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The article focuses on women’s situation in post-Stalinist Poland. It employs the feminist notion of backlash (a term coined by Susan Faludi to describe the situation of American women in the 1980s) to analyse the retreat from the Stalinist model of women’s emancipation. In the case of Poland, the backlash concerned changes in women’s participation in the labour market and the discourses concerning the social roles they were expected to assume. Interpreted from this perspective, the post-Stalinist backlash was an element of a new strategy designed to legitimize the power of the communist leadership. Restoring the traditional gender order, where women were associated with the private sphere, family and household was a way of demonstrating the national and traditional nature of the authorities. As a result of this backlash, the situation of Polish women was defined by the ambiguous co-existence of emancipation and traditionalism.