No Man’s Land? Gendering Contraception in Family Planning Advice Literature in State-Socialist Poland (1950s–1980s)

This research has been funded through POLONEZ 2 grant no. 2016/21/P/HS3/04080 from the National Science Center (Poland). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665778.

This article examines popular medical discourses on contraception produced in state-socialist Poland following the legalisation of abortion in 1956, a time when the party-state declared family planning to be a public health project. By analysing popular medical literature, I argue that the popularisation of family planning constructed and relied on gender norms that could ease anxieties about the mainstreaming of ideas relating to sexuality and contraception, as well as anxieties about gender equality in a state-socialist context. I show that the femininity constructed in Polish birth control advice was based in fertility and the physical attractiveness required to maintain a husband’s sexual interest. Although masculinity was represented as distant, egoistic and violent, experts broadcast mixed messages about the effectiveness and usefulness of popular male contraceptive methods, some of which were at times utterly demonized.