Culture in The People's Republic of Poland - Post-Second World War

Post-Second World War

With expanding urban industrial opportunities in the early postwar era, agriculture steadily became less popular as occupation and lifestyle in new Poland. The service sector, like industry, grew rapidly, even though much less than the service sectors of Western Europe. The result was a postwar exodus from the rural areas and increased urbanization, which split apart the traditional multigenerational families upon which the prewar mostly rural society had been based.

The early socioeconomic reforms were greeted with relief by a significant faction of the population. Most people were willing to accept even the Communist rule in exchange for the restoration of relatively normal life. Even the Catholic Church believed that any open resistance would be suicidal. Postwar Poland, like the rest of socialist Eastern Europe, saw growing opportunities for higher education and employment and increased rights for women. In many respects, Poland offered women more opportunities in professional occupations than did many countries in Western Europe. Professions such as architecture, engineering and university teaching employed a considerably higher percentage of women in Poland than in the rest of the West. Communist propaganda, and sometimes reality itself, has created the model of the "Communist woman worker", similar to the "woman miner" in Silesia, initially part of the forcible socialist trend in art and culture dominating from late 1940s to late 1950s. By the year 1980, the majority of Polish medical students were women.