ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief description of the extent to which women's domestic burdens were socialized in the formerly communist countries, and a brief exploration of the gender dynamics of privatization in those countries. It also explores US women's experience in ways that may offer guidance for the process of privatization in Europe. As the new democracies privatize they can learn from the example of the United States. Data indicate that the property system in the US enriches men at the expense of women and children. Most dramatic are the shockingly high levels of childhood poverty, which contrast sharply with the comparatively low childhood poverty statistics of other industrialized nations. In at least some East-Central European countries, divorced mothers received a stipend from the states. In the new European democracies, as in all industrialized countries, work is structured in a way that imposes costs on adults involved with childrearing or other caregiving.
