1 In Polish “gospodyni” refers to a housewife and a farmer’s wife at the same time.

2 For the outline of the concept of household economy as a socio-economic structure that plays a significant role in consumer cultures, see: Wilk, Richard R., ed., The Household Economy: Reconsidering the Domestic Mode Of Production (Boulder, CO., 1989; New edition Abingdon, Eng., 2019)Google Scholar; De Vries, Jan, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, Eng., 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For the discussion on the history and agenda of the home efficiency movement, see: Rutherford, Janice Williams, Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and The Rise Of Household Efficiency (Athens, GA, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stage, Sarah and Vincenti, Virginia B., eds., Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elias, Megan J., Stir it Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia, 2008)Google Scholar.

4 Dreilinger, Danielle, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live (New York, 2021), 172–272Google Scholar.

5 The KGD and its role in public debates on technology and modernity in state socialist Poland will be discussed in an upcoming book: Patryk Wasiak, Technological Innovation, Modernity, and Electric Goods in Late State Socialist Poland (Lexington Books, forthcoming).

6 Mazurek, Malgorzata and Hilton, Matthew, “Consumerism, Solidarity and Communism: Consumer Protection and the Consumer Movement in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (April 2007): 315–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 The transmission belt term was originally used by Lenin to discuss the role of trade unions in helping the Communist Party in building the communist project. Vladimir Il΄ich Lenin, “The Role and Functions of Trade Unions under the New Economic Policy,” Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd ed., 45 vols. (Moscow, 1965), 33:188–96.

8 Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2012); Cristofer Scarboro, Diana Mincyte, and Zsuzsa Gille, eds., The Socialist Good Life: Desire, Development, and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe (Bloomington, 2020).

9 For the most important studies that elaborate on the concept of “mediations,” see: Grace Lees-Maffei, “The Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm,” Journal of Design History 22, no. 4 (December 2009), 351–76; Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze, eds., The Design History Reader (Oxford, 2010), 427–66 (Section 11); Ruth Oldenziel, Adri Albert de la Bruhèze, and Onno de Wit, “Europe’s Mediation Junction: Technology and Consumer Society in the 20th Century,” History and Technology 21, no. 1 (March 2005): 107–39.

10 Lees-Maffei, “The Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm,” 366.

11 Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900–1950 (Columbia, MO, 2000); Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 2004); Janice Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London, 1987). Similarly, a classical volume, The Sex of Things, includes studies that highlight how not only producers but also intermediary actors (retailers, the mass media, and expert groups) have an impact on the formation of gender-based consumer practices and identities: see Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 1996).

12 Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Smith Maguire, “Consumers and Consumption,” Annual Review of Sociology, 30 (January 2004): 173.

13 Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone bring a concise definition of subjectivity as a formation of the reflexive self which is “an active agent that scrutinizes both itself and the world it inhabits and thus plays a dynamic role in creating its own narratives of itself.” Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, “Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective,” Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 967.

14 Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, “Introduction,” in Bren and Neuburger, Communism Unwrapped, 7.

15 Martin Hand and Elizabeth Shove, “Orchestrating Concepts: Kitchen Dynamics and Regime Change in Good Housekeeping and Ideal Home, 1922–2002,” Home Cultures 1, no. 3 (November 2004) 235–56.

16 Hand and Shove, “Orchestrating Concepts,” 237.

17 Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics, 172–239.

18 Karin Zachmann, “Managing Choice: Constructing the Socialist Consumption Junction in the German Democratic Republic,” in Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 259–84.

19 Zachmann, “Managing Choice,” 260.

20 Oldenziel, Bruhèze, and de Wit, “Europe’s Mediation Junction,” 122.

21 For an instance of a detailed presentation of the objectives of such a policy, see: Edward Wiszniewski, Polityka konsumpcji w Polsce (Warsaw, 1979). Natalya Chernyshova offers a comprehensive study of the role of the state apparatus in shaping consumption in a single country: Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (New York, 2013).

22 Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer, 2002): 213.

23 Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” 220.

24 Christine Varga-Harris, “Homemaking and the Aesthetics and Moral Perimeters of the Soviet Home during the Khrushchev Era,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (Spring 2008), 568.

25 For a discussion on such a new gender role, see: Małgorzata Fidelis, “Are You a Modern Girl?: Consumer Culture and Young Women in 1960s Poland,” in Shana Penn and Jill Massino, eds., Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (New York, 2009), 172.

26 Archiwum Akt Nowych w Warszawie (AAN), Telewizja Polska S.A. Wycinki prasowe (TP), sygn. 20/140, Stanisław Albinowski, “Kobieta—homo oeconomicus,” Życie Warszawy, November 12, 1960, 3.

