Women's Anniversaries: Snapshots of Polish Feminism since 1989

On June 4, 2009, Poland celebrated the twenty-year mark since the first (partially) free elections in the Soviet bloc, the result of the roundtables where communist and Solidarity leaders negotiated what we now recognize as the beginning of the end of communism in all of East Central Europe. (Some recall this moment as a politically brilliant breakthrough to freedom, others as an unholy coalition between bankrupt socialist managers and neo-liberals.) Though my focus here is Polish women's organizing in these twenty years, for everyone the scale of social and economic reorganization is barely imaginable. Older people, often too busy recasting their lives to reflect on what such massive change means to them, have a fleeting sense of wonder. Those now in college were born in 1989; for them, life under communism is something their parents remember and can barely communicate, drowned out, as past experience is, in the cascade of new opportunities, new things to buy, new calls to urgent self-invention.