This chapter, as an experiment, discusses the work and commitment of women elder caregivers in three (post)socialist societies—or certain elements of this work and commitment—as activism. It is an experiment in so far as care for older people can take various forms, thus offering women different opportunities to “be an activist” or take action for some reason. First of all, paid nursing and institutional care comes to mind. Like other people who engage in paid work, employed caregivers, i.e., people engaged in paid nursing
Self-organized neighborhood and home-based care services were an extremely common way of providing care for older people in the state-socialist societies of East Central Europe.1 Those who committed to such self-organized forms of caregiving have not yet received much attention in a history of women’s labour, much less women’s labour activism. Research on women’s labour activism so far (and by no means less importantly) has devoted much attention to formal work and workplace relations, making visible, for instance, the tireless efforts of women trade unionists fighting for the needs of pregnant workers, mothers, and retirees within the structures of their workplaces.2 In an attempt to capture cases and concerns of self-organized caregivers, I will more broadly address “care activism” in this chapter. By care activism, I mean patterns of thought and behavior closely related to care work.
In the transformation of socialist societies into postsocialist ones, care work involved mostly unpaid services performed by women, often on a part-time basis or during their “free” time. This included care for older people, which was provided informally by family members or, for example, in the form of home-based care services.3 A number of studies in the fields of social anthropology and sociology have already addressed this topic.4 An important finding has been that one can certainly speak of care work even if such work was not performed professionally and/or for money.5 In a European history of work, as historian Marsha Siefert phrased it, diverse forms of work “have been shown to coexist with wage labour in different regional and temporal contexts, bringing their own underlying costs and demands.”6 Formal and informal arrangements of care work, I think, can be added to that list.
During the post-1989 transformation, when political and social change occurred simultaneously in East Central Europe and East Germany, many caregivers continued working. In the sense of a “supportive tissue,”8 they ensured that care was provided to older people in need. A comparison of East Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic is particularly revealing because similar conditions in all three countries shaped the transformation processes. While thousands of people took to the streets to advocate for sociopolitical change during the peaceful revolutions, care workers in all three countries remained remarkably invisible in these events. In the course of the 1990s, all three countries then experienced a radical transformation of their welfare systems, shifting from overarching caring states to care economies that placed a greater emphasis on self-care.9 Both paid and unpaid care was drastically reorganized in multiple—institutional, legal, practical, and financial—ways. A comparison of these three (post)socialist societies allows us to examine this shared transformation experience in more detail and to assess its long-lasting consequences.
I assume that women caregivers were faced with a highly gendered division of care work during this period. Spending more time on caregiving, i.e., on activities securing the well-being and ultimately the survival of other human beings, meant having less time to engage in classical forms of activism.10 Susan Zimmermann has pointed out that unpaid care work was, in fact, as much a part of the state-socialist “catching-up development” as was the inclusion of women in paid work.11 I would add that this unpaid care work, of course, continued to be needed throughout the postsocialist transformations. How, then, could women caregivers shape their working conditions when they formed such a heterogeneous group in which only very few received labour contracts and, thus, labour protections? Did they seek material remuneration or symbolic recognition from the public or the state?
To address these issues, I think it may be helpful to pay closer attention to (what I call) care activism. The character of this activism was connected to two important features of (post)socialist societies. First, as stated above, classical forms of labour activism were not available to caregivers (even if only from their own perspective) who engaged in less formalized forms of care. As I will demonstrate, this prompted the invention of alternative means of activism such as, for example, self-organization. Second, women who cared for elderly persons aspired to create a world with care at its center. This mindset led them to identify strongly with their individual contributions to everyday care practices (and how to improve them) rather than to question political or state authorities. This approach seems to have helped women develop self-esteem, coping strategies, resilience, and agency. Care activism in this sense was an attitude; it was not comparable to mainstream labour activism, but it was still an important motivation for women caregivers. While the use of the term activism here may be debatable, I will use it (for the time being, i.e., experimentally) to describe the actions of women caregivers that were intended to establish, uphold, and deepen the shared values of good care and, in this sense, to implement an ethics of care under the difficult political conditions of the period.