27 Here we can refer to Victor Buchli’s study in which he investigates how the concept of “design” became used in a campaign of removing the remains of petit-bourgeois culture in the Khrushchev era USSR. Victor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against ‘Petit-bourgeois’ Consciousness in the Soviet Home,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997), 161–76. Similarly, Christine Varga-Harris explores the use of normatively valued aesthetic principles and moral perimeters as a set of values on how to define home design in the same era. Varga-Harris, “Homemaking,” 568. Returning to Poland, Brian Porter-Szűcs notes that: “Underpinning virtually all the debates and discussions of economic policy in the PRL was a desire to assess what people required—not only for sustenance but also for personal satisfaction and fulfillment.” Brian Porter-Szűcs, “Conceptualizing Consumption in the Polish People’s Republic,” in Cristofer Scarboro, Diana Mincytė, and Zsuzsa Gille, eds., The Socialist Good Life: Desire, Development, and Standards of Living in Eastern Europe (Bloomington, 2020), 90.

28 Scarboro, Mincyte, and Gille, eds., The Socialist Good Life. For a discussion on the concept of socialist modernity, see: Małgorzata Fidelis, “Pleasures and Perils of Socialist Modernity: New Scholarship on Post-War Eastern Europe,” Contemporary European History 26, no. 3 (August 2017), 533–44; Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (Pittsburgh, 2011).

29 Mary Neuburger, “Pleasure, Restraint, Backwardness, and Civilization in Eastern Europe,” in Scarboro, Mincyte, and Gille, eds., The Socialist Good Life, 25–51.

30 Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), 9.

31 For a discussion on the cultural history of “efficiency” as a term, see: Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore, 2008). Porter-Szűcs notes the role of efficiency in his work on the policy debates concerning consumption in Poland. He argues that the policy-makers and economists insisted that not only the production sector had to be efficient in terms of the production quotas and the proper allocation of the available resources, but also “the object of efficiency maximization shifted from the firm to ‘society.’” Porter-Szűcs, “Conceptualizing Consumption in the Polish People’s Republic,” 91. For a discussion on efficiency in the context of the notion of competitiveness in state socialism, see: Katalin Miklóssy and Melanie Ilič, eds., Competition in Socialist Society (London, 2014).

32 The League of Women (Liga Kobiet), formerly the Social-Civic League of Women (SOLK), created in 1949 as a result of the unification process under Stalinism. In the mid-1980s it had approximately 600,000 members.

33 The issues of autonomy, agency, and the position of women’s organizations under state socialism have been extensively discussed among scholars. The debate was held on the pages of Aspasia journal (a polemic between Mihaela Miroiu, “Communism Was a State Patriarchy, Not State Feminism,” 197–201, and Kassimira Daskalova, “How Should We Name the ‘Women-Friendly’ Actions of State Socialism?” 214–19, in “Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradiction in Terminus,” a forum in Aspasia 1, no. 1 [March 2007]: 197–246). See also: Nanette Funk, “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism,” in “The New Europe: 25 Years after the Fall of the Wall,” ed. Barbara Einhorn and Kornelia Slavova, special issue, European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 4 (November 2014): 344–60; Kristen Ghodsee, “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women 1975–1985,” in “Human Rights, Global Conferences, and the Making of Postwar Transnational Feminisms,” ed. Jean H. Quataert and Benita Roth, special issue, Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 49–73; Zsófia Lóránd, “New Yugoslav Feminism During Socialism Between ‘Mainstreaming’ and ‘Disengagement’: The Possibilities of Resistance, Critical Opposition and Dissent,” The Hungarian Historical Review 5, no. 4 (2016): 854–81. See also: Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor, 1989). Linda Racioppi and Katherine O’Sullivan See offer a concise overview of women’s activism in the Soviet Union: Linda Racioppi and Katherine O’Sullivan See, Women’s Activism in Contemporary Russia, (Philadelphia, 1997), 1–42, 72–126.

34 For a discussion on this shift, see Porter-Szűcs, “Conceptualizing Consumption in the Polish People’s Republic.”

35 Maria Jaszczukowa, [untitled], Gospodarstwo Domowe, no. 1 (1958): 2.

36 Here it worth noting that in the Soviet Union a similar women’s organization, zhenskie sovety (women’s councils), had more limited agency. Linda Racioppi and Katherine O’Sullivan See note “the goals of these councils were not generated by their members, however, but by the party or government organization with which they were associated.” Racioppi and O’Sullivan See, “Organizing Women before and after the Fall: Women’s Politics in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20, no. 4 (1995): 821. See also: Genia Browning, “The Zhensovety Revisited,” in Mary Buckley, ed., Perestroika and Soviet Women (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 97–117. See also Racioppi and O’Sullivan See, “Women’s Activism,” 108–12.

