for young couples married for less than two years. Likewise, a flat management act (No. 138/1948 Coll.) gave preference in flat allotment to young married couples with children or couples expecting a child soon. 46 However, as a result of the lack of investment funds for housing construction, a problem that rent regulation exacerbated, the stock of available housing decreased in the 1950s, leading inevitably to an increased demand for vacant flats and an increasing shortage of them. While in 1945, there was a lack of approximately 300,000 flats, according to a census taken in 1961, there was an unsatisfied demand for half a million. 47
Besides planning and constructing new housing units, marriage loans had a similar stimulating effect. They actually only began in 1948, although the Protectorate authorities had attempted to introduce them in March 1940. The legislative proposal for their introduction was inspired by the German law on the alleviation of unemployment of June 1, 1933 (Gesetz zur Verminderung der Arbeitslosigkeit), 48 which envisaged interest-free marriage loans aimed at raising marriage rates. In its formulation of the proposal, the Protectorate government took into account “various moral, health, and social motives,” justified by “public interests,” and the efforts to achieve the requisite quality of the population. A loan would be preferentially granted to physically and mentally healthy young Czechs. 49 Its inspiration by the legislation of National Socialist Germany was not only practical but also ideological. The detailed proposal envisaged the granting of interest-free aid amounting of five to eight thousand crowns, and, in its second part, aid for families with many children. These were not negligible sums—in July 1940, the annual wage of a worker working in the favored metalworking industry amounted to approximately 15,000 crowns. 50 Nonetheless, any financial aid in the rationed economy period had one great drawback: without ration cards, people could only buy goods on the black market. The high financial burden, which the Protectorate ministries were unable to ease, was also the reason given by the occupation authorities when they refused to implement this government ordinance.
Loans continued to be perceived as very attractive measures for simulating natality, although the German experience did not confirm that their effects were convincing. The birth rate of young German couples who received state aid did not rise dramatically. 51 After the war, the Czechoslovak authorities took up similar incentive projects. The later unrealized proposal for a “marriage discount” of March 1947, which would have exclusively supported couples of childbearing age, was finally replaced in 1948 by marriage loans instituted by the act on state aid for newlyweds (No. 56/1948 Coll.). In terms of generosity, they were comparable with the Protectorate government proposal of 1940. Young families aged thirty-five and under and married for over two years could borrow up to 36,000 Czechoslovak crowns with a preferential interest rate of 3.5 percent. When a child was born, the loan became interest-free and one-sixth of it was written off. Another sixth was written off after the birth of a second and after every subsequent child.
The law attracted a number of criticisms, especially of the complicated application procedure and lengthy processing. The necessity for a loan in order to purchase goods to set up a household and acquire items for children was a practical problem, since both the supply and availability of consumer goods were limited. 52 Despite the initial relative popularity of the marriage loans, it soon waned after the monetary reform in 1953 because the legislation had not been adequately updated in line with the new ratios between prices and wages. The conditions were adjusted with circumstances and were too stringent for households with average incomes to satisfy them. The loans were not abolished in the following years but recourse to them became rare. 53 They would return again with new legislation during the era of “normalization” in the 1970s and 1980s.
Improved services, in particular health services, accompanied the stabilization of the social situation of families through allowances and marriage loans. A woman considering motherhood was not to be discouraged by a lack of available care. For this reason, women were to be the main target audience of the contemporary health-care discourse because “it is through a health-conscious mother that new health care knowledge is imparted to the members of her family and those close to them.” 54 In the 1950s, worries about health consciousness would be alleviated by experts’ and then politicians’ interests in reforming counseling services and in conferring upon midwives the status of professionals. Unlike the marriage loans, both of these measures had been foreshadowed in practice during the occupation, when they may have helped to raise the number of live births between 1940 and 1944.
More generally, the system of family social health protection had originally been largely the province of voluntary social care institutions. During the occupation, these were affiliated with the new National Aid (later Social Aid) projects under the National Centre for Social and Health Care umbrella organization, established in the summer of 1939. This was the first step toward the centralization and the subsequent nationalization of voluntary social care in pursuit of the prospect of a population revolution. At the beginning of 1947, there were plans to further expand the network of counselling bureaux—in Bohemia alone there were 1,032 counselling bureaux for mothers and children—and, in the future, the network was to be further expanded by a third, the number of counselling centers for pregnant women would increase, and, at a time when there was a shortage of medical and social workers, there would also be the option of creating mobile counselling facilities. 55
The path toward the nationalization of the counseling bureaux, which the government saw as a very effective instrument for the mediation of current health-related knowledge and for the regulation of the country’s population behavior, was supported by a growing interest in midwifery. This was logical because, according to the statistics, 85 percent of all births in the second half of the 1940s took place at home, and in the rural areas, it was almost 100 percent. 56 With midwives’ professional status, which was conferred in 1948 when they were taken into state service, and the transfer of births from homes to institutions, care was improved to the detriment of intimacy in the home environment and the ethos of voluntary care.
