OLD ENTITLEMENTS AND NEW DEPENDENCIES: FAMILY VERSUS STATE IN THE 

CZECH REPUBLIC

Rebecca Nash, the Henley Centre, London

© 2005 Rebecca Nash All Rights Reserved
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Introduction

In 1995 the Czech government put in place a 
multi-tiered system of social “support” 
(podpora) and “care” (péče) for low-income 
families. These new terms denoted reform of 
“socialist paternalism” and previous 
redistributive family awards and benefits for 
all families. Social policy makers introduced 
these terms and simultaneously placed 
greater emphasis in policy documents on 
individual responsibility. Yet while new 
policy language suggests a radical change in 
relations between the state and families, for 
many Czechs, family life during the socialist 
era was not characterized by wholesale
reliance on the state but by what I call a 
productive dependence.

In this paper I argue that ethnographic 
studies of welfare reform in East Central 
Europe must take into account how socialist-
era ideologies of family life inform people’s 
experiences with new family policies. I draw 
on ethnographic work in family offices and 
the collection of family histories to 
demonstrate that post-1989 expectations of 
families to tend to themselves did not
represent a break from the socialist era. 
Well-established ‘go-it-alone’ values had the 
effect of complementing and reinforcing 
new state ethics of self-care. Autonomy had 
already been established through notions of 
work for the family set in opposition to the 
state. Inversely, more recent engagements 
with means- and income-tested policies 
often elicited strong criticisms of what was 
cast as utter, and unfamiliar, dependencies. 
On the one hand autonomy and individual 

responsibility framed stories of socialist-era 
family activities. Yet on the other, 
dependence on society and the state, and 
perceived unwillingness to provide for one’s 
own, emerged during my fieldwork 
discussions as contemporary trends and, 
paradoxically, as the product of “post-
paternalistic” family policy.

I Took Care of Myself, No One Helped 
Me

Czechs do not remember life during the 
socialist era as a time of taking 
indiscriminately and freely from the state, 
and they recognized social distinctions 
between claims categories. Receipt of 
certain services was connected to familial 
roles and relations. Although family benefits 
were “universal/ across-the-board” (plošné), 
children were the primary beneficiaries. As 
one family policymaker explained, “it didn’t 
matter if the family was wealthy or poor, 
each child had a nárok to the benefit—they 
were only differentiated according to age. If 
the child was young he received more, if he 
was older he received less.” In some cases, 
such as the child benefits, a nárok was 
interpreted as a natural “right” (právo). 
Klára Pittnerová, a resident in a Home for 
Mothers where I did fieldwork, defined a 
nárok as “something (něco) that belongs to 
you.” During the socialist era, across-the-
board family policy did the claiming for 
Czech households. Today, clients in the 
local support and care offices must do their 
own claiming by filing a request (žádost; to 
claim: požadovat). Today, a nárok is the 
state’s verification that a client’s claim is 

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justified. The nárok is no longer promised to 
all, it is no longer an inherent right; 
although, those who “take” benefits, such as 
Klára, believed that postsocialist benefits 
were “theirs.”

As automatic as socialist-era nároks might 
first appear, they were in practice contingent 
on family circumstances and, in the views of 
some, left up to arbitrary bureaucratic 
decisions.1 Mrs. Heroldová was married but 
childless when she applied for an apartment, 
so she did not have a nárok to move from 
her one-room basement apartment to the 
three-plus-one apartment where she and her 
family still lived in 2000. She and her 
husband waited for two and a half years, 
from 1975 to 1978, for their apartment, and 
by that time they had one young son and 
were expecting a second baby. Awards from 
the state were not guaranteed. When a 
claimant qualified for benefits on paper and 
in propaganda, they were more successful at 
having their requests filled when they had 
personal connections and contacts in their 
respective national committees. And even 
within the seemingly wide parameters of an 
across-the-board family policy, distinctions 
developed between recipient categories.

