Household as a Battleground of Modernity: Activities of the Home Economics Committee Affiliated to the League of Women (1957–80)

Abstract

This essay seeks to show the Polish household in the communist time as a space of modernity and modernisation activities. The chronological framework is set between 1957 – the date the Home Economics Committee affiliated to the League of Women was set up to contribute to, and be a mouthpiece of, the everyday life modernisation policy – and 1980, being the symbolic borderline between the modernity discourse and the Polish 1980–1 crisis discourse about household. In this context, the article reconstructs both the activities of social actors who created the ‘scenarios of modernity’ for the household and the reception of the messages in question in the village of Bogate in the District (powiat) of Przasnysz.