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Newsweek, July 26, 2004

Hear Them Roar

In a Catholic country, feminism is now trendy

Conservative and Roman Catholic, Poland hasn't been a bastion of women's rights. For years the country has ranked near the bottom among European nations in terms of attitudes toward women and legal protections. Abortion, reproductive rights and gender equality were seldom discussed in public.

But 2001 elections that dramatically increased the number of women in Parliament were a watershed in Poland's women's rights movement; major and lasting changes are now in the air. A new bill giving equal status to women in the workplace, as well as setting quotas for them in government jobs and establishing an agency to monitor gender discrimination, is likely to pass into law. Women's groups and NGOs have even managed to push legislators into introducing a bill legalizing abortion during the first three months of pregnancy and mandating sex education in the first year of grammar school. The bill isn't expected to pass, but getting this far is a victory.

Indeed, although Poland still has a long way to go—women earn up to 35 percent less than men—the old paternalistic culture is on the run. Feminism has become "trendy," says Wanda Nowicka, executive director of the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning. Women make up about 20 percent of Parliament and there's no shortage of female role models—like Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, a vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction, and Danuta Hubner, Poland's commissioner to the European Union. "My daughters' generation is already living in a different world, where they see gender equality as a normal human right," says Hubner. As Anita Siebert of the Warsaw-based Karat Coalition, a women's organization, says, "Right now Poland [is] an exciting place to be a woman."

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