Polish Feminism

Polish Feminism in an East-West Context

Rosalind Marsh

The aim of this essay is to set the subject of Polish feminism in a wider context by raising some general questions about feminisms and women’s issues in society and culture, particularly as they affect Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. My standards of comparison with feminisms in Poland will be the history and contemporary situation of feminisms in the West and the Russian Federation. 

The Decline of Feminism? Backlash East and West
In the first place, it is now universally acknowledged that feminism is currently experiencing a crisis in the West.  Two particularly famous (or infamous) media contributions to this debate were the Newsweek article “The Failure of Feminism” (Ebeling, 1990) and the Time cover story “Is Feminism Dead?” (1998).   In the twenty-first century discussions still rage on questions such as “Feminism: alive or dead?” (the subject of an interesting panel held at the Bath Literary Festival in the UK in March 2007). 
In the early 1990s Susan Faludi (1993, 12) persuasively argued that there was a powerful anti-feminist backlash in the USA and Britain, orchestrated by the media, popular culture and conservative think-tanks, which “stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women’s positions have actually led to their downfall.” She convincingly demonstrated that the alleged “man shortage” endangering women’s chances of marrying, posited by a widely-publicized Harvard-Yale study of 1986 (Faludi 1993, 21-1, 27-32), and the “infertility epidemic” said to strike professional women who postpone childbearing were largely inventions organized by the male-dominated media (Faludi 1993, 46-52).
The 1990s saw the emergence in the West of the “new feminism” or “third-wave feminism” proposed by such writers as Naomi Wolf (1991; 1993) and Natasha Walter (1999; 2000), which is an attempt to reconcile the aims of second-wave feminism and the aspirations of young Western women. However, much of the negative publicity against feminism in the Western media has remained (Baumgardner and Richards 2000, 87-125), and I would argue that many young women in the West have been colluding in their own oppression, although some young feminists are now fighting back (Coppock, Haydon and Richter 1995; Berger 2006).  Some of the problem may be due to the term “feminism” itself – even in the West many women regard it as associated with such stereotypes as “hairy man-hating lesbians.”  In my view, it would be possible to abandon the “F-word” that has been distorted and denigrated by the media, as long as the political issues that it encompasses remain on the agenda. One of the basic demands of first-wave feminism (equal pay for equal work) has not yet been achieved in the West.
Integrate into introduction? Finland paper. In higher education in the UK and the USA, many courses and departments of women’s studies are either disappearing or have been replaced by “gender studies” programmes which, albeit broader and interesting in themselves, dilute the attention previously given to an analysis of women.  Ironically, though, this negative development for many feminists in the West may actually have helped women academics and students in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, since the terms “gender relations” and “gender studies” have become more acceptable than “feminism” in those societies and are now generally used to describe the academic courses that are developing in the region.
A second important consideration is that the decline of feminism in the West is particularly unfortunate for Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, since it is only fairly recently (and especially since the 1990s) that women in this region have been discovering the ideas of second-wave feminism that emerged in the USA, Britain, and France in the 1960s and 1970s. (One major exception was the emergence in the 1970s of feminist thought in former Yugoslavia, where women were living under a more relaxed communist regime, as well as being closer to the West and more able to travel (Drakulić 1993; Renne 1997, 5; Hawkesworth 2001, xi)).  Many of the classic feminist texts, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième sexe (The Second Sex, 1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) were not translated into Russian until the 1990s (Fridan 1992; Bovuar 1999).   In Poland, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was translated much earlier, in 1972, but Betty Friedan’s liberal feminist work conveying the discontent of the suburban American housewife in the patriarchal socio-political system has not yet been translated. This suggests both that Western feminist ideas could not possibly have exerted much of an impact on Polish women until 1989 (except on those few fluent in foreign languages), and that publishers in Poland may have little sympathy for Friedan’s text, since it contests the commonly accepted view in Poland (by the Polish Church and state) of women’s primary roles as wife and mother. 
Another controversial issue in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been whether there is such a phenomenon as “women’s literature” or “women’s prose,” or whether there is only “good and bad literature” (which, of course, begs the question: who decides what is “good” and “bad”?). In Poland, modern prose fiction written by women appears to have blossomed earlier in the twentieth century than in Russia, and continues to flourish today:  Czermińska (2001) discusses four generations of women prose writers publishing in Poland from the inter-war period to 1995. Although she does not suggest that there is any “tradition” of Polish women’s literature, the sheer number of prominent women writers in Poland must have helped to increase the confidence of successive generations, even if individual writers do not acknowledge any specific female precursors or “role models.”
By contrast, some women writers in Russia, such as Svetlana Vasilenko, who compiled Novye amazonki (The New Amazons, 1991), one of the earliest collections of contemporary women’s writing published after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were obliged to defend the right of “women’s prose” even to exist. Vasilenko has recently admitted that she and her fellow contributors knew nothing about feminism at that time, and were surprised and delighted at the very positive response they received in the West, especially from women’s groups, universities and non-governmental organizations (Vasilenko 2002: 3-6; Azhgikhina – Vasilenko 2003).
In Poland, too, there was no “second wave” of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, but feminist thought and criticism were reintroduced to the country by the literary scholar Maria Janion (b. 1926), who from 1981 to 1988 directed a group of young writers in the publication of five volumes of essays and translations from French feminist thinkers under the general title Transgresje (Transgressions) (Czerminska 2001, 237-8). Yet the most important impetus to the development of feminism in Poland was the collapse of communism, even though, as in other post-socialist countries, feminism was not exactly welcomed after 1989 because of its negative associations with communism, which claimed to have given women equal rights to men. In practice, although Polish women were allowed into the workforce during the communist period, this ended up increasing the burdens placed on them as well as denying civil rights to both men and women. 
