Malgorzata Fidelis is currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her articles have appeared in journals including Slavic Review and the Journal of Women's History. She has also contributed to several edited volumes of essays published in the USA, Poland, and Germany.

'Malgorzata Fidelis provides a significant and comprehensive research study that questions conventional historical accounts of women and communism within the European context. … provides a rich and nuanced account of the ways in which gender was taken up by state and society who shifted its meaning depending on social and politico-economic needs of the time.' Canadian Woman Studies

• Introduction; 1. Visions of equality: the state, the church, and women's sections; 2. Heroines and rebels: accommodation and resistance on the shop floor; 3. From village to factory: creating the new proletarians; 4. New women for new occupations: the case of coal mining; 5. Women astray: debating sexuality and reproduction during the thaw; 6. Reforming the system, protecting motherhood: contradictions of the post-stalinist experience; Epilogue: from communism to post-communism; Appendix I. List of archives and abbreviations; Appendix II. Personal interviews.