When I began my fieldwork, I presumed that 
across-the-board family awards and distrust 
of the state had led Czechs not to 
differentiate between those receiving state 
funds. I carelessly asked family members 
what kinds of “support” (podpora) they 
previously received and was surprised to 
hear them insist, “nothing,” absolutely 
nothing—they never received support. On 
the one hand, this denial of having ever been 
“supported” by the socialist state may be 
due in part to the recoding of past 
experiences in light of newer ideologies of 
individual responsibility. Today the most 
basic tier of income-based funding for 
families is called “support,” and although 
the majority of households were eligible for 
it in 2000, it required the filing of complex 

                                                     
1 And, as Milada Bartošová’s (1978) history of social 
policy makes clear, socialist family policy had 
income-based criteria in place until 1968.

paperwork and verification of 
deservingness. Some of those eligible did 
not bother. This suggests that stories of the 
socialist era were being mediated by 
growing contact with and awareness of 
dependent persons in the present. On the 
other hand, however, distrust and anger 
toward the previous regime were 
remembered well. That state had 
mythologized its generosity while keeping 
Czechs and Slovaks at low standards of 
living. Czechs did not feel that they had 
been especially helped by the state; rather, 
they had had to help themselves. My 
questions about socialist-era state “support” 
evoked memories and stories of not having 
been supported.

Grandmother Vodrážková (Kateřina) 
responded to my questions sharply, “I didn’t 
get any support from the state; I had to work 
for myself.” She had a hard life and 
identified neither the socialist nor the 
postsocialist eras as easier to live through. 
Yet in her recollections of state provisions 
for families, she saw herself as less 
dependent than some and as self-sufficient. 
She explained that “support” was not for 
“normal” Czech families, but for those she 
called “the unpowerful.” Given the distrust 
of “the powerful” (politicians, bureaucrats) 
during the socialist era, the unpowerful 
should not be interpreted here as 
undeserving or immoral. Most Czechs 
would probably agree that Grandmother 
Vodrážková herself was unpowerful. She 
moved to Prague from Moravia in the early-
to-mid 1950s, escaping what other family 
members implied was an abusive marriage 
and raising a child on her own by taking a 
series of labor-intensive jobs. Her 
acquisition of an apartment was thanks to a 
family member (Uncle Pavel) tied in to 
influential administrators at her national 
committee office. She did not think of the 
apartment and subsequent child benefits for 
her son Ondřej as “support,” but as earned 
through hard work—and deserved because 
she had looked out for herself and done what 
needed to be done to get by.

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Although Mrs. Boudová and her husband 
obtained a large sum of money from the 
state in 1970 to build their family home, she 
also emphasized how hard she worked. “I 
seldom got anything for free,” she recalled 
bitterly;

[that loan] was all the state did for 
us, and building that house was 
absolute madness because there was 
nothing….When we collected 
material it was unbelievable, 
because beforehand I had to call 
around Prague for building material 
and when I learned that someone had 
what we needed I got into the car 
and went there with money or some 
documents [showing what the 
materials were for]. My husband 
went to the site where we were 
building, where the truck we had 
was parked; he started it and drove 
to where I was waiting. He got there 
about an hour after me. During that 
time, I had tried to hold on to the 
cement or whatever (laugh)…and 
before he arrived he would get 
stopped [by authorities] and 
questioned as to what he was doing. 
Transportation could not be counted 
on—that is why we bought a truck. 
We were glad that we had our own 
things (že jsme zvládli svý vlastní 
věci). So that’s how we collected our 
materials….It was quite a sight….

Mrs. Boudová described the building of her 
home in Prague much in the way that 
cottage owners depicted gathering and 
accumulating materials for weekend 
building and chores in the country. Her case 
demonstrates, moreover, that despite 
qualifying for a sizeable loan and (unlike 
many) accumulating enough resources to 
build a freestanding, “family house” 
(rodinný domek) in Prague, she felt that she 
had not been supported by the state. Mrs. 
Boudová was resentful because of how 
much energy she and her husband put into 
the project. In fact, as the example of the 
transport of building materials reveals, Mrs. 
Boudová and her husband’s interactions 

with state authorities as regards the 
construction of their home were more of an 
obstacle than a support.

