Abstract
In 1962 a young female worker from a textile factory in southern Poland wrote an autobiography for a memoir contest organized by a popular magazine, Nowa Wieś (New Village), directed at village youth. In her essay, titled “I Dream of Paris,” she described her migration from the countryside to the city, her discovery of urban ways of life, and her fascination with foreign travel. She admitted that foreign travel was more important to her than getting married and starting a family. “Some people scorn me for this,” she complained. “They want me to stay at home. They think that a woman is only a household manager; that she should take care of pots, cooking, laundry, darning, and other chores. But I have a different opinion—after all, we fought for equal rights!”1 Another woman in her essay, “From a Mountain Village to Nowa Huta,” submitted for a similar contest at the end of the decade, described her discovery of the fashion and beauty industry after relocating to a new socialist steel plant in Nowa Huta: “I began to take care more and more of my looks,” she wrote. “First of all, I changed my hairstyle. I became interested in fashion and bought fashion magazines … I diligently followed fashion trends. I started taking better care of my skin, I tried different lotions.”2
Research funds for this chapter were provided by a faculty grant from the Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago. An earlier version was presented at the Seventh European Social Science History Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, February 26–March 1, 2008. I would like to thank conference participants Jill Massino, Shana Penn, Emily Greble Balic´, Irina Gigova, Katherine Lebow, Basia Nowak, Junko Takeda, and the anonymous reviewer of this collection for their valuable feedback. Special thanks go to my research assistant in Poland, Izabela Smaczna.
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Notes
I use the term “communism” to denote the Marxist-Leninist brand of socialism in Eastern Europe and to differentiate it from other types of socialist ideologies. On the double burden see, for example, Tanya Renne, ed., Ana’s Land: Sisterhood in Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO, 1997)
Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East-Central Europe (London, 1993)
Chris Corrin, ed., Superwomen and the Double Burden: Women’s Experience of Change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (London, 1992).
On employment policies and images of female workers in Stalinist Poland see Malgorzata Fidelis, “Equality through Protection: The Politics of Women’s Employment in Postwar Poland, 1945–1957,” Slavic Review 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 301–24.
Eva Plach, The Clash of Moral Nations: Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935 (Athens, OH, 2006).
On consumer policies under Stalinism in the Soviet Union, see David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003).
On endemic shortages of food and consumer goods in Stalinist Poland, see Mariusz Jastrząb, Puste półki. Problem zaopatrzenia ludności w artykuły powszechnego użytku w Polsce w latach 1949–1956 (Warsaw, 2004).
Marcin Zaremba, “Społeczeństwo polskie lat sześćdziesiątych—między ‘mała stabilizacją’ a ‘małą destabilizacją,’” in Oblicza Marca 1968, ed. Konrad Rokicki and Sławomir Stępień (Warsaw, 2004), 24–51, 25. The term “small stabilization” comes from a play by Tadeusz Rożewicz, Witnesses, or Our Small Stabilization [świadkowie, albo nasza mała stabilizacja], published in 1962.
Stanisław Widerszpil, Skład polskiej klasy robotniczej. Tendencje zmian w okresie industrializacji socjalistycznej (Warsaw, 1965), 110.
Andrzej Gawryszewski, Ludność Polski w XX wieku (Warsaw, 2005), 130.
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth- Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005), 336–75.
Leszek Goliński, “Telewizja—partner pierwszej rangi,” Kultura i Społeczeństwo 4 (October–December 1966): 161–70, 161. On the history of Polish TV in the 1960s, see Patryk Pleskot, Wielki mały ekran. Telewizja a codzienność Polaków lat sześćdziesiątych (Warsaw, 2007).
See, for example, the breakthrough book on modern forms of leisure by Antonina Kłoskowska, Kultura masowa (1963; Warsaw, 2006).
Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Komitet Centralny (KC), Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR), Biuro Prasy, “Filipinka,” 237/ XIX/212 Anna Pawłowska,“Dwutygodnik ‘Filipinka,’” November 17, 1964, kk. 1–18, 1. The editor-in-chief of Filipinka in 1957–1969 was Felicja Strumińska, who also edited one of the most popular women’s magazines Kobieta i życie (Woman and Life). Zofia Sokoł, Prasa kobieca w Polsce w latach 1945–1995 (Rzeszow, Poland, 1998), 102.
Iwona Kurz, Twarze w tłumie. Wizerunki bohaterów wyobraźni zbiorowej w kulturze polskiej lat 1955–1969 (Warsaw, 2005), 125.
For personal testimonies see, for example, Tomasz Dominik and Marek Karewicz, Złota Młodzież, Niebieskie Ptaki. Warszawka lat 60 (Warsaw, 2003). For an analysis of images of young women in Polish film, see Kurz, Twarze w tłumie.
For example, in 1969, Polish intellectual Stefan Kisielewski, while visiting a small mountain village of Zawoja in southern Poland, wrote in his dairy about “girls herding cows in miniskirts.” Stefan Kisielewski, Dzienniki, 2nd edition (Warsaw, 1996), 256.
Dariusz Stola, “Fighting against the Shadows: The Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1968,” in Anti-Semitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca, 2005), 284–300.
Andrzej Paczkowski, Pół wieku dziejów Polski (Warsaw, 1995), 366.
Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago, 1994). For a discussion of the modern woman in interwar Poland, see Plach, The Clash of Moral Nations, esp. 146.
Female-dominated strikes in textile factories, in particular, were a regular feature of social protest in Communist Poland. See Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 399–425.
Marcin Zaremba, “Bigosowy socjalizm: dekada Gierka,” in Polacy wobec PRL. Strategie przystosowawcze, ed. Grzegorz Miernik (Kielce, 2003), 184–200.
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Fidelis, M. (2009). Are You a Modern Girl? Consumer Culture and Young Women in 1960s Poland. In: Penn, S., Massino, J. (eds) Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101579_11
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