It will not go unmentioned that these women’s activities coincided with academic and feminist debates on the ethics of care, which were introduced in the work of scholars like Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, and Nel Noddings. These
Speaking more broadly, the question who takes care of the elderly also provides insight into the broader social organization of a society.13 Thus, I regard care as a topic relevant for understanding contemporary history, the history of everyday life, and gender studies. In the past decade or so, care has been intensely researched in terms of cultural and gender history and anthropology.14 Proceeding from this research, I will address the roles of women in (post)socialist societies, and care work as the domain of women in particular, as topics embedded within the research on postsocialist transformations and as innovative ways of conceptualizing women’s labour activism.
Based on materials from German, Czech, and Polish archives, I will first introduce three organizations in which women engaged in elderly care were involved before and after 1989: the Polish Committee for Social Help (Polski Komitet Pomocy Społecznej), the Pensioners’ Clubs (Kluby důchodců) of the Czechoslovak municipal national committees (Městské národní výbory), and the East German People’s Solidarity (Volkssolidarität). I will then discuss the East German case in more detail, presenting findings from oral history interviews with women members of People’s Solidarity that shed light on the experiences of women working at the intersections of paid and unpaid care since the 1980s. I will conclude with some reflections on the long-term absence of care activism that continues to reverberate in the current nursing crisis exacerbated by the global covid-19 pandemic. In this way, I demonstrate how significant self-organized activities outside of more formal labour relations were in the transformation process and how arrangements for care located “just around the corner” (i.e., community-based care) can be integrated into a contemporary history of women’s labour activism.
1
In every society there are expectations related to the process of aging. They are shaped by collective memory, state propaganda, and individual experiences. Social anthropologists Tatjana Thelen and Cati Coe demonstrate that aging is indeed a highly political concern, explaining that “many states emphasize the welfare of older persons in their policies and planning, because of a perceived care crisis due to societal aging.”15
In the People’s Republic of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic (gdr), the ideal conception of old age encouraged older people to participate in society, to actively engage with other generations, and to keep themselves “mentally and physically fit […] so as not to burden the progress of socialism.”16 In brief: old age was a topic important enough that it shaped the state-socialist welfare agenda. In everyday life, though, voluntary—not state directed—care practices appear to have been critical for providing for the elderly. Because state institutions were often overburdened, voluntary helpers took over numerous tasks, supposedly in the spirit of the socialist common good, for which the state honored them.17 However, sociologist Radka Dudová observed that at the time, elderly care was also deeply gendered both in terms of who received care and who provided it.18 Women in the household continued to be the main providers of care despite the fact that their participation in the work force was heavily promoted. My hypothesis is that this gender regime was extended to the activities of socialist mass organizations, through which women voluntarily—and without pay—cared for elderly persons far beyond their own families.
In Poland, the Polish Committee for Social Help (Polski Komitet Pomocy Społecznej, PKPS), which was established in 1958, was the organization that stands out for its provision of care for the elderly. Although the pkps was one of the largest social organizations nationwide, it has remained rather unknown to this day. In 1968, alongside voluntary fire fighters and the Polish Red Cross, it was recognized as an organization of so-called higher utility (stowarzyszenie wyższej użyteczności19) in a decree of the Council of Ministers (Rada
At the time the pkps was founded, mainly regional and unpaid social guardians (terenowi opiekuni społeczni) were caring for the elderly in their local communities. They were part of a network that had been created after the “Khrushchev Thaw” in the mid-1950s and had been charged with coordinating social care in cooperation with the state administration. These social guardians were nominated by local social organizations or the National Councils (Rady Narodowe) and performed their duties without financial remuneration.22 It was not until the mid-1960s that the profession of social worker (pracownik socjalny) emerged in Poland.23 pkps home helpers were, thus, a common phenomenon of the era. In contrast to the earlier social guardians, pkps home helpers operated within an organizational structure but they remained volunteers, unlike the social workers employed later. Local groups of pkps home helpers provided home care which included “various household chores performed by home helpers who do the house cleaning and shopping, prepare meals, feed disabled persons, do the laundry, provide the dependent with heating coal and water and take care of the various day-to-day matters.”24 It is precisely such housekeeping tasks, not only medical duties, that count as care for the elderly. As defined by political scientist Joan Tronto, care is “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.”25 The “world” in which pkps home helpers were active usually encompassed the proximate neighborhood “just around the corner.” Like the social guardians, the idea behind this arrangement was that help could be provided instantly and on the spot.
