Modernism: The Creation of Nation-States

Maria Dulębianka: The political stance of woman

MARIA DULĘBIANKA: THE POLITICAL STANCE OF WOMAN Title: Polityczne stanowisko kobiety (referat wygłoszony na Zjeździe Kobiet Polskich w Warszawie) (The political stance of woman – paper delivered at the Polish Women’s Assembly in Warsaw) Originally published: presented in 1907, published in Ster 1907, No. 7, 8 Language: Polish The excerpts used are from: Aneta Górnicka-Boratyńska, ed., Chcemy całego życia. Antologia polskich tekstów feministycznych z lat 1870–1939 (Warsaw: Fundacja Res Publica, 1999), pp. 228–245. About the author Maria Dulębianka [1861, Cracow – 1919 Lwów (Ukr. Lviv)]: painter, social worker and women rights activist. She was born into a gentry family in Galicia. Dulębianka studied painting (she was a student of Jan Matejko, the most famous Polish historical painter of the second half of the century). She also campaigned for the admission of women into the Cracow Academy of Arts. At the turn of the century , she became a close friend of Maria Konopnicka, a well-known poet. In 1907, Dulębianka launched a campaign for women’s suffrage in Galicia. During the 1908 elections for the Galician Parliament she fervently campaigned for candidacy on the ticket of the Agrarian Party. Women’s suffrage was introduced only after the reestablishment of the Polish statehood in 1918. In 1914 she supported Józef Piłsudski’s attempts to set up Polish military units within the Austrian army. During the Polish– Ukrainian war in Eastern Galicia (1918–1919) she supported the Polish defenders of Lviv and organized charity work for Polish prisoners of war on the Ukrainian side of the front. In 1919 she became infected with typhus in one of the prisoners’ camps and died from that disease. As many other activists of the Polish women movement, she remained forgotten till the new wave of feminism in the 1990s started to search for native traditions. Main works: Katalog wystawy zbiorowej dzieł śp. Marii Dulębianki [The catalogue to the exhibition of works by the late Maria Dulębianka] (1919). 132 SELF-DETERMINATION, DEMOCRATIZATION, AND THE HOMOGENIZING STATE Context The situation of women became an issue of public debate for the first time during the 1863–1864 uprising. The suppression of the uprising, followed by large scale Russian reprisals, caused the social degradation of the small gentry as well as a noticeable decline in the middle-class male population (due to death during the uprising, migration, or exile to distant Asiatic provinces of the Russian Empire). The new conditions forced at least a partial reformulation of the social status of women. Many of them were now forced to work and to penetrate new social domains. From the 1860s on, there emerged several journals which were for, and more importantly edited by women. This activity was also supported by acknowledged ‘national’ women-writers such as Eliza Orzeszkowa and Maria Konopnicka. Their place within the intellectual elite and their contribution to the discourse of modernization was acknowledged . Yet, they did not formulate any agenda concerning the specific place of women in Polish society. The Polish women’s movement underwent serious changes in the last decades of the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth centuries. Women played an important role in the generation that followed the ‘positivists’ (see Aleksander Świętochowski, Political directives). They constituted an important part of the student population at the illegal Polish university (one of them being Maria Skłodowska, later Marie Curie), and also fought for women’s right to admission in Galician universities. In the late nineteenth century, female Polish students (along with their Russian counterparts) gained a considerable presence in Western European universities which had begun to admit female students. Women activists at home appealed for the opening of all types of higher and technical education to women, which would allow them to secure their future. Unofficial feminist groups of various political colors were formed, vividly discussing the social and national role of women. The question raised (also pointed out by Maria Dulębianka in her quoted speech) was the place of the women’s question within the Polish national program. However, from the 1860s to the 1880s, the Polish women’s movement did not problematize the question of universal suffrage. As a matter of fact, the issue could not be addressed under the conditions of constant martial law in the Russian partition and under the conservative legal system of Austria. The opportunity to raise the question emerged in the aftermath of the 1905–1907 revolution that...