It is important to note that “support” as a 
benefits category existed only minimally 
during the socialist era, and formal 
legislation for state social support was not 
passed until 1995. Rather, the socialist state 
denied that material differences between 
households were a social problem to be 
addressed. “Classic social work” with, or 
“care” (péče) for, at-risk children and a 
negligible amount of institutional aid for 
single mothers made official networks for 
the disadvantaged nearly invisible and 
structurally insignificant. The director of the 
Prague Home for Mothers, Jitka Králová, 
explained to me her own frustration with the 
system of social support during the early 
1970s, when she went through a painful 
divorce. “I work in this field because I 
personally and privately experience-ed what 
it is like to have a divorce and be isolated 
with a child. It was such a negative 
experience, so I said, I will study social 
work. I don’t want anyone to go through 
what I went through,” she told me. Indeed, 
support for the “unpowerful” was almost 
non-existent, and a set of class distinctions 
based on familial resources operated during 
the socialist era. The few homes for mothers 
with children (and without families on 
which to lean) established during that period 
were the result of careful maneuvering on 
the part of few individuals, like Jitka, who 
were outraged by the absence of care for 
struggling parents and families. The mothers 
in the homes fell into the “unpowerful” 
category to which Grandmother Vodrážková 
referred. Because she had an apartment and 
a somewhat influential family member, 
however, Grandmother Vodrážková as a 
single mother did not categorize herself as 
unpowerful and state supported. Although 
all families with children qualified for 
universal benefits and various other state 
distributions, one supported oneself rather 
than relying on the state. Parents with 
children were simultaneously entitled and 
left to their own devices.

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We can see that universal “family benefits” 
(přídavky) and “care” services (péče) 
operated according to a system of “relative 
merit” (Gal and Kligman 2000:77) during 
the socialist era in Czechoslovakia, much 
like the manifold range of unstigmatized and 
stigmatized public provisions in western 
states: “Universal cash transfers that make 
no distinctions within the relevant 
population of recipients have often been, in 
the history of Western welfare, less 
stigmatizing than aid for which recipients 
must reach some criterion of minimum 
income or ill health” (Gal and Kligman 
2000:77). In their memories and reflections 
on the universalized system, Czechs 
categorize certain receiving persons as 
needier than others when they did not have 
personal resources (the “unpowerful”); 
while benefits designated for children and 
mothers—and housing allotments in Mrs. 
Boudová and Grandmother Vodrážková’s 
cases—were taken for granted and deserved 
when family members were thought to be 
looking out for themselves and turning to 
one another. Recalling their experiences 
building a home and raising children during 
the socialist era, these two and others like 
them remembered their efforts to make do. 
“No one helped me, I had to do it all 
myself,” they insisted.

Family versus State

It is useful to study some of the Czech 
publications written from the early-to-mid 
1990s about what women’s lives were like 
during the socialist era; these publications 
contribute to ideologies of the family. The 
value of family to Czech women often 
surfaced in response to the derogatory 
coverage of western feminism in larger 
cities like Prague and Brno and as an 
explanation by leading Czech gender studies 
scholars for why Czech women were 
different from “western” women and why it 
was inappropriate to apply feminist concepts 
(patriarchy, the subordination of women at 
home and work) to the Czech setting (see 
Nash 2002). This literature was one of the 
principle academic outlets evoking a family 
versus state opposition in the immediate 

post-1989 period. This literature also 
unmasked the shortcomings of socialist-era 
gender ideologies.

Here I focus on the work of three scholars 
who, particularly in the early-to-mid 1990s, 
were called on most frequently in public 
settings (media, academia, international 
women’s conferences) to represent “Czech 
women.” These are sociologist Marie 
Čermáková, philosopher Hana Havelková, 
and former dissident and sociologist Jiřina 
Šiklová. Much like the family history 
interviews, their writing turns to past 
experiences when explaining social relations 
in the present. These publications join 
examples of “unsupportive” family care in 
making the point that a particular ethic of 
self-interest as regards family life, one 
which these authors claim is not familiar to 
western feminists, opposed the efforts of a 
homogenizing socialist state. In all of these 
cases, Czechs draw on the family as the site 
of individuality and self-realization. 