In contrast to this type of care work, which took place in individual homes, the Pensioners’ Clubs of the Czechoslovak municipal national committees
Sociologist Pavla Kodymová explained that in the 1960s and 1970s, the national district and municipal committees (Okresní a městské národní výbory) started to systematically target certain groups for social work, one of which was senior citizens.30 Sociologist of gender Hana Maříková also stresses that after the “failed transformation” of 1968, the Czechoslovak communist party was under immense pressure to develop solutions to the problem of elderly care. One of the main problems was the lack of capacity in residential care facilities. This is why, especially during the Normalization period, care for the elderly often (re)turned to the family and informal care services.31 The Pensioners’ Clubs were an attempt to counteract this problem with an institutional approach.
The establishment of the clubs, therefore, coincided with a time when it was politically desirable to invest in efforts to provide good care to the elderly. In the case of Most, a city in the Ústí nad Labem region in Northern Bohemia,
The third example is the People’s Solidarity (Volkssolidarität, vs) in the gdr. Founded in 1945, this organization specialized in care for the elderly in the gdr, with the explicit aim “to leave no one alone and to give everyone the opportunity to participate in social life until old age.”37 Again, this is a large organization that until the 1980s had over two million registered members.38 Its women home helpers (Hauswirtschaftspflegerinnen) offered household assistance very similar to the pkps, focusing on housekeeping tasks, meal provision, and the daily needs of the older people. However, as with the voluntary nurses in Czechoslovakia, vs home help was not intended to provide an entry point for women into the nursing profession. Home helpers were to be
Home helpers were indeed subsidized by the state, and similar to other countries in East Central Europe, “the work of women outside the home was supported by a heavily subsidized network of services offering alternatives to home chores.”42 Yet, as one former vs coordinator told me, many home helpers were transferred to the vs from their original workplaces as a punishment after applying for an exit permit to West Germany. He said they were “pushed aside [and shunted] to the vs to work in places where they could do no harm.”43
In addition to home help, the vs operated so-called veterans’ clubs (Veteranenklubs), where the elderly—then called veterans of work (Veteranen der Arbeit)—could get a hot meal or participate in a daily recreational program. In a brochure from 1960, the vs promoted its club in Berlin with the following quote from a woman visitor: “I was so alone and felt weak and sick. I’m sure I’d be dead already if you hadn’t created this beautiful club.”44 Similar to the Czechoslovak Pensioners’ Clubs, the focus here was on the social needs of the elderly.
As the three examples show, there were alternative, resourceful forms of care for the elderly that complemented institutional care arrangements and might, for that reason alone, be considered forms of care activism. All three examples merged into their countries’ respective social care policies, which all relied on a combination of public authorities, nursing homes, mass organizations, neighborhood help, and informal care provided by relatives. In one way or another, their structures, but rarely their activists, were co-financed by the socialist state. In all three countries, national Red Cross societies were also involved, managing the medical care of elderly people in their homes. If further help was needed, it was usually relatives who were responsible for
I would like to emphasize that it was mainly women who engaged in “eye to eye”47 care for the elderly, even though the process of enabling care involved both women and men. Organizations such as the pkps or the vs, which had hundreds of thousands of members, could by no means recruit caregivers from only one gender. But the women among them often did the shopping, cooking, washing, and feeding. These tasks bring me back to the core of care work and the main purpose of care activism: meeting the needs an individual cannot achieve alone or, in the case of the elderly, may no longer be able to achieve on his or her own. In this respect, voluntary care and activism as discussed in the introduction are remarkably similar: both point to deficits of the existing system or even to state failures, especially in the field of social welfare. Paradoxically, communist parties did not interpret voluntary involvement in elder care as criticism of the regime. Instead of intervening to make their own claims concerning care provision more explicit, they welcomed unpaid care work and reframed it as a contribution to the socialist common good.