Finnish paper? As a result of the distrust of what was presented as “feminism” in post-socialist Poland, the vital distinction between the ideas of “sex” (płeć) and “gender” – the social constructions of sex (plciowosc) – only began to be drawn in the mid-1990s.  It is, however, encouraging that there is a Polish word for this concept, as in Russian there is only the foreign borrowing “gender,” which has provided a pretext for hostile commentators to reject the whole concept. The gender studies specialist Sergei Ushakin, has, somewhat unfairly, argued that the term “gender” is a Western “import” that has no historical past in Russian society, and claimed that its popularity among Russian scholars exemplifies their lack of independence and depth of thought (Ushakin 2002, 16-17). Tampere: add Elena Trofimova, Stockholm paper. There has been some discussion in Russia of the advisability of reintroducing the Russian word “pol” (sex) into public discussions of gender, since some commentators claim that the term has also been used historically to refer to social and cultural, as well as purely physiological aspects of sex (“Doing gender” 2005, 192, 196, 207). Rod is currently considered more acceptable, for understandable reasons.
Any application of concepts from Western feminist and gender theories to help elucidate aspects of Russian culture has been criticized for allegedly imposing a “Western” model on Russian culture. Some Russian gender studies specialists have, however, persuasively countered this argument, stating that the main problem is that most Russians are not sufficiently familiar with contemporary Western concepts of feminism, and that theories in any field automatically need to be, and indeed will be, adapted to national cultural conditions (“Doing gender” 2005, 197).
As the social scientist, publicist and women’s and human rights activist Agnieszka Graff (b. 1970) has argued, feminism has had “a different chronology” in Poland from that in Western countries: “Despite not having had much of a second wave of feminism, we did experience a backlash. In fact, many of us internalized its message before discovering feminism” (Graff 2007, 144). Nevertheless, despite their avowed opposition to what they regard as “feminism,” many women in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia have for a long time expressed (views that can be interpreted, in the words of Sue Bridger (2000, 130) as “I am not a feminist, but…”
A third significant factor is the necessity to recognize the great impact on women of the new social and political circumstances in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The general trend in post-socialist states has been to create a more conservative society for women, allied to the withdrawal of state funding and the resurgence of the Church, whether Catholic or Russian Orthodox. As Halina Filipowicz (2001, 4) has commented, “What emerged from the Quiet Revolution of 1989 in Poland was a highly traditional culture, rooted in religious fundamentalism, nationalist ideology and patriarchal practices.” At the same time, the collapse of communist censorship and Poland’s greater openness to the West enabled some women to become familiar with Western feminist ideas and to challenge established views on gender and sexuality in their country, although this was initially a slow process.  In 1996, Graff claimed that there was still no feminism in Poland, admitting that her own views had been formed during her periods of study in the USA and Britain (Watson 2000, 105). 
In partial contradiction of Graff’s view, the situation had actually begun to change in 1993, as a result of the new Polish government’s decision to reverse the legalization of abortion introduced in the Polish People’s Republic in 1956. The new limitations on abortion have been the most striking example of the backlash against women’s rights in Central and Eastern Europe since the collapse of communism, even though, admittedly, the free or relatively free access to abortion formerly permitted in many countries of the Soviet bloc had often been introduced as a means of compensating for an absence of contraception and adequate public sex education. There were some attempts to liberalize the laws on abortion in Poland in 1996 and subsequent years, but the ban was not overturned (Fuszara 1993; Novicka 1977a, 1977b; Kramer 2007). The only positive side of this extremely negative development for Polish women is that it united previously disparate groups of women around a common cause: “Women have become aware of the need to organize and to be more conscious about their own issues” (Nowicka 1997a, 46).
The enormous influence of the Catholic Church and Christian fundamentalism in Poland has meant that since the 1990s the unique feature of the Polish feminist movement has been its sustained focus on one issue: reproductive freedoms, and, especially, the question of abortion. One major campaign was the “Open Letter” by 100 Polish women to the European Parliament in March 2002 signed by such prominent figures as Wisława Szymborska, and in 2008 there was a new protest by Polish feminists against the attempt by the Ministry of Health to register all pregnant women in the country.
Although it has been suggested that Polish women’s own real attitudes to abortion have been hidden by successive opinion polls that make no reference to gender (Kramer 2007, 67-8), the post-socialist states do not appear to be very interested in finding out women’s opinions, and still less, in meeting their needs, unless they coincide with the perceived strategies of the state. Although Central and Eastern European states have been obliged to comply with legal requirements on welfare and gender equality in order to join the European Union, there is little evidence that these provisions have been fully implemented in practice.
In Poland, as is clear from some literary texts, many women (along with their male contemporaries) continue to be believers first, and citizens second. It is thus hardly surprising that since the collapse of communism many Polish women have been reluctant to challenge the dominant nationalist and religious discourse and the less overt taboos of gender discrimination. Nevertheless, as the contemporary art historian Paweł Leskowicz has argued, if writers, artists and activists were more prepared to confront “the problem of sexual difference,” this could have a subversive and even revolutionary potential in Poland (Grimstad and Phillips 2005, 7).
Tampere? What kind of feminism has exerted an impact on Central and Eastern Europe? It is important to refer to “feminisms,” since there is no one interpretation of women’s issues that is universally accepted by feminists, although the Russian and Central European media have often tried to present it as a monolithic “ideology.” Western feminists have sometimes offended women in Central and Eastern Europe by implying that they know “the truth,” or by concentrating on certain issues that have not been particularly important to women in the region (such as pornography, or the cultural diversities between feminists of different generations or ethnicities), as opposed to the survival strategies and reproductive rights that are closer to the experience of women in the post-socialist countries.  
In Russia, very few women are prepared to call themselves “feminists” in a liberal, Western sense.  Moreover, those few have been subjected to considerable criticism for allegedly being primarily interested in obtaining money from the West, or more concerned with self-promotion than with the problems of other women.  This is often said, for example, of Mariia Arbatova, almost the only Russian author who has since the late 1990s described herself as a “feminist writer” (“pisatel’nitsa-feministka”) (Gessen 1998).

