Wojciech Jaruzelski had sent Eugeniusz Molczyk to confer with Vice President George H. W. Bush and Bush had agreed with Molczyk that martial law was the lesser of two evils. Whether this meeting with the American vice president occurred is disputed. While it is erroneously cited, Harvard historian Mark Kramer has pointed out that no documents support Jaruzelski's claim. Jaruzelski was chiefly responsible for the imposition of martial law in Poland on 13 December 1981 in an attempt to crush the pro-democracy movements, which included Solidarity, the first non-Communist trade union in Warsaw Pact history. Subsequent years saw his government and its
Marital power in 1805. The spread of the Roman-Dutch law introduced the marital power doctrine so that it eventually formed part of the law of marriage in South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana and Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known). Of the Southern African countries that apply Roman-Dutch law, every one except Swaziland has abolished the marital power. In Southern Rhodesia the marital power was abolished in 1928 by the Married Persons' Property Act, which also abolished community of property. In France, marital power ("puissance maritale") was abolished in 1938. However, the legal repeal of the specific doctrine of "marital power"