This position makes sense since caregivers oftentimes did not turn to state authorities for assistance but rather turned to their neighbors and friends for help when it came to doing something for the elderly. This kind of purposeful joint initiative is what I would call self-organization. Sociologist Jeff Shantz and lawyer Dean Spade would probably speak of “mutual aid.” They have used this related analytical term to describe everyday relationships of reciprocal aid, which they, interestingly, define as explicitly “anti-authoritarian.”48 Likewise, sociologist Shana Cohen concludes that local social activism “often explicitly
But what changed for caregivers after the socialist ideology undergirding the existing system of elder care in the region disappeared? Why did they continue to perform such work instead of, for example, protesting in the streets for paid care work, or doing something else entirely? Moreover, did their involvement in paid and unpaid care work have anything to do with gender? I will explore these questions using the example of the vs in the following section. Interviews with representatives of the vs illustrate the motivations and perceptions of women care workers in the (post)socialist societies of East Germany and East Central Europe in an exemplary manner. The interviews were conducted between 2020 and 2022, during the high point of the covid-19 pandemic restrictions. Travel restrictions and contact restraints complicated my interactions with this group of elderly women. My initial plan to conduct similar interviews in Poland and the Czech Republic, therefore, unfortunately had to be abandoned. Nevertheless, the experiences of vs representatives in East Germany characterize the experiences of those involved in elderly care across the entire region from the postwar period to the postsocialist transformation. They reveal different forms of women’s care work; allow us to question whether such activities can be regarded as care activism; and help us better understand what this activism actually looked like at the time.
2
With the regime changes in 1989, multiple transformation processes were set in motion, and within a few years, “citizens dared to set out toward democratic societies and capitalist private economies based on the Western model.”52 Did women’s self-organized care for the elderly also experience such a “great change,”53 a rupture or a new beginning? According to historians Ana Kladnik and Thomas Lindenberger, some of the structures and practices formerly “maintained from below, partly demanded and promoted from above […] survived the far-reaching transformation and even helped shape it.”54 This also applies to the field of care. However, the reasons no mainstream care activism existed before the regime changes in 1989 did not change after the transformation.
Care work performed on behalf of the elderly was always systemically relevant: people in need of care continued to need care regardless of the political upheaval. Likewise, of course, those who cared for the elderly continued to be needed. Moving from one system to another while maintaining standards of care presented an enormous challenge for both those providing and those receiving it. In the Czech case, this happened in a particularly dramatic way as “the availability of residential care facilities decreased. […] And as the economy was liberalized in the course of the 1990s and 2000s, the state gave priority to family-based elder care.”55 In addition to care provided by families, services sold on the market of the newly emerging care economies became increasingly important. No matter what form it took, economist Mascha Madörin points out, care work comprises “life-sustaining and vital activities, without which societies would not be able to exist and economic growth would be impossible.”56 To sum up: care work was disrupted by the processes of privatization and marketization after 1989, but at the same time, continuity in care was required. It is therefore useful to understand transformation also as “a social change stretched in time and space.”57 With these considerations in mind, I spoke with women in East Germany who volunteered to care for the elderly starting in 1980 until 2000.
We must keep in mind that this is a retrospective narrative in which the interviewee may be ascribing agency to herself in hindsight. Still, her statement reflects typical transformation experiences (i.e., the long-lasting remaking of life-worlds) and the fundamental changes that affected peoples’ lives and life chances.59 Certainly, this quote could be attributed to an activist who promoted better care for the elderly with the intention of achieving political and social change. In another setting, this attitude would probably have led her to overt forms of activism. Yet, in the midst of a period already defined by change, she concluded that she must continue her work as before.