The Development of Independent Feminism in Post-Socialist Poland
In contemporary Poland a considerable variety of Polish feminist thought and literature has emerged. Against significant opposition from the media and the patriarchal political and social system, several centres of gender studies have been established in Polish universities, and there are also numerous feminist discussion groups, workshops, magazines and organizations, notably the officially registered Polish Feminist Association, one of the few organizations in Central and Eastern Europe prepared to use the term “feminist” (Hauser, Heyns and Mansbridge 1993).   However, as Ewa Gontarczyk-Wesola (1997, 65) has argued, in Poland “there are still many obstacles to the development of feminist scholarship.”
As far as literature is concerned, women writers in Poland have long been under-represented, marginalized or ignored by male critics, as they have been in Russia and other Central and Eastern European cultures. Sometimes a woman writer has to be “blessed” by a prominent male writer before she is taken seriously, as occurred with the drama and poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska (1909-84) which was praised by the 1980 Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz (Grossman 2003, 88), who translated two volumes of her poetry (Świrszczyńska, 1985; 1996). It is, however, to be hoped that this is changing since the poet Wisława Szymborska (b. 1923) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, although she is an intellectual, predominantly philosophical poet (Czerminska 227-8), and it is a contested issue whether her work can be called “feminist” (Ostrowski forthcoming).
Some new and interesting contemporary prose writers and dramatists have also emerged in Poland (Czermińska 2001; Grossman 2005). One is the prose writer Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962), who, unusually, is both a “serious” and a popular author, a trained psychologist and devotee of Jung, who published the outstanding novels E.E. (1995) and Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (House of Day, House of Night, 1998). Tokarczukhas openly acknowledged the feminist stance in her fiction and even claimed that any wise woman would have to be a feminist. However, it depends what is meant by the term “feminist.” A chapter from her novel E.E. (translated in Tokarczuk 2006), set in Wrocław at the beginning of the twentieth century when Freud’s fame was spreading from Vienna, evokes the physical and emotional experiences of Erna Eltzner (hence E.E.), a young girl being treated for a psychiatric illness, who starts her menstrual cycle (with all the humiliation and discomfort that this entailed at that time), then discovers masturbation and orgasm. The chapter ends with the girl’s joyful union with nature, as she covers herself with leaves:
She withdrew her hands and started to tear off the overhanging leaves. Crushing them in her hands, she put them between her legs like a compress in place of those belts, loops and pads. She was overwhelmed by the suffocating scent of living plants, which touched her body both delicately and brutally, caressing her and pressing themselves against her (Tokarczuk 2006, 168).

