Book Reviews : MAVIS MACLEAN AND JACEK KURCZEWSKI (EDS), Families, Politics and the Law: Perspectives for East and West Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, 326 pp
| Date | 01 June 1995 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399500400218 |
| Author | Helen Reece |
| Published date | 01 June 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
299
MAVIS MACLEAN AND JACEK KURCZEWSKI (EDS), Families, Politics and the Law:
Perspectives for East and West Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, 326 pp.
’He provides for the family, gives me what he earns as housekeeping.’
’Comes home from work, has dinner, has a rest, reads a bit, takes a nap, watches the
film on TV.’
’He throws the garbage out, helps a bit with the kids.’
While the wives have privacy in the form of conversations with their female friends,
the husbands satisfy that same need by meeting their male friends ’for a beer’,
repairing the family car, watching sports broadcasts, or indulging their particular
hobbies. (p. 86)
Where are these husbands and wives from? London? Manchester? The answer is that they
live in a workers’ district of Warsaw.
This answer reveals the feature of Farnilies, Politics and the Law, a collection of essays
written by lawyers and social scientists from Poland and Britam, which is the most
interesting and at the same time the most problematic for its project. The editors state that
they aim ’to do what artists do when they hold up their drawing to a mirror in order to see it
more
clearly, to check perspective and composition’ (preface), but when we look into this
mirror, we see only our own faces staring back at us, warts and all. The similarity between
Polish and English systems of Family Law is quite remarkable, yet at no point is it remarked
upon. Explicit discussion of this similarity would have been useful at three levels, the
theoretical, the legal and the empirical.
At
the theoretical level, this book aims to compare Poland’s transition to democracy with
the United Kingdom’s transition to Thatcherism. Although the editors seek to contrast a
drive towards increasing the freedom of the individual in the East with increasing the
operation of the market economy in the West (p. 16), these are in reality two sides of the
same
coin: the tensions are within rather than between the social systems. This was the way
in which...
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