I took care of elderly people when they needed help […] I did everything that came up; we built local groups, took care of elderly people, went to the doctor with them. Then you would call them every now and then, the people are happy […] It was a bad time when the “Wende” [transition/turn] came. People were afraid, you had to comfort them. We were an
organization that worked through [the changes]. That was when people needed us most! You just had to push through.60
This woman emphasized that her responsibilities could vary a lot. Unlike a professional nurse, she was literally there for “everything that came up.” She was a domestic helper, a cook, a companion, and also a representative for the elderly, all wrapped into one person. She was around when “people needed us most.” As she describes her ongoing and determined action, she explains her activities as reactions: She fulfilled her care work, whatever the situation, because whatever happened, she was flexible enough to react to it. I interpret this attitude as a form of activism (albeit a silent form).
Although this interviewee described herself as a care volunteer rather than a care worker, as someone who assists rather than an activist, I chose this specific quote to illustrate care activism because I believe that this term represents my interviewees’ convictions. In their opinion, there was always something they could do, and there were a lot of things they could change. For them, change referred no to the great political transformations of the time but to the changes—improvements—their daily actions brought to the lives of “their” elderly care recipients. In their neighborhoods, these women were the ones who made things happen, who improvised and invented—on a low budget or with no budget at all—both before and after 1989. The 94-year-old recalled her involvement as a caregiver with “action-rich verbs” to emphasize that in desperate situations, she was the one who retained agency.61 As she herself put it: “You just had to push through.”
In my view, such “bottom-up-voices”62 make it very clear that care for the elderly pre- and post-1989 took place at the margins of the existing system: in situations for which there was no institutional solution, in moments when care provided by relatives was not possible. They were filling gaps. Furthermore, both women acted on their own initiative. After 1989 at the latest, there was no longer a regime that would have demanded this kind of commitment from them nor one that would reward it ideologically. The vs was the organization that served as the backdrop of their work, as a coordination point and a contact that undergirded their commitment and made it a little more effective. Among members of this organization, a common narrative is that everyone carried on and that this was how they survived the fall of communism. If we understand self-organization as an activity that is not directed by the state or
But is it possible to interpret these two quotes as perpetuating previously established practices? Or did carrying on (or caring on) “just around the corner” contribute to social change? Political scientist Elisabeth Conradi argues, yes, as “care practice does not only alter social interaction; it contributes to the transformation of society. […] by trying to improve listening, support, assistance or help, the structural, political and organizational barriers to good care […] become visible, and as such can be addressed in public discourse or by way of careful counteraction.”63 I agree with her, but I would add that women’s care activism did not reach a large public sphere in the postsocialist transformation period.
Everything that had to be done walking, I did. […] So, I was always on the move […] when I did something, I enjoyed doing it, and I did it well. I really didn’t let things slide; I made an effort to do something nice so people were happy to come. […] The best thing was the excursions; those attracted the most people. What kind of excursions did you have in gdr times? There was nothing. The bus was always full, we saw many, many beautiful things. All the things you couldn’t do in the gdr.64
There are two examples of her very individual activism in this quote. First, she performed tasks on foot. As I learned through this interview, this could involve her delivering letters personally instead of asking for funds or donations for stamps. Additionally, since many elderly people had limited mobility, she took many walks to visit people in their homes. However, she organized bus trips to
This quote also clearly demonstrates that for this woman and the other interviewees, the meaning of care work was not limited to nursing activities or provisioning. From my discussion with this interviewee, it was obvious that caring for the elderly also meant taking care of their social and cultural needs, bringing joy to the elderly, including them in activities, and treating them as valued members of society. Here again, we see that self-organized care of the elderly filled gaps. It went beyond predictable necessities and addressed aspects of human togetherness, community, and, in general, sought to ensure the dignity of people in their old age.
Before 1989, this conception of care corresponded to official rhetoric, but the reality on the ground was much different than this ideal, which is why this vs interviewee was practically working on the margins of the socialist care system. After 1989, such care arrangements were dismissed as socialist and supposedly outdated. For this interviewee, performing her care activities in both systems meant challenging prevailing narratives and, at the same time, maintaining the bonds between a group of like-minded caregivers and care recipients. It is hardly surprising, then, that in terms of language, this 92-year-old woman describes herself as a “mover” who “did” something. Moreover, this interviewee revealed a clearly moral understanding of her care work, as for her it was unimaginable to “let things slide.”
In my first winter [in that position in the vs], it was a really tough winter. The food supply was delivered by hand, by bike, and old baby carriages and so on; there was nothing motorized. And we got there through the heavy snow. […] And there were some old mothers [grannies] sitting in their houses without any coal in the cellar. We took care of that. […] We really went from pillar to post, we went to the city district administration and said we wouldn’t leave unless they somehow produced a ration card for coal. […] I was proud that no one in my district froze to death that winter.66
In contrast to other situations where the caregiver’s responsibilities prevented mainstream forms of labour activism, this quote shows how the very responsibility for human lives could provoke care activism. Members of the vs were responsible for distributing food and coal to households, and they also got involved when there was no food or coal available at all. In the case of my interviewee, this went so far as to put pressure on political decision-makers. Care activism manifested itself here in the joint advocacy for freezing “old mothers,” with the aim of improving their situation and meeting their existential needs. To clarify, in this specific case, there was only a rather small number of people in danger of freezing. Yet, the determination with which they were supported by the interviewee and her vs colleagues is astonishing. In my opinion, this case illustrates very well the shared values of caregivers in the vs and the local dedication of my interviewee. Even though she was as concerned about elderly men as she was about “old mothers” in her neighborhood, I think it is significant that she told me so explicitly about how women were able to help each other during the harsh winter. Care activism, in her case, apparently also included a profound solidarity among women.
No one ever gave up their work [in the residential groups]. That actually continued beyond the “Wende” [transition/turn] as far as the work in the residential communities is concerned. Until I left, there were still group leaders there who had been there during the socialist times. […] They somehow stubbornly continued doing it.68
You had to cope with the economy of scarcity. You had to come up with something, that’s what we used to say. […] You had to make something out of nothing. And the old people were much more shaped by this than I was. […] There were many who did this who had never been in the sed [Socialist Unity Party of Germany]. That was another factor. There were many who were not party members […] and in any case, had never been in the sed. […] And I think that it always also depends on the people involved.69
In this quote, members of the vs, the care activists so to speak, are portrayed as resourceful, accustomed to scarcity, and, above all, independent from the then ruling communist party. Did these features render care activism obsolete? Would these people always “come up with something,” even (or especially) when the “great change” occurred in 1989? In the interviewee’s opinion, that “depends on the people involved.” For three of the interviewees mentioned in this chapter, indeed a very personal “great change” happened after 1989, when they themselves entered retirement. On the one hand, this meant that they had more time for their voluntary activities in the vs. On the other hand, workplaces where they had previously been “active” were now inaccessible to them. They leaned more on typical women’s strategies, or, as historian Susan Zimmermann put it, “a culture of mutual self-help among women in neighborhoods, firms, and the family”70 that had been developed and refined during the socialist period.
Feminist debates in recent decades have been concerned with making care, i.e., an activity traditionally performed by women, “a public issue of equity and demanding the recognition of ‘care’ as a necessary social task.”71 However, an analysis of the interviews I conducted with former vs care workers suggests that we need to completely rethink our notions of care activism in order to understand it as a form of resilience and lived solidarity that manifests in silent practices of (women’s) care-giving. During the postsocialist transformation period, my East German interviewees had first-hand experience of this model of care work and activism.
3
By comparing select cases of elder care, this chapter reveals how care work took similar forms in three socialist societies, all of which involved both women’s paid and unpaid labour. Forms of self-organized elder care presented in this chapter occurred “just around the corner,” where local groups, mostly organized by women, offered help to older people in need. Such arrangements of care developed in East Central Europe as well as in East Germany, typically in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside reassessments of national social welfare policies. Many local caregivers remained involved in care work during the transformation period after 1989, during which they faced simultaneously the dissipation of socialist care ideals and the creation of new care economies. The example of the gdr’s People’s Solidarity helps illuminate the individual motivations of women who provided care, such as the ability to act, solidarity, or conceptualizations of good care.
