The National Secret

The National Secret Shana Perm In the summer of 1990,1 traveled to Poland to interview women who had been active in SoUdarity.1 I was writing a book about women in the opposition movements of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak RepubUcs. The story that unfolded in Poland surprised me.2 It is not a weU known story. One activist caUed it a "national secret."3 I learned that after martial law was imposed on December 13,1981, women reorganized SoUdarity underground. With thousands of activists imprisoned, induding most of the male leadership, women from Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Lublin created a dandestine network to feed information and move equipment into aU regions of Poland. They pulled together unions and publications; they reestablished connections with the Western press and supporters. They persisted in nonviolent resistance. Above aU, for almost seven and a haU years, from December 1981 to April 1988, they inspired the Poles to keep SoUdarity aUve.4 I endeavored to learn about these women, what motivated them, and why their activism remained invisible. Barbara Labuda was the most outspoken of the SoUdarity women whom I interviewed, and one of the few to successfuUy move into partisan poUtics after the 1989 changeover. In an interview that stretched from early evening to past midnight in June, 1991, she described the roles women performed after martial law was declared. Four women were in charge, she explained.5 Labuda herseU headed the Wroclaw region in southwest Poland with Wladislaw Frasymuk, a national trade union leader and one of the few key men who had escaped arrest. Danuta Winiarska managed the Lublin region in southeastern Poland single-handedly. In Warsaw, the nation's capital, Helena Luczywo and Ewa KuUk, together with Zbigniew Bujak, a trade union leader like Frasyniuk, coordinated the national underground headquarters. Luczywo was a briUiant organizer, I was told.6 Under her direction, six women published a weekly newspaper called Tygodnik Mazowsze (Solidarity Weekly) that served as the voice of SoUdarity. The newspaper's editors were Helena Luczywo, Joanna Szczesna, Anna Dodziuk, Anna Bikont, Zofia Bydlenska, and Malgorzata PawUcka. Only later, in 1985, did men join the editorial staff. Even then, Tygodnik Mazowsze was considered a women-run newspaper. Tygodnik Mazowsze boasted the largest circulation in the illegal press of the martial law period, with a weekly print run of 40,000-80,000 copies.7 Typewriters, pubUc telephones, hand-deUvered messages, and private © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol 5 No. 3 (Winter)_________________ 56 Journal of Women's History Winter apartments replaced computers, office telephones, telexes, and office space, most of which had been confiscated by poUce. Tygodnik Mazowsze's editors switched apartments every two to four weeks to insure their safety. In order to produce and distribute the newspaper and extend links to other parts of the country, the Warsaw group organized approximately two hundred volunteers, mostly women, ranging in age from fourteen to eighty years old as typists, printers, couriers, and distributors, while others offered their homes to activists in need of hideouts.8 Women hid materials in their clothing and on their belUes, creating what they called their "artifidal pregnandes."9 They also hid equipment and newspaper copies in washing machines and laundry chutes, under their chüdren's beds and in refrigerators—in other words, wherever they thought poUce would not search.10 Before meeting these women in Poland, I had thought my book would explore women in the labor force and in the famüy from a Western feminist perspective, with an emphasis on women active in opposition movements. I had read Timothy Garton Ash, Lawrence Weschler, Neal Ascherson, David Ost, and other authors' accounts of SoUdarity and knew of no instance where women had taken the lead in the Polish opposition.11 According to what I had read and seen in news photographs, SoUdarity's leaders were men: Adam Michnik, Lech Walesa, Bronislaw Geremek, Zbigniew Bujak, to name a few. In an afterword to Konspira, a coUection of interviews with SoUdarity men about their underground activity, U.S. journalist Lawrence Weschler compared these revolutionaries to our Founding Fathers in the U.S., "In the same eerie way that a far...