Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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art, