This book explores the nature of the gender regimes emerging in the new Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states of the European Union, and in particular in Poland, in the aftermath of communism. It asks about gender equalities and inequalities in the welfare regimes of the new CEE welfare states and specifically about the extent to which the support for mothers and their care responsibilities, which characterised CEE countries under communism, has survived the transition from communism. The transition has primarily been seen as a transition of economics and politics, with liberalisation of markets and of civil society. But it is also a transition of social welfare structures and of households and of the gender relations and assumptions within both. What assumptions are now made about the state's role in social welfare, about the gender relations of earning and caring and about the social policies that should support earning and caring? How well do emerging structures in practice support paid and unpaid work and gender equality in both? And how may they best be developed in the context of continuing social and economic change as well as in the context of a European Union now expanding to include Central, Eastern and Western Europe?

The welfare regimes of Central and Eastern Europe in the communist era had a distinctive gender character. State socialist societies sought women's labour for economic development. They enabled it through education systems oriented to producing highly qualified women and men (UNICEF, 1998), through workplace social provision and through state-guaranteed entitlements such as parental leave and benefits, kindergartens and nurseries and strong family allowance systems (Fajth, 1996; Haney, 2002). Under communism these societies retained an unreconstructed domestic division of labour that left women with a famed ‘double burden’. The established pattern of gender relations across Central and Eastern Europe was of dual earner households, supported by state and enterprise welfare structures. Social policies and households in Western Europe have been, broadly speaking, moving from the male breadwinner model of the family and towards assumptions relating to dual earners, although the practice in most countries is of one-and-a-half earners, with men fully in paid labour, and women bending paid labour to unpaid (Lewis, 2001a, 2001b, 2002).