Havelková interprets “patriarchy” as the 
control of women by men, and as a guiding 
concern of feminism in the United States 
and Western Europe. But she rejects “the 
separation of women’s problems from the 
problems of the citizen” (1993b:89) in the 
Czech case. Patriarchy, she explains, should 
not be understood as “paternalism.” While 
Havelková admits that paternalistic state 
supervision harmed Czechs throughout the 
previous era, in homes and households men 
and women lived as one. Thus challenging 
“patriarchal” control in the postsocialist era 
was uncalled for because men and women 
were accustomed to being equally subord-
inated by the communist party and the state. 
They had acted as partners to fight and resist 
this external influence, or “common enemy” 
(see Čermáková 1995:82). “It was the 
family, or rather the household, where many 
people put to use their inventive potential 
and their desire to do things their own way, 
without having to observe some official 
regulation” (Havelková 1993a:68). 
Havelková reminded her readers that the 
identification of women as separate or 
unlike men was more antagonistic and, she 

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suggested, could cause more harm than good 
in the early stages of social trans-formation. 
For this reason, and also because of the 
range of formal benefits families were once 
automatically entitled to, Šiklová wrote that 
in the early 1990s “[m]arriage and family 
are still the most attractive option for 
women” (1993:73). Although the socialist 
state had denied the pursuit of individual 
interests, moral subjectivity and a sense of 
what was right and wrong developed among 
family and close friends (Havelková 
1993a:68) and family was “the last bastion 
of personal freedom” (Havelková 
1993b:92).

Havelková and Šiklová were reluctant to 
identify differences between men and 
women in the family, but they wrote often in 
the early 1990s about the gendered realities 
of Czech politics. Both agreed political 
activity was corrupt and that the communist 
party had been thought of as a male domain. 
Unlike “western feminists,” then, Czech 
women did not perceive of political 
engagement as a way to improve their lives 
but as something to be avoided (Šiklová 
1993; Čermáková 1995:77). For example, 
Šiklová writes “Women in socialism never 
allowed themselves to be manipulated to the 
extent that men did, which I regard as 
fortunate. Women took refuge in their 
‘double burden,’ in motherhood and in care 
for young children” (1993:79). Šiklová 
might seem to be contradicting Havelková’s 
insistence that, because they were united in a 
common dislike of the regime, Czechs did 
not recognize gendered oppositions between 
men and women. But both authors agree that 
family was a site of resistance. It was the 
“one free institution” (despite the state’s 
engagement in family policy) and these 
gender studies scholars turned to the 
socialist period to inform their readers that 
marriage, having children, and family 
activities were a source of identity building 
and not women’s “subordination”—what 
had also been a keyword in socialist 
propaganda. In the words of sociologists of 
the family Ivo Možný and Ladislav Rabušic, 
marriage during the socialist era, unlike 

politics and the economy, was “perhaps the 
only free market even before the institution 
of a market economy” (1999:101).

Throughout their writing, Havelková, 
Šiklová, and Čermáková challenge what 
they understand to be a western feminist 
preoccupation with earning the “right” to 
work outside the home. These authors did 
not conceive of work as the realization of 
individuality, they said, because women had 
been forced to work by the socialist state. In 
her research throughout the 1990s, 
Čermáková paid close attention to women’s 
inequality, discrimination in the workplace, 
and inequity in women’s wages and access 
to education. Still, she reasons that these 
imbalances should be attributed to women’s 
preference for family over work and their 
willingness to sacrifice for the good of 
society (1995:76-77).

Since the Czech economic downturn in 1997 
and rising unemployment in the late 1990s 
and 2000, the work of these gender studies 
scholars has grown more critical of women’s 
unequal position in public and private in the 
Czech Republic, what they consider to be 
offensive images of women in advertising, 
and the harmfulness of minimal political 
representation by women. Younger 
generations of gender studies students and 
writers, moreover, freely use words like 
“patriarchy,” even calling themselves 
“feminists” (feministky). In the early 1990s, 
however, Havelková, Šiklová and 
Čermáková drew on memories of the 
socialist era to counteract what they 
understood as the imperialistic framework 
and inappropriateness of western feminism. 
And within their writing, we can identify the 
narrative construction of family as a safe 
haven, “islands” as the head of a foster care 
NGO described them, and as a unique site of 
individuality during the socialist era.

There is much to be learned from 
discussions of family life during the socialist 
era—particularly these understandings of 
family as a source of women’s identity 
rather than the source of women’s 
oppression and subordination. The personal 

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value of the family to many Czechs, and its 
necessity for material security, underscores 
similarities between socialist and capitalist 
family ideologies, particularly ideas about 
the stigma of dependence on public services. 
I now address the ways in which principles 
conceived of as “socialist” transformed into 
postsocialist categories of productive and 
unproductive dependency.

Family and 1989: Ending the Free 
Market, Beginning Socialism

In the Prague “care” office where I 
conducted fieldwork, benefits accountants 
often explained to “claimants” (žadatelky) 
that there were limits on what the state 
would provide. For example, if a female 
client would not reveal the father of her 
child(ren) she was informed that a “fictive 
child support” of 1,000 crowns would be 
deducted from her living minimum benefits. 
If the client protested that the deduction 
would result in no living minimum funds, 
the benefits accountant responded, “that is 
your problem” (to je váš problem). A stress 
on “your” (váš) indicated that the client 
needed to look after herself and pursue the 
father’s financial contribution (rather than 
the state’s). Only after the father refused to 
pay or had been unsuccessfully sought after 
by the mother, court, and police would the 
state make up the difference in monthly 
income. To give another example, if a client 
forgot a document or necessary verification 
(of residence, pregnancy, other state benefits 
received) she heard, “that is your mistake” 
(to je vaše chyba) or, “it’s your issue to 
handle” (to je vaše věc). The state was no 
longer “ours” (náš) to plunder; family 
concerns were “yours” (váš).

This meaningful shift in focus from “our 
state” to “your family” suggests that 
postsocialist family ideologies have moved 
from an emphasis on communal to 
individual/family units. The state no longer 
declares itself supreme caretaker; rather, 
Czechs must look out for themselves and 
their families. As I have sought to 
demonstrate at greater length in my 
dissertation, however, this is something that 

family members were doing throughout the 
socialist era. Be it in the form of weekend 
retreats, household construction, ingenious 
support networks, or defining one’s identity 
and self-worth through family relations, 
family members never presumed otherwise. 
For this reason, I argue, many narratives of 
self-sufficiency—such as the gender studies 
work outlined earlier—complemented the 
state’s withdrawal of public responsibility 
for family well-being after 1989. Prior 
official rhetorics of intimacy between the 
state and family, many argued, was never 
achieved or made significant as Czechs 
maneuvered their lives and worked to retain 
a distinction between their households, on 
one hand, and work and political influence 
on the other.

Czechs responded critically to capitalist 
family policies toward lower-class Czechs 
as if those policies were creating a socialist 
lower class. This was a socialism never 
realized during the socialist era because, in 
the post-1989 era, the state generously 
redistributed public resources and actually
cared for (needier) families with children. 
State administrators and more materially 
secure family members interpreted those 
who were “taking” as over-supported by 
new provisions. If one were to presume that 
Czechs had faith in the prior redistributive 
ideology these criticisms might be 
surprising. Yet my informants, particularly 
older Czechs, were often quick to emphasize 
their sacrifice and self-care during the 
socialist era. New dependencies were 
perceived through denials that they were 
dependent in the past. Contemporary 
disparagement of those who “take” suggests 
rather that the socialist experience often led 
Czechs to believe that they could not count 
on the state as some do today. This 
perception of reliance on the state is, 
moreover, shaping the development of class 
distinctions which builds on the previous 
category of “unpowerful.” While all Czechs 
are “dependent” in some combined form (on 
the family, on the state, on both), productive 
dependents stigmatize those whom they 

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perceive as unproductive for both drawing 
on the state and, seemingly, not working. 

Why Work When You Can Live Off of 
Benefits?

