As an anthropologist, Joanna Mishtal brings readers into the world of women in Poland whose lives were jolted by the dramatic events that ended communist rule and instituted a democratic system beginning in 1989. The story she tells in The Politics of Morality is not of dislocation due to the sudden expansion of freedoms and choices, but rather shock at the immediate restriction of freedoms and choices in women’s private lives.

Key to the transition toward a noncommunist state in Poland was the early alliance between Solidarity, the first independent trade union, and the Episcopate (administrative structure) of the Polish Catholic Church. In the context of the communist regime, both organizations had been seen as symbols of freedom from oppression; in the 1980s, they formed an alliance to push for a change toward democracy and capitalism. Mishtal shows that the church, with the encouragement of Pope John Paul II (the Polish Pope), took advantage of the vacuum of power during the transition to establish itself as the official moral authority of the society. Thus, what was seen by the world as a promising step toward democratization after decades of Soviet-sponsored authoritarianism in Poland was a decision that gave great power to an authoritarian religious institution. That power was not the traditional type of legal state authority enforced by state institutions, but rather moral governance over education and family enforced by the church, dominating women’s lives.

In this work, the author urges readers to adopt an alternative understanding of democratization by focusing on this case of reproductive politics. She contrasts the politics in the Polish communist system with that of the postcommunist or, to use a term she prefers, postsocialist world. Under the communist system, abortion was legal and contraception use was widespread. Women enjoyed numerous services that allowed them to combine labor-force participation and family responsibilities. To drive home the point, Mishtal characterizes these communist work and family policies as “state feminism” because the state handed out rights that women in Western democracies had to fight long campaigns to achieve. But such rights ended when the church condemned the separation of church and state, as well as legal abortion, as tools of communism and demanded that they be ended. Representing the state church, Catholic authorities sought and won criminalization of abortion with few exceptions, removal of state funding for contraceptive services, and insertion of religious teaching in state schools. The compact with the new postsocialist state gave the church authority to exert moral discipline over doctors, health workers, teachers, and women themselves, requiring their compliance with Catholic doctrine.

The author argues that such moral governance is not only not democratic but also more authoritarian than even communist doctrine. Polish public opinion did not favor these restrictions, yet authorities ignored efforts to stop the changes, claiming that moral issues were not to be subject to referendums or political debate. As a result, noncompliance has been widespread, especially with the abortion law. Private doctors have formed a system for providing clandestine abortion services that operates more or less in the open. Those who can pay find safe reproductive services, and physicians are able to increase their incomes by providing abortions. Further, despite efforts by both state and church to limit support for working mothers in order to encourage them to leave the workforce and have more children, fertility rates remain low. Without the supports offered by the state under the communist system, women are not able to combine work and motherhood. They opt to limit family size, rather than to stop work to raise more children.

The author calls herself an “accidental refugee.” As a teenager in 1981, Mishtal, due to turmoil back home, was stranded in the United States while on a trip with the tennis team. Much later, after becoming established in the United States as an anthropologist, she undertook research to learn firsthand the effects of Catholic influence in Poland since 1989. The book is based on several years of fieldwork, including extensive interviews between 2000 and 2014 among activists, doctors, priests, and mothers. She also observed nongovernmental organizations, such as the Federation for Women and Family Planning and the Women’s Rights Center, that are involved in the politics of reproduction and morality. The book is organized as a narrative, with chapters describing the postsocialist transition and the role of the church; restrictions on contraception, abortion and the rise of moral governance; the response of women’s rights activists; methods of church surveillance of women, doctors, and families; the system of clandestine abortion services; and the persistent decline of fertility.

Making contributions to theory and conceptualization is not the goal of the research, nor do research concepts or theories structure the book. Rather, the author uses concepts such as governmentality and democratization to characterize information that she presents in the narratives.

The major contribution of this work is the detailed information that Mishtal has accumulated in order to make her case that the power given to the Catholic Church to control and police church doctrine in areas of reproductive and educational policy has led to disastrous effects for women and their status. The descriptions of “moral surveillance”—the way the Catholic clergy use the confessional, mandatory premarital courses, and the Koleda, or Christmas family visit rituals—to control women and their family formation and access to contraception, let alone abortion, are chilling. As reported in the book, priests armed with Catholic doctrine, backed up by the authority of the state, infiltrate the private lives of women and their families. They use the practices of faithful Catholic women to enforce their doctrine: Complying with Catholic rules regarding sexual relations and procreation requires women to give up control over their reproductive lives or risk condemnation, even damnation. To bolster the general descriptions of such instances of surveillance, the author includes personal stories of Polish women, such as Maya, whose priest cursed her when she confessed that after five pregnancies in six years with an unstable and often violent husband, she had gotten an intrauterine device from a doctor. The priest refused to give her absolution until she had it removed.

The usefulness of The Politics of Morality to a wider scholarly audience is limited. Mishtal fails to ground her classifications and concepts in existing scholarly research. For example, she argues that the access to abortion and contraceptive services under the communist regime in Poland were women’s rights equivalent to rights to abortion and contraception in Western democracies. She does not recognize the contested nature of the concept of rights, as well as the doubts of many that there is an equivalence between a policy of legal abortion ordered by an authoritarian state and one where the democratic state decriminalizes abortion law placing the procedure in the medical or health sector. Similarly, she somewhat carelessly uses the term “state feminism” to characterize the reproductive policies under the communist system in Poland. Having assumed the equivalence between legal abortion in communist systems and Western democracies, and that both policies advance feminist goals, she names the communist system as state feminism without any discussion of the use of this concept in other scholarly studies and without a definition of “feminism.” This shows little understanding of the importance of the framing and meaning of policies, laws, and regulations. In this area and many others, this information would be of much more significance had the author’s analysis delved more deeply into the literature on feminism, rights, and democratization, especially in comparative contexts.

Developing evidence-based theory about the processes of democratization remains a central mission of comparative politics research. Works such as The Politics of Morality encourage attention to the incorporation of personal perspectives, along with the public and institutional aspects of such processes, in research designs. For example, studies of the effects of individual noncompliance with authoritarian directives reveal challenges to state power that are just as important as counting the frequency of public protests. Such approaches reinforce the already robust contributions of scholars of comparative gender politics and feminism to an understanding of the complexities of democracy.