This scene resonates with contemporary ecofeminist and ecocritical theories about women’s self-discovery through the natural world (Rosenholm forthcoming). As Estella Lauder has stated, the myth of nature may be empowering for female authors who suggest that “nature remains female but becomes equal to the human” (Lauter 1984, x). Tokarczuk’s chapter can be regarded as “woman-centred” (Eagleton 1990, 45) in a similar way to Russian autobiographical or semi-autobiographical texts published in the 1990s, especially those that analyse the self and the formation of identity through the eyes of a child, such as the story by the Russian Armenian writer and feminist scholar Nina Gabrielian, “Lilovyi khalat” (“The Lilac Dressing Gown,” 1996).
Tokarczuk’s House of Day: House of Night, set in a village in the extreme south-western part of Poland, on the Polish–Czech border where the author lives,does not criticize patriarchy openly, but has been aptly characterized as “gently feminist” (Inga Iwasiów, cited in Ostrowski forthcoming). Tokarczuk is primarily interested in exploring dreams and the subconscious as a means of escaping from reality, and the search for truth in the areas of myth and magic, which may engender female archetypes. This text (like some recent women’s writings in Russia) may, perhaps, be more fruitfully analysed using French feminist concepts emphasizing the specificity of women’s experience and women’s differences from men (Gatens 1991, 100-21), rather than through certain Anglophone varieties of feminist literary theory that focus on equality and liberation from patriarchy. As Gabrielian (1996, 41-2) has said about Russia, some contemporary women writers have tried to “break away from the situation where woman sees herself through the eyes of man, not through her own eyes, to stop copying male writing, and begin to realize in her own work those features which have been encoded in the patriarchal culture as feminine.” This also recalls the statement in “Women’s Time,” the famous article by Julia Kristeva (1989, 199-200), that second-wave feminists in Europe aspired to create a language for physical and emotional experiences that had been suppressed by the previous culture, and demanded the recognition of a specificity which did not go back to the “Other.”

