Abstract
From the 1960s to 1989, thousands of female Polish workers were sent to Czechoslovak enterprises. I analyze how the Polish women used their stay in the CSSR during the peak period of labor force cooperation to escape the dual burden of production and reproduction.
My argument is that the advantageous position enjoyed by skilled male workers in state-socialist regimes could also partly apply to the otherwise vulnerable and marginalized unskilled female and migrant work force. Mutually countervailing policies of the two "cooperating" states, which in fact competed for the same workers, forced Czechoslovakia to relax control over the Poles and allowed the workers to choose relatively freely whether to stay in the host country or return.
I conclude that these favorable conditions endowed the female Polish workers with agency and empowered them to flee from their determined roles in paternalist state-socialist society.