Most Czechs receive public funds from the 
state in some form. Given the legacy of the 
role of social policy in everyday life and an 
abiding social safety net, I believe it is more 
useful to interpret new Czech recipient 
categories in terms of a manifold range of 
relationships between individuals, 
households, and the state, rather than as a 
binary between the self-reliant and the 
disadvantaged. Nevertheless, an opposition 
is developing in the Czech Republic 
between those who are “self-sufficient” 
(sám za sebe) and those who are not (in 
Czech, sociální slabší, the socially weaker, 
or unpowerful as Grandmother Vodrážková 
put it).

Unless themselves recipients, many of the 
families in Prague with whom I worked 
were unfamiliar with elaborate benefits 
criteria. When I inquired about who Czechs 
felt the state should be aiding, most agreed, 
“the socially weakest need help from the 
state;” “the state should help poor mothers;” 
“I don’t know how [the weakest] manage, 
the state should help them.” But in their 
responses, my interviewees also established 
restrictions on how much the state could and 
should do for the growing numbers of poor. 
The conditions of public care for the poor 
were informed by understandings of whether 
or not those who “take” also work. If not, 
responses sounded a line familiar to 
American ears when Czechs argued, “it’s 
better to make people contribute to society, 
to work, than to pay them support,” or “the 
social network is too plentiful.”

Nowhere was the expectation that benefits 
recipients should work—and the moral 
evaluation of those who did not—more 
evident than among employees within the 
“social network” itself (the benefits 
accountants, family court judges, social 
workers in the Home for Mothers). These 
employees, almost all of whom were 
women, administered the new income- and 

means-tested criteria and commented openly 
about their effects. In the case of the benefits 
office, clients’ employment status structured 
employees’ willingness or refusal to seek 
greater funding on their behalf. When clients 
lived under the living minimum and still 
worked, were on parental leave, or had no 
luck finding work through an 
“unemployment office” (pracák) they 
usually had a claim to financial aid, and the 
accountants processed the application and 
authorized the distribution of benefits. 
Accountants were often saddened when 
someone hovered just above the living 
minimum and remained ineligible. For 
example, when a seemingly deserving client 
left with no further benefits in hand, the 
accountants would explain delicately, “Má 
smůlu:” “She is down on her luck.” If a 
client was unemployed and had not 
registered at a pracák he or she was not 
eligible for further state benefits. The client 
might, however, be able to negotiate a “one-
time-only” award (jednorázovka) or, 
alternately, an in-kind benefit.

If one’s fate was uncertain, benefits 
accountants might explain that “the 
commission” would have to rule on the case. 
In matter of fact, “the commission” 
consisted of the office’s three benefits 
accountants and their director flipping 
through files, drinking tea, and complaining 
about so-and-so’s last-minute application for 
benefits. “It’s always the same,” they told 
me. “Right before the school year begins, 
and just before Christmas, they come in and 
say, ‘We don’t have money for books and 
shoes, or we don’t have money for 
Christmas.’” Final decisions were thus 
attributed to this anonymous body, “the 
commission,” suggesting that the clients’ 
requests, rights, and needs had been taken 
into account and treated fairly and 
objectively. The system appeared structured 
and inflexible on paper, but like the earlier 
socialist era, post-1989 offices were 
maneuverable and subject to personal 
connections, inter-office cooperation and 
competition, and employees’ mood swings.

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When a client needed to stay at home to take 
care of children, she was often asked why 
she did not go to work and leave the child 
with a grandparent. Or, why not get the 
child’s father, grandparents, or other family 
members to work so that there were more 
funds for the household? When clients were 
out of earshot the benefits accountants and 
social workers asked sarcastically, “Why 
work when you can live off of benefits?” 
After a consultation with an unemployed 
father seeking custody of his children, social 
worker Nina looked at me, exasperated, 
“There isn’t an obligation today to go to 
work” (není dneska povinnost jít do práce). 
The responsibility for unemployment rested 
on both the client and the state’s shoulders. 
The client lacked the willingness to work, 
but the state no longer forced him or her to 
work in the first place.

