As Democracy Appears, Ranks of Women Drop in Halls of Government : Eastern Europe: The females in the Communist regimes were mostly showpieces. There are strong forces holding them back.

Ranks of women members were a showpiece in the sham parliaments of Communist regimes. Then democracy came to Eastern Europe, and most of the women were gone.

A survey by the Inter-Parliamentary Council in Geneva found that all parliaments in the former Soviet Bloc have fewer women members than before Communist parties fell from power last year.

The sharpest decline was in Romania, where women made up 34% of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s rubber-stamp assembly. After the May elections, only 4% of the legislators are women.

“While, under Ceausescu, there were quotas for skirts in the parliament . . . that didn’t reflect political reality,” said Cristina Popescu, a feminist and editor of the newspaper Romania Libera. “Now, what you see is what you’ve got.”

New issues may galvanize women--Poland is on the verge of outlawing abortion, legal since 1956--but there is virtually no tradition of real power for them in either the Communist system or the former opposition movements.

Strong forces are holding women back.

To them falls most of the exhausting daily grind of finding a family’s food, clothing and small pleasures in shortage-plagued economies.

Social custom causes women to marry early, have children immediately and dote on them. The Roman Catholic Church, predominant in Poland and strong elsewhere, encourages a traditional family model and has considerable political influence.

Women have virtually no organizations they can use as a basis for political power.

The search for equality on which Western women, men and institutions embarked 25 years ago found no mirror in the Communist world.

Communist leaders often dismissed “women’s lib” as a foible of indulged, immoral capitalists. Opposition groups did not welcome women to their leaderships or pursue women’s issues in the battle against communism.

Little sensitivity to women’s equality is evident in the new democracies.

Government commissions and public forums usually are men-only, and assumptions about women are rampant. A Western diplomat recalls repeatedly explaining that she was not making an error in Polish when she identified herself as a secretarz of her embassy, not a secretarka on the clerical staff.

Those few women in the East who would call themselves feminists are only beginning to look at the way schoolbooks stereotype male and female roles. Suggestions that advertisements seeking Western investors should be addressed to “executives” and not “businessmen” are greeted with blank stares.

“The word feminist was ridiculed, the media made fun of Western women and I didn’t believe there were other women who believed as I did,” said Hanna Jankowska, who helped found Poland’s fledgling ProFemina group after meeting like-minded women at a small rally against the anti-abortion law.

Jankowska and others blame the fake equality of the Communist system. Now that it has crumbled, women are likely to retreat rather than jump at new possibilities, they predict.

“Women did not fight for emancipation; it was given to them with the new socialist system,” she said. “Many people connect the two.

“For many women, the practical effect of this emancipation is they have to go to work. They have two shifts--at work and then for the home. They are very tired and would prefer to stay home.”

After Bulgaria’s elections in June, women made up 3.5% of the parliament, down from 21%. The Hungarian parliament is 7% female, down from 21% before free elections.

Poland’s parliament, chosen partly by democratic elections, is 12% women, compared to 20% when the Communist Party picked all candidates.

“The situation in most of the post-Communist countries is more or less the same,” said Izabela Nowacka of the Polish League of Women, a Communist-aligned organization now seeking an independent identity.

“A certain number of seats were allotted to women in Parliament and it was due to this (Communist) system that women were allowed to enter government institutions, but not the women who had something to say.”

The Communists also had quotas for farmers, steelworkers and miners. Their elimination in Poland also reduced working-class participation in Parliament, where 83% of members now have university educations, compared with 60% previously.

No women have positions of power in Solidarity, which was born in 1980 during a Gdansk shipyard strike that started over the firing of a female crane operator. Even in the textile center of Lodz, where the vast majority of mill workers are women, Solidarity always has been led by men.

When Solidarity was banned in 1981 and thousands of members were interned under martial law, women played important, but supporting, roles.

They helped activist husbands, made placards and distributed literature. Their highest representation was in the underground press, where many wrote under male pseudonyms.

Only two women were among the 57 participants in talks between Solidarity and the Communists that laid the groundwork for the transfer of power in 1989. Just one woman minister, in charge of culture, serves in the new government.

The anti-abortion campaign, a product of Solidarity’s close alignment with the church, conservative nationalism and all things anti-Communist, has roused some women.

“For the first time in postwar Poland, women became aware that their rights are in danger,” Jankowska said. “We are at the very beginning of organizing women in this country. It is a difficult task, but this abortion issue has awakened women.”

Generally, however, there is little optimism for substantially increased involvement or professional advancement by this generation of women in Eastern Europe.

Winners of Polish parliament seats “were very much connected with the church and the traditional model of family,” said Dr. Zofia Kuratowska, deputy senate speaker and one of the few ranking women in Solidarity.

She said the spring elections probably will produce an even more conservative assembly after a battle among fledgling parties in which women have little place.

Kuratowska noted that women made up only about 10% of candidates in the May local elections. Municipal contests often are a starting point for political activists.

Worn down by work, shopping and child care, women appear likely to succumb to the widespread Eastern European attitude that the authorities will do whatever they want in the end.

Activists say many women already have retreated into their private lives, tuning out the political system.