37 In 1971, in line with the new ruling elite of the First Secretary Edward Gierek (1970–1980) of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, or PZPR (the Polish United Workers’ Party), with new policies on consumption and the program of the VI PZPR Convention in 1971, the KGD advocated the rapid modernization of Polish households. It used the same vocabulary as the official communiqué of the PZPR. For instance: “Progress and rationalization in household management are now becoming an indispensable condition for the dynamic growth of the economy as a whole and for the implementation of the program to improve the living standards of all citizens.” Teresa Pałaszewska-Reindl, “O dalszy postęp i racjonalizację w gospodarstwie domowym,” Gospodarstwo Domowe, no. 6 (1971): 1.

38 AAN, Liga Kobiet, temp. ref. no. 13/53, npag, Tłumaczenia zagranicznych materiałów na temat gospodarstwa domowego.

39 Neuburger, “Pleasure, Restraint, Backwardness, and Civilization in Eastern Europe.”

40 See: Fidelis, “Pleasures and Perils”; Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity.

41 Sorin Radu, “Countryside and Communism in Eastern Europe: Perceptions, Attitudes, Propaganda—Problems, Interpretations and Perspectives,” in Sorin Radu and Cosmin Budeancǎ, eds., Countryside and Communism in Eastern Europe: Perceptions, Attitudes, Propaganda (Zürich, 2016), 17.

42 Małgorzata Fidelis shows that just after 1945, women in Poland were accused of clericalism, political indifference, and having a strong attachment to the traditional ways of life. Even in the 1960s, they were the subject of modernization policies in terms of changing their practices of consumption and lifestyle. Małgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge, Eng., 2010); Fidelis, “Are You a Modern Girl?”

43 Radu, “Countryside and Communism in Eastern Europe,” 19.

44 Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen.”

45 Rebecca J. Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (Cambridge, Eng., 2011), 67; Luisa Tasca, “The ‘Average Housewife’ in Postwar Italy,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 2 (2004): 107.

46 Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics, 189–202.

47 See: Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics; Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France, 63–68.

48 Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics, 240–55.

49 T. Kuczyńska, “Ty i Ja,” Kobieta oszukana, no. 6 (1965): 13–15. For more on the relation between women’s organizations under state socialism and feminism, see: Barbara Nowak, “Serving Women and the State: the League of Women in Communist Poland” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University 2004); Zsófia Lóránd, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia (London, 2018).

50 Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics, 1–23.

51 Differently than the KGD, the FK openly expressed, as Zsuzsa Gille and Diana Mincytė note, the “relationship between desire and politics, that is, political subjectivity” and “the consumption–political consciousness relationship,” Zsuzsa Gille and Diana Mincytė, “The Prosumerist Resonance Machine: Rethinking Political Subjectivity and Consumer Desire in State Socialism,” in Scarboro, Mincyte, and Gille, eds., The Socialist Good Life, 220.

52 Libora Oates-Indruchová points to a change in its imagery from the revolutionary image of a female tractor driver, which was popular under Stalinism, to the traditional imagery of womanhood after 1956. Libora Oates- Indruchová, “The Beauty and the Loser: Cultural Representations of Gender in Late State Socialism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 2 (2012): 359.

53 See for example: (AAN), Telewizja Polska S.A. Wycinki prasowe (TP), sygn.20/140, Józef Czapnik, “W spódnicy—i za pługiem (Feminizacja zawodu rolnika),” Dziennik Ludowy, August 29, 1968, 2; Bogdan Dydenko, “Feminizacja zawodu (Wiek XX na wsi),” Słowo Powszechne, August 24, 1967, 4.

54 PGR (Państwowe Gospodarstwa Rolne, or State Farm) was the main Polish organizational form of collective, state-owned farming, similar to the Soviet sovhoz. This organizational structure was established in 1949 and shut down in 1991. For a discussion on the gender role of a female state-owned farm worker, or kolkhoznitsa, see: Ivan Simić, “Building Socialism in the Countryside: The Impact of Collectivization on Yugoslav Gender Relations,” Journal of Social History 51, no. 4 (June 2018): 1023–44.

55 David R. Henderson, Robert M. McNab, and Tamás Rózsás, “The Hidden Inequality in Socialism,” The Independent Review 9, no. 3 (Winter 2005): 390.

56 Neuburger, “Pleasure, Restraint, Backwardness, and Civilization in Eastern Europe.”

57 Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics, 203–18.

58 Ibid., 189–202.

59 Józefa Adamusowa, “O niektórych zadaniach placówek terenowych i instruktorkach gospodarstwa domowego w 1964 roku,” Gospodarstwo Domowe, no. 1 (1964): 3.