The director of the Home for Mothers, Jitka, 
lamented over incompatible trends—desire 
for material goods combined with what she 
interpreted as a reluctance to work—
developing in the residents she oversaw, but 
she blamed post-1989 social policies for 
allowing people to count on the state 
without taking care of themselves. There 
was a “cost in the lack of freedom” during 
the socialist era, but with a nostalgic tone 
she recalled that certain things like 
apartments and employment had been 
guaranteed and, she suggested, helped one 
tolerate life under a totalitarian regime. Too 
much freedom and the continued availability 
of funds for the poor today, though, have 
produced an inexplicable group living on 
support. Czechs had new freedoms to take, 
claim, and demand. Jitka said,

The state would prefer to pay social 
benefits and social support than 
motivate people to earn their own 
money and take themselves to some 
better place. The mothers here used 
to work themselves toward better 
lives; now those on support (na 
podpoře) are increasing. I don’t 
know how it exactly works 
elsewhere, but here there’s no time 
limit. People are on support forever, 

their whole lives. I simply don’t 
understand.

Jitka did not confine the socialist-era work 
ethic to family domains exclusively. She 
contrasted previous requirements to work 
outside of the home to reduced expectations 
of today’s unemployed. Czechs were 
supported and cared for by the Home 
previously, but it was never for long (three 
years maximum) and the socialist system did 
not allow for the upholding of unproductive 
persons. She did not miss the socialist era, 
but had greater respect for the work ethic 
associated with it.

I didn’t agree with communism. But 
at the same time I wanted to live 
here. Or at least I had to live here. 
No one could get out. So we tried to 
improve ourselves and stand on our 
own legs. And there were no 
exceptions—after school there was 
no way to get out of work. A person 
was obliged.

Both social worker Nina and Jitka 
mentioned that the “obligation” (povinnost)
to work during the socialist era had been 
replaced by the right not to work—and a 
state that too easily allowed clients and the 
residents they worked with to expect many 
kinds of aid without working. These critical 
reflections and comments imply that the 
state was enabling new forms of 
dependency.

Some felt that wages were too low for 
working to seem necessary or beneficial. As 
one man put it, “if people had decent wages, 
they would not come in” to the state offices 
to file for their benefits and support 
supplements. At the Ministry of Labor and 
Social Affairs, policymaker Novák made the 
point that, actually, the state was giving too 
much—the amount of care benefits were too 
close to wages so “why work?” In his 
opinion, benefits accountants were 
overworked and undervalued, so they 
processed paperwork without fully 
evaluating applicants’ resources and needs 
and, then, justifying distribution. Time for 
the concerns of families—both in public and 

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private settings—was too limited. The 
system was flexible enough to cut back on 
automatic awards, but employees were not 
able to maximize its potential and to take the 
circumstances of each life into account 
because they were overwhelmed. “A person 
isn’t poor because he doesn’t have money,” 
Novák explained,

rather he is poor because he got in to 
a situation whereby he doesn’t have 
money. Lack of money is only one 
indicator of poverty. And if we give 
him money, we don’t eliminate the 
poverty. We only make him 
dependent (závislým)…. There are a 
number of barriers on the system, 
one of which is the opinion that the 
living minimum is too high, and that 
it is contributing to the problem.

Novák’s ideal use of the system of support 
and care by the social workers (toward 
whom, by the way, he was quite 
sympathetic) would be to pay closer 
attention to the unique conditions of 
individual persons and households. In a 
lengthier version of this project, I 
demonstrate that benefits accountants were 
in fact alert to possible non-financial care 
resources, frequently calling on or inquiring
about extended family members who might 
assist clients. Moreover, “the commission” 
tried to take advantage of the flexibility 
offered by policies. As an author and mentor 
of state texts and research studies Novák felt 
that the expansion of individualized 
treatment of clientele, more thorough 
examinations of claims, and subsequent 
denial of care, were justified.