The Feminist Legacy in Poland
Another significant feature of contemporary Polish culture is that women writers and scholars have been eagerly rediscovering their own feminine or feminist traditions, referring in their works to famous female historical or literary characters or to mythological figures. One example is Olga Tokarczuk’s discovery of a medieval story from lower Silesia about the androgynous Saint Kummernis, a woman whom God saved from an unwanted marriage by giving her a male face, which she skilfully retells in House of Day, House of Night to explore the fluidity of gender identities.   
Tampere Until very recently, the history of women’s movements in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe in general had not been extensively researched or published only in local languages, thus making it unavailable to international scholars (including myself). Important exceptions to this are Russia and Ukraine, as Western historians and literary scholars had begun to study women’s movements and feminisms in these countries since the late 1970s (Stites 1978; Edmondson 1984). However, some recent studies by Polish women scholars have shown that since the nineteenth century, in Poland, as in many other countries of the region, a small, but unprecedented number of women have protested against discrimination, campaigned for women’s education, and become active in fields previously confined entirely to men. The recently published Biographical Dictionary (de Haan, Daskalova, and Loutfi 2005) has made a particularly significant contribution to our knowledge of women’s movements and feminisms in Central and Eastern Europe. Through biographical studies of more than 150 women and men who participated in women’s movements and feminisms in 22 countries, it has challenged the notion that there was no feminism in this part of Europe – a  widespread view espoused not only by the general public in the West, but also by prominent historians such as Eric Hobsbawm (1989, 193).
The absence of reliable information in the past may have led to another widely held misconception that feminism in the region was “imported” from the West.
However, this false impression may also be the fault of some Western feminists, who have conveyed this view with a sense of their own superiority and an unshakeable belief that they had the right to impose their opinions on others in an imperialist manner.
It is also noteworthy that feminism came earlier to Poland than to Russia – the “first wave” of Polish feminism dates back to the period 1800-1830. The writer and publicist Narcyza Żmichowska (1819-1876), who was involved with a group of women known as the Enthusiasts (“Entuzjastki”) in the 1840s, has been called the first Polish feminist.  By the 1870s the women’s movement in Poland had grown quite strong, and from the 1890s some Polish feminists succeeded in establishing links with the international women’s movement. However, as in Russia, at the turn of the century the Polish movement split into two factions, a liberal and a more radical group. The First Congress of Polish Women was held in 1905, three years before the first one in Russia – and, by contrast to Russia, subsequent congresses were held in 1907, 1917 and 1938, as the movement for women’s rights continued under the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939). During the interwar period until the end of the Second World War, at a time when the “woman question” had allegedly been “resolved” in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the writer and publicist Irena Krzywicka (1899-1994) continued her active defence of women’s rights and can be seen as a radical precursor of contemporary Polish feminism.
Tampere Thus, contrary to media stereotypes, feminist and women’s movements in Poland long predate the communist period, even though, as in Russia and Ukraine (Marsh 1996a, 4-5, 14-17), women activists in Poland have sometimes been persuaded to subordinate their struggle for women’s rights to issues of independence or nationalism (perhaps mistakenly, as it subsequently turned out, as in the case of the female division of “Solidarity”).  Further investigation of the history of feminisms in Poland and Central Europe in general may help to increase tolerance of modern-day feminisms in this region, countering the misconception that feminist ideas are nothing but an alien intrusion from the West bearing no relation to the history or contemporary socio-political reality of these countries.

Conclusion: Polish Feminisms in the Twenty-First Century
Polish feminist theory and practice continue to develop in the twenty-first century. In 2007, a new feminist political party emerged, the Polish Women’s Party; and recent feminist books published in Poland include those by Agnieszka Graff, Świat bez kobiet (World without Women, 2001) and Rykoszetem. Recz o płci, seksualnosć i narodzie (Ricochet. On gender, sexuality and nation, 2008), which frankly expose discrimination against women in Poland. The literary historian, critic and television personality Kazimiera Szczuka (b. 1966) has published the controversial book Milczenie owieczek (Silence of the Flock, 2004) which passionately defends the right to abortion and adopts certain feminist positions that are more radical than those adopted by most Russian feminist scholars.
 The presence of feminisms in contemporary Poland seems surprisingly strong both in politics and in culture, considering the anti-feminist views still prevalent in society and the media. Some commentators would even claim that Polish feminists have “the most vibrant women’s movement in the region” (Graff 2007, 142).  When I began to work on this subject my initial impression was that the pre-feminist ideas prevalent in the media in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR bore an uncomfortable resemblance to current “post-feminist” views in the Western media. However, it now seems more important to emphasize that the feminist movement in Poland, which is concerned with countering the widespread notion of the failure of feminism and the media construct of “post-feminism,” could be very topical and relevant to other countries too, since, as Graff suggests, it presents a “peculiar mixture of second wave feminist goals and third wave feminist themes and tactics” (Graff 2007, 143).   The new wave of feminism in Poland may thus have much to teach disillusioned feminists and “post-feminists” in the West.
Whatever types of women’s movement and feminist theory become dominant in Poland, it is most probable that they will not be a mere import from the West or a reproduction of Soviet-style equality, but will be based on Poland’s own national traditions – a kind of “third way.” Unlike many feminist scholars in the West, Polish feminists may choose to play a part in building an active women’s movement capable of opposing the patriarchal policies of Church and state, rather than merely concentrating on the theoretical, depoliticized, cultural aspects of feminism. Despite feminism’s current loss of fashion in the West and the continuing “backlash” in much of Central and Eastern Europe, it is vital to continue the struggle for women’s rights, not only in Poland but in all parts of the world, since, at the most fundamental level, as Rebecca West (1983, 219) sardonically commented in 1913: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

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