Eight - From “True Believers” to “Cultural Feminists”: Polish Identity and Women's Emancipation in Post-1945 and Post-1989 Poland

Summary

As theoretical tradition and a set of activist practices, feminism in Poland often formulates and reformulates its subjectivity in reference to (and often as a critique of) what is recognized as dominant intellectual, cultural, and social traditions. Similar to other movements around the world—particularly in locations that dealt with impositions of foreign totalitarian powers—in Poland emancipatory struggles are seen as being formed in the broader context of the fight for national independence and against foreign domination. Consequently, issues related to sovereignty and the existence of Polish national identity constituted important points of reference for narratives of women's subjectivity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist historiography in Poland has historically (and sometimes still is) centered on how women fought for independence, freedom, and democracy, and how over the past centuries they have been mobilizing against various hegemonic discourses that have emerged or reemerged during national and global upheavals or transitions. More recently, various approaches to the feminist identity formation process have emerged in response to changes brought about by the systemic transformation of 1989.

As a plural formation feminism developed a number of strategies to work around i national identity, both as a concept and as a set of required criteria of belonging (language, geography, literature). This chapter focuses on the ways in which Polish national identity was tackled by the emancipation struggles after 1945 and explores how the connection between Polishness and emancipation continued to be constructed and deconstructed after 1989. I first examine discursive spaces—such as the women's departments of the Polish Workers Party and Polish United Workers Party, women's press and international organizations—which, after 1945 were major venues where debates, negotiations, and conflicts over women's emancipation, representation, and identity of women’s movement in Poland took place. My aim is to illuminate the constraints faced by political actors able and willing to imagine women free from the bounds of Polish nationalism and political Catholicism and to examine the motivations of those who propagated the vision of emancipation that reached beyond the entanglement with local political forces: patriotism and Catholicism.

The second part of the chapter traces transformations of the Polish emancipation project after 1956 and 1989.