The Gender Politics of Child Poverty in Post-Communist Europe.

Child poverty has become a widespread concern in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. Social welfare retrenchment necessitated by marketization disproportionately harms those most dependent on benefits (women, children, the elderly);but children are perhaps most vulnerable, because they have no possibility to articulate their own interests and mobilize politically to secure them. Family benefits, the most widely cited remedy to child poverty, are being reduced and/or means-targeted in most post-communist countries. We might expect women (mothers in particular, given the history of welfare state formation in the West) to fight against this trend. We might also expect women to demand retention of paid maternity leaves, child care, and other supportive services that ease maternal participation in the paid labor force and thereby help to reduce child poverty. But, that is not, by and large, what has been happening. Indeed, the erosion of important benefits has gone by with relatively little public outcry. In this paper, we examine the intersection of changing gender and welfare regimes in order to understand growing child poverty across post-communist Europe. Using data from the trans-MONEE project, public opinion surveys, and elite interviews, we suggest that child poverty is related to the growing privatization and familialization of need in post-communist Europe, a trend which has been abetted by a re-traditionalization of popular attitudes regarding gender, the family, and motherhood; pressure from international actors to reduce social spending and target benefits; the growing political organization and clout of pensioners; and the concomitant delay in the formation and politicization of women’s movements. Cutting across all of this is the growing disparity between the more successful and affluent transitional economies and those countries, particularly of the Former Soviet Union, where the national state is practically defunct and the economic crisis so severe that family survival crowds out other issues. In those countries, women, the very group most likely to fight the withdrawal of state supports, are replacing the loss of benefits and services with their own unpaid labor (growing a private vegetable plot, canning and preserving food, maintaining the informal networks necessary for family survival). Among the more successful Central European countries, states are adopting a variety of welfare strategies regarding families. We posit that the same factors that help to account for the regional trends with regard to child poverty interact with local conditions to help explain variations in policy response across states and over time. Welfare regimes in Eastern Europe are still fluid, and they may not fit easily into standard welfare regime typologies, but we find that the choices different states are making with regard to the alleviation of child poverty are intimately linked with their policies and discourses regarding the appropriate family model and women’s role within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]