60 Bren and Neuburger, “Introduction,” 5. Chernyshova discusses a similar transformation in the Soviet Union from the Stalinist era onwards as the “drive for ‘culturedness’(kul΄turnost’)”: “official advice appointed clothes, furniture, books, and various other objects as tools for transforming the uncouth masses into cultured and modern citizens of the new state,” see her Soviet Consumer Culture, 8.

61 Cristofer Scarboro, “The Late Socialist Good Life and Its Discontents: Bit, Kultura, and the Social Life of Goods,” in Scarboro, Mincyte, and Gille, eds., The Socialist Good Life, 201.

62 Luisa Tasca, “The Average Housewife in Post-World War Italy,” 93.

63 Władysława Ciemniewska, “O kursach na wsi,” Gospodarstwo Domowe, no. 3 (1959): 16.

64 This term is widely used in media studies to identify the role of a person who helps others, mostly from the same social milieu, to learn how to use new technologies. For an overview of the use of concept of “warm experts” in the process of mediating technology, see: Maria Bakardjieva, “The Consumption Junction Revisited: Networks and Contexts,” in Robert E. Kraut, Malcolm Brynin, and Sara Kiesler, eds., Computers, Phones, and the Internet: Domesticating Information Technology (Oxford, 2006), 97–108.

65 “It is very important to continue working in the field of propaganda and information,” announced the KGD in 1970 and declared that they would provide materials for a weekly radio broadcast “Progress in the household” and cooperate with women’s and general interest journals and magazines. AAN, Liga Kobiet, temp. ref. no 25/1, npag, “Ramowy plan pracy KGD na rok 1970.KGD.”

66 Lynne Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 1922–53 (London, 1999), 12. For example, Dziennik Ludowy, a rural daily, portrayed a perfect modern housewife, who was a chair of the KGW, the head of the Modern Housewife Center, and a perfect farm manager, (AAN), Telewizja Polska S.A. Wycinki prasowe (TP), sygn. 20/140, Halina Przedborska, “W kobiecym królestwie,” Dziennik Ludowy, July 12, 1968, 3.

67 Tomáš Samec and Martin Hájek, “Performing Financialized Subjectivities in Household Economy Manuals under State Socialism and Neoliberal Capitalism,” Competition & Change 23, no. 5 (October 2019): 441.

68 Chatterjee and Petrone, “Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity,” 978.

69 Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture, 8.

70 Zachmann, “Managing Choice.”

71 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), 41. For a discussion on the notion of power/knowledge relations in consumer cultures, see Frank Trentmann, ed., The Making of the Consumer Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford, 2006).

72 For example, in the series of booklets “The library of a modern housewife,” the author encouraged rural women to purchase electric appliances, persuading them that “modern equipment, although sometimes more expensive, will work out to be cheaper in the long run than the traditional one.” Henryka Borzykowska, Nowoczesny sprzęt domowy (Warsaw, 1968), 6; Izabela Borowiecka, Nowoczesność w gospodarstwie domowym (Warsaw, 1979).

73 Susan Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen,” 218. Advertisements published in Gospodarstwo Domowe not only presented specific appliances but also explained how they fit into an imaginary modern household, which was efficient, well managed, and well equipped: “If you still do not have a sewing machine, washing machine, hoover, juicer, food processor, radio, television set, and other durable goods necessary for a modern and rationally run household, please visit the department stores of the municipal cooperative Samopomoc Chłopska or a rural department store, which offer a wide selection of the above-mentioned articles.” Gospodarstwo Domowe, no. 5 (1971): cover page 4.

74 “Warto kupić,” Gospodyni Wiejska, nos. 17–18 (1963): 8.

75 Susan E. Reid, “‘This is Tomorrow! Becoming Consumer in the Soviet Sixties,’ in Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, eds., The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World (Bloomington, 2013), 30.

76 Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (Oxford, 2003).

77 Helena Spalona, “Rozwój działalności w zakresie gospodarstwa domowego w Polsce,” Gospodarstwo Domowe, no. 11 (1959): 6.

78 Janina Kołaczyńska, “Głos spółdzielczyń,” Gospodyni Wiejska, no. 16 (1962): 5.

79 AAN, Liga Kobiet, temp. ref. no 15/36, npag, “Pracownia żywienia ośrodka “Nowoczesna Gospodyni” na 5 stanowisk pracy i 8 stanowisk pracy (1969).”

80 Helena Gintelowa, “Gospodarstwo domowe w liczbach (wg rocznika statystycznego 1978)” Gospodarstwo Domowe no. 1 (1979): 4.

81 Gintelowa, “Gospodarstwo,” 4.

82 Hand and Shove, “Orchestrating Concepts.”

83 Zukin and Smith Maguire, “Consumers and Consumption,” 173.