Others found primary fault in those who 
were being “cared for” by the state. One of 
the full-time “doorkeepers” (vrátná), Mrs. 
Jedličková, at the Home for Mothers was 
astonished by the lifestyles of the Home’s 
residents. We often chatted in her office as 
she buzzed residents in, admitted and signed 
in authorized guests, and connected phone 
calls to the upstairs living units from her 
switch-board. Although similar homes for 
mothers were founded throughout 

Czechoslovakia from the 1960s onward, 
Mrs. Jedličková considered theirs an 
indicator of the inconceivable claims Czechs 
made on state resources. “This kind of 
institution didn’t exist before,” she said. “If 
you went to a social worker and said, ‘my 
husband doesn’t give me money’ she would 
say ‘go to work for yourself.’ People should 
work; before you had to have a stamp in 
your national identification card (občanka) 
that said you worked.” The vrátnás in the 
Home were retired women, usually in their 
late fifties and mid-sixties, and they worked 
as door minders to supplement their 
pensions. They led “triple burden” lives, 
caring for husbands, grown children who 
often still lived at home, and grandchildren,
while also working outside the home beyond 
retirement age. Like most of the benefits 
accountants, then, these women were older 
than the “socially weaker” clients they 
worked around. While recognizing the 
difficult family lives the residents came 
from, older state employees struggled to 
understand how mothers could stay at home 
all day, even after the completion of 
maternity leave. This vrátná, for one, 
insisted that she had not wanted to stay at 
home when she had little children. She 
“wanted to go to work.”

Conclusion

Czechs refer to past systems of social 
provisions when making sense of current 
reform, tortuous filing procedures, and 
differences between the self-sufficient and 
“the socially weak.” Entitlement claims span 
a broad section of the population. Yet in 
recalling their experiences with the socialist 
state, people such as Grandmother 
Vodrážková and Mrs. Boudová distanced 
themselves from today’s poorer classes of 
Czechs by insisting that they never drew on 
support and care. They took care of 
themselves; they never got anything for free. 
Family and gender studies narratives of 
sacrifice, hard work, and self-sustenance 
refigure the trajectory of postsocialist 
transition by contrasting state narratives of 
state-family relations (these latter narratives 
often trace the state’s retreat from enabling 

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passivity—characterizing literature on the 
socialist era—and a movement toward 
engen-dering responsibility in the present 
through policy). Instead of witnessing a 
radical break from state paternalism and 
civic laziness, the stories told by individual 
family members affirmed continued belief 
in, and value for, the family and individual 
responsibility—and ongoing perceived 
independence from public provisions.

Czechs who have moved further outside of 
state oversight (those who carried the state 
versus family opposition to the postsocialist 
period) viewed those struggling to make 
ends meet as generating individual and 
family dependence on the state not matched 
by individual effort (what I refer to in my 
dissertation as a productive dependency
(Nash 2003)). The socialist state did not pay 
significant attention to the “unpowerful” 
(i.e., the socialist-era “socially weaker”). 
Today those who draw on the state are 
accused of creating their own struggle to 
survive and of perpetuating dependencies 
never before seen. Living minimum criteria 
and support eligibility mark expanding gaps 
and differences among Czech families and 
generations. Care benefits were meant to 
serve as a safety net for those unable to 
protect themselves in an unfamiliar 
economic environment. Within the system 
itself, administrators experienced the 
benefits as obstacles to care for the self and 
family, which older generations would 
otherwise have passed along.

It is important to examine closely when 
Czechs evoke an ideology of independence 
from the state—and an opposition of state 
versus family outlined by leading Czech 
gender studies scholars—which signifies an 
ability to turn to family as productive 
dependents and not the state (fully) in the 
postsocialist era. Socialism shared a 
discourse of individual interest now 
complementing ideologies of responsibility, 
but the growth of class differences among 
families suggests the creation of altogether 
new dependencies.

References Cited: 

Bartošová, Milada et al. 1978.  Populační 
politika v ČSSR 1945-1975. Výzkumná 
práce (Pracovištĕ Praha), řada B, č. 76. 
Bratislava: Československy výzkumný ústav 
práce a sociálních vĕcí.

Čermáková, Marie. 1995.  Women and 
Family—The Czech Version of 
Development and Chances for 
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Barbara Łobodzińska, ed. Westport, 
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Gal, Susan and Gail Kligman. 2000.  The 
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Havelková, Hana. 1993a.  A Few 
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——1993b  “Patriarchy” in Czech Society. 
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Nash, Rebecca.  2002.  Exhaustion from 
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—— 2003. Restating the Family: Kinship 
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Šiklová, Jiřina.  1993.  Are Women in 
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