The transformation of the system through the nationalization of the bodies active in the field of public care meant, in practice, the decline of charitable institutions in favor of social and health facilities (day nurseries and orphanages), social and educational facilities (educational facilities, children’s homes, and orphanages), and social and legal institutions (wardship and guardianship). These were regulated by Act Nos. 48 and 49/1947 Coll. Before the First World War, day nurseries had played only a marginal role, but they soon grew in importance. In 1921, there were 56,600 children in day nurseries, but in the school year of 1936/7, there were already 104,600. 57 Only after the Second World War did schooling and nursery facilities become much more prevalent. There were some critical voices that pointed to their negative impact on children’s development, 58 but others admitted that schooling and nursery facilities made life easier for working women. The perception at the time was clearly that the collective facilities were institutions that existed for the good of mothers who could rejoin the workforce through natural emancipation. Doctors, however, considered that they were contrary to children’s interests and maternity as such, and it was claimed at the time that mothers’ interests, stemming from a desire for emancipation and employment, did not necessarily coincide with children’s needs. 59 The idealized image of the employed woman-mother was to represent the progress brought about by the revolutionary year of 1945: “And here we see the great difference between the perception of women in the pre-Munich republic and today’s popular democratic system. The employed woman no longer plays the role of escape valve in times of economic crises.” 60 Now she was supposed to be capable of combining the role of woman-mother and woman-worker, and the state was to help her with this challenging task as much as it could. Instead of these idealized images of the future, the reality of the ensuing decades of state socialism in Czechoslovakia was far darker, as the Czech demographer Milan Kučera described in his critical essay of 2009: “The only possible career a women could have was gradually unified: marriage at an early age after a short period of work preparation, bearing on average two children one after another in the interest of family “effectiveness”, and then long years of two-shift work—at their jobs and in the home, including raising the children.” 61
The groundwork for this change was laid by the National Insurance Act (No. 99/1948 Coll.), regarded as the apex of the postwar legislative efforts for the social protection of the population. It guaranteed free medical assistance to insured women, including treatment in maternity hospitals and maternity grants. It also confirmed family allowances (child allowances) introduced in December 1945 and provided mothers with children’s clothing and accessories, which, in an inadequately supplied market in the postwar period, was a most welcome help. Maternity leave was fixed at eighteen weeks. Between the wars, it had only been twelve weeks (except for female civil servants who had enjoyed three months’ leave and national insurance, which they had been eligible for since 1950; this privilege was revoked). National insurance, together with the new Family Code (No. 265/1949 Coll.), which eliminated the superior position of men as the heads of the family and gave children born out of wedlock equal rights, closed the cycle of rapid changes in family policy of the postwar period. Social policy, in the first years of the existence of the Socialist dictatorship after 1948, began to be more subordinated to economic interests, which quickly overshadowed other interests including the population. The family policy that fully crystallized at the end of the 1940s was stabilized for more than two decades.
Conclusion
To what extent was the family policy after the Second World War conceptual? Perhaps the best answer to this question is that the policy gradually became more conceptual. We found that what allowed a conceptual and relatively complex family policy to be created was the discourse on the nation’s threatened existence, which functioned as a broad platform for the formation of expert narratives. This discourse justified the growing state interventions into the sphere of family relationships and legitimized various interventionist political measures. In the second half of the 1940s, it helped deepen experts’ and politicians’ mutual respect for one another as well as their collaboration. Moreover, both groups shared Czech nationalist tendencies coarsened by the forced expulsion of the Germans in 1945–1947.
The revolutionary rhetoric that Vojta Beneš deployed in his speech at the National Assembly was primarily legitimized by the immediate postwar political measures and priorities of postwar Czechoslovakia. In political practice, it was reflected in acts that united volunteer care in Czechoslovakia and emphasized the employment of women. Both of these developments, however, had been initiated during the Nazi occupation. Czechoslovak family policy was thus not created from scratch, or revolutionarily shortly after the Second World War. In fact, it followed in the tradition of Protectorate social welfare, something that people kept quiet about after the war. The postwar reconstruction of the state provided arguments for increased state intervention in the intimate sphere of the family, which had already slowly started to happen. The steps in the 1920s, 1930s, and the first half of the 1940s coalesced in 1948 thanks to the national health insurance law. The family care package was rounded off by laws on youth care and health-care counseling, and the popular newlywed loans. The research shows the contradiction between the political priorities and the subsequent reality. While there was consensus on the goals of the future family policy after the war (long-term population growth, the not only formal but also actual liberation of women, and comprehensive economic and social compensation of families for raising the next generation in the form of available apartments and a broad catalogue of social benefits and services), their realization was rather a different matter.
It cannot be said that the socialist dictatorship, in the first decade of its existence, was devoid of any achievements in the family agenda established during the 1930s and 1940s. The greatest success is rightly considered the elimination of infant mortality: by the late 1950s, Czechoslovakia had one of the lowest rates in Europe. Women’s emancipation, however, was sacrificed on the altar of economic growth. Investments in production capacities consumed vast quantities of resources, and not enough institutions of collective consumption and education, prerequisites for the high employment of women, could be built. Moreover, the leveling wage policy increased families’ reliance on the incomes of two workers. The living standards of families with children, and especially those who had many children, were severely hit by the monetary reform of 1953, which was not followed by sufficiently effective measures to compensate them adequately for the economic losses sustained from raising their children. Significantly, a survey of family life conducted in 1959 showed that when women’s employment was high, the network of services that replaced traditional family functions was inadequate, wages were equalized, and the hope of population growth reached a stalemate. At the end of the 1950s, this survey revealed a significant difference in the fertility rates of economically active women and housewives (1.72, while housewives bore 2.49 children). 62
The evident failure of the family policy established during the conditions of the second half of the 1940s gave a new momentum to discussion of the theme in the more relaxed 1960s. The conceptualization of a future family policy appeared necessary, all the more so as it began to become clearer that building Socialism did not resolve the social problems that were supposed to disappear automatically when capitalist relations of production were abolished. Therefore, in the period’s expert discourse, albeit in a different political context than in the 1930s and 1940s, we once again see an increase in attention to the topics of the possible extinction of the nation, poor families, and the need for women’s liberation but this time from two-shift work and housework after the workday. The ambitious pro-natal policy of the normalization regime tried to respond to these challenges only after the year 1969.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was written with the support of the Czech Science Foundation (Project no. 14-35273S "Liberal Society, or National Community? Social Policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1939-1945").