The idea that where there is women’s labour, there is also women’s labour activism obviously does not apply without some caveats. Activism in the field of elder care looked quite different from mainstream labour activism, which is why I have suggested capturing it under the term “care activism” instead. Following on the work of historians Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson, who argue that “women’s activism existed in practice, and thus historians can create a narrative of activism; […] but activism is not itself an analytic category,”72 I am fully aware of the contested nature of this term and the need for further conceptual elaboration.
In this chapter I have argued that women caregivers appropriated certain patterns of understanding of and action directed toward (post)socialist care provisions that led not to mainstream activism but rather to attitudes that enabled individuals to retain their agency in times of crisis and, most importantly, to implement their shared values of good care. i, thus, present unpaid caregivers as agents of care activism who have notably changed their social environments: They were the persons who knew what the elderly needed, who were in contact with their families, the local authorities, and other caregivers. Consequently, they were the ones who changed the lives of many people. It was they who, from first-hand experience, knew how elder care could still be improved and where the qualifications—or maybe the professional profiles—of caregivers could be enhanced. The crucial difference from more classical forms of women’s labour activism was that caregivers did not draw attention
In many countries in Central and East Central Europe today there continues to be a lack of more mainstream activism by care workers—i.e., activism aimed first at the improvement of their own working conditions, with the wider implication that on this basis, they would be able to supply better care. Caregivers, whether in formal or informal settings, only recently returned to the top of countries’ political agendas when the global covid-19 pandemic made us aware of how much we all depend on the help of others. To a certain extent, the covid-19 crisis mirrored the transformation experiences of care workers in the gdr, Czechoslovakia (Czechia), and Poland after 1989, demonstrating that those in need of care as well as their caregivers are particularly vulnerable in times of crisis and require widespread societal support. In the words of a journalist writing for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (Southern German Newspaper) in May 2020: “Alongside all the expressions of respect, a genuine and lasting solidarity is needed with those who, out of solidarity with the sick and those in need of care, the elderly, and children, continue to work […], for better or for worse.”73
But what exactly are the working conditions that caregivers should endure under these circumstances? Talking to women from the vs helped me understand that they did not lack an awareness of their precarious working conditions. They also shared many concerns, a fact that might have led to a more open form of activism on their part. Following on the conclusions of care and gender researcher Hanne Marlene Dahl, one would expect conflict to arise when “[n]early everywhere the ‘elder burden’ and the ‘demographic challenges’ are at the top of the national political agenda. […] Hence, we observe struggles within states […], and between the elderly in need of care, their family members and the care worker.”74 Instead of looking for such visible struggles, in this chapter I have suggested that it is more important to focus on self-empowering and coping strategies and the resilience and agency of caregivers. This approach worked well for interpreting the narratives of the four women I interviewed, who identified individual commitment and a certain “stubbornness” as key features of local care arrangements.
By comparing elderly care arrangements in three (post)socialist societies, I have shown that there were quite similar coping strategies for filling deficits or gaps. These included organized approaches through groups and associations in the immediate neighborhood of the elderly, providing meeting places, and offering age-specific activities. Care activism in the above cases consisted of “caring on” and “pushing through” while social welfare was being politically renegotiated. Learning about these forms of care work means becoming aware of the boundaries and the shortcomings of the existing system. With such a view, perhaps we can contribute to overcoming the conceptual and empirical deficits when it comes to studying care work and its position within the history of women’s labour activism.
Dudová 2018, 43.
See Laczkó 2017.
Dudová 2018, 43.
See Robbins 2021; Kaźmierska and Waniek 2020; Kramer 2020; Janiak-Jasińska 2016.
Kohlen 2016, 192.
Siefert 2020, 2.
Conradi 2011, 128.
See Haug 2013; Madörin 2010.
See Kohlen 2016.
Zimmermann 2010, 16.
