Women’s Rights Discourses in Early State-Socialist Poland (1944-1956): Forgotten Voices and Ideas

• In Event: Political Thought, Memory, and Biographies from Women’s Intellectual History in East Central Europe

Abstract

While the tradition of women's movements in Poland in the interwar period and after 1989 is well-researched, discourses on women's rights in the era of state socialism are ignored. Although researchers representing the "revisionist turn," such as Magdalena Grabowska and Agnieszka Mrozik, refer to the traditions of the League of Women and introduce the figures of the "architects of the Polish People's Republic" into academic discourse (Mrozik 2023), in the collective memory the policies toward women in the period 1945-1989 are identified with so-called forced emancipation. This is especially true for the 1940s and 1950s when the new regime took its most oppressive forms, but which was also the period of the most radical gender equality policies (Fidelis 2010). The proposed paper aims to recall the gender equality discourses that emerged in Poland during the early socialist period (1944-1956) and present them as part of a modernization project of Polish society. Among the discourse producers were communist activists, but also pre-1939 socialists who introduced the "women's question" into the political realm. This paper focuses on the ideas and political projects they developed as manifestations of women's political thought.

Author

• Katarzyna Maria Stanczak Wislicz, Inst of Literary Research PAS (Poland)