The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Autobiography and Social Rights

Between the World Wars, Polish sociologists gathered thousands of autobiographies by workers, peasants, and other "ordinary" people. The resulting body of "social memoir" can be read as an argument about social rights: authors simultaneously drew on Enlightenment ideas of subjecthood to press for enfranchisement and portrayed the limits of liberal citizenship, insisting on the embodied experience of poverty. While World War II heightened the urgency of life-writing in Poland (e.g. as testimony), however, postwar personal narratives came to be embedded in new, transnational rights discourses, through which they lost traction as arguments about specifically social rights.