The State of Research on Polish Women in the Last Two Decades

The State of Research on Polish Women BM the Last Two Decades* Elzbieta Pakszys Assuming that women's studies is any type of research in which the subjed matter is women and womanhood in the context of the humanities and sodal sdences, this paper wül concern the role, place, and pecuUarities of Polish women in culture and sodety. Such a definition is important since, until recently, there was no specific research in Poland known in the western world as "women's studies," i.e. studies concerning women as such, and separate from other social phenomena. Instead, in social sdence Uterature there are many works devoted to women, thereby generaUy demonstrating that women's problems are recognized in this area. However, given the lack of a broad-scale feminist movement in Poland,1 these attempts and results are tentative and constitute quite an early stage in the development of women's studies. I have chosen to evaluate the state of research on women in Poland in the last two decades in the 1970s and 1980s, because of the connection with the changes in the sodo-poUtical system in Poland, there was an important breakdown and radicalization of attitudes towards women's issues. The active feminist movement and the solutions it has offered in western Europe and the United States should have also had an important Unpad upon the growing openness of Polish humanities to ideas worked out in sodo-poUtical systems in foreign countries. In 1980 there was a fundamental breakdown of communist power. This marked an important change in Polish thought. However, until recently this change was only rarely and mdirectly reflected in the Uterature about women.2 Comparing the work done prior to 1980 to that done in the last decade, it appears that the most recent pubücations generaUy negled the very common post-war conviction that Eastern Bloc solutions to women's problems were of unquestionably high value. Thus the obligatory optimism that so often charaderized the older Uterature has undergone serious fracture in the 1980s. The previous complacency towards and ridicule of Western feminist ideas has also disappeared. The study of women's issues in Poland, as in other European countries , originated in Uterary fiction reflecting the cultural role of women in sodety. A few works exist analyzing this Uterature for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 The weak devdopment of Uterature about women mirrors the condition of the struggling suffrage movement in Poland before the First World War. It should be noted that in the period of © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 3 No. 3 (Winter) 1992 International Trends: Pakszys 119 the Polish Partition, the main focus of attention was on the national issue of emandpation for aU of Poland, rather than on women. Qearly then, the Polish patriotic preoccupation blocked other sodal reforms, induding the Uberation of women. After the poUtical sovereignity of Poland was estabUshed after World War One, the Polish RepubUc gave women the fuU franchise.4 This seemed to have solved their most urgent problems. However, the situation of Polish women in the postwar period very rarely underwent any analysis,5 except for the press and fiction. At that time, women were dealing with the crucial economic problems of wage inequaUty between women and men, as weU as with the issue of contraception and abortion. Due to the impad of the CathoUc Church and the tradition of Polish sodety dosely conneded with reUgion, the latter were taboo topics, tackled only by a few writers and journalists.6 Besides tremendous destruction, the Second World War brought dramatic changes in the Polish sodal and poUtical systems. The new communist order and Marxist ideology undoubtedly contained women's sodal and economic emanripatory ideals. The constitutionaUy guaranteed equality of women and men was realized through slogans exhorting women to do the same sort of work as men. But this action took place in post-war Poland, where there were far fewer men because of massive wartime casualties. In the 1940s and espedaUy the 1950s, the mass media promoted an ideal of the "woman-worker," the proverbial tirador driver, wdder, or medÃ-ame. Bdiind the ideal of "the leader of sodaUst labor...