Thelen and Coe 2019, 280.
See Hachmeister 2022, 181.
See Kodymová 2015, 42.
Dudová 2018, 42.
See Apel [Call] (20 September 1976), sg. 3215, inv. no. 397, Afisze, plakaty i druki ulotne z terenu Przemyśla w zasobie Archiwum Państwowege w Przemyślu. Archiwum Państwowe [State Archive], Przemyśl, Poland.
Rozporządzenie Rady Ministrów w sprawie uznania Polskiego Komitetu Pomocy Społecznej za stowarzyszenie wyższej użyteczności [Decree of the Council of Ministers on the recognition of the Polish Committee for Social Help as a higher utility association].
Brenk 2018, 76.
Brenk 2012, 139.
Brenk 2012, 140.
Synak 1989, 111–112.
Tronto 1993, 103.
“Péče o starší spoluobčany” [Care for the elderly fellow citizens] (2 August 1984), Průboj, Ústí nad Labem, iv/b 24, kart. 1. Státní Okresní Archiv Most [State District Archive]. Most, Czech Republic.
Letter (10 September 1969), inv. č. 102/17, Místní národní výbor Benešov u Semil. Státní Okresní Archiv Semily [State District Archive]. Semily, Czech Republic.
Letter (23 July 1969), inv. č. 102/17, Okresní národní výbor Semily. Státní Okresní Archiv Semily [State District Archive]. Semily, Czech Republic.
Letter (10 September 1969), inv. č. 102/17, Místní národní výbor Benešov u Semil. Státní Okresní Archiv Semily [State District Archive]. Semily, Czech Republic.
Kodymová 2015, 41.
“Nikdo nezůstane osamocen aneb zabezpečení ve stáří” [No one is left alone or insecure in old age] (3 June 1982), Průboj, Ústí nad Labem, iv/b 24, kart. 1. Státní Okresní Archiv Most [State District Archive]. Most, Czech Republic.
Kodymová 2015, 41.
“Aby člověk nikdy nebyl sám” [So that one is never alone] (2 November 1994), Severočeský regionální deník sd, Ústí nad Labem iv/b 24, kart. 1. Státní Okresní Archiv Most [State District Archive]. Most, Czech Republic.
“Nikdo nezůstane osamocen aneb zabezpečení ve stáří” [No one is left alone or insecure in old age] (3 June 1982), Průboj, Ústí nad Labem, iv/b 24, kart. 1. Státní Okresní Archiv Most [State District Archive]. Most, Czech Republic.
Komentář [Comment] (2 February 1977), kart. 1977, Okresní národní výbor Semily. Státní Okresní Archiv Semily [State District Archive]. Semily, Czech Republic.
Sekretariat des Zentralausschusses der Volkssolidarität 1981, 6.
Angerhausen 2003, 128.
Reichert 1967, 264.
Reichert 1967, 264.
Reichert 1967, 264.
Ferge 1997, 161.
Male member of the Volkssolidarität in Saxony, interviewed 2 August 2021.
Synak 1989, 125.
See Dudová 2014; Ferge 1997.
Watemberg Izraeli 2020, 191.
See Shantz 2020, 48; Spade 2020, 138.
Cohen 2019, 52.
See Bonfiglioli 2020, 208.
Dudová 2018, 43.
Madörin 2006, 283.
Woman member of the Volkssolidarität in Saxony, interviewed 16 February 2021.
See Brückweh 2020.
Woman member of the Volkssolidarität in Saxony, interviewed 12 February 2021.
Meyer 2018, 60.
Conradi 2015, 125.
Woman member of the Volkssolidarität in Saxony, interviewed 19 October 2020.
Hilmar 2019, 1.
Woman member of the Volkssolidarität in Saxony, interviewed 24 January 2022.
Woman member of the Volkssolidarität in Saxony, interviewed 24 January 2022.
Woman member of the Volkssolidarität in Saxony, interviewed 24 January 2022.
Zimmermann 2010, 14.
Brückner 2010, 43.
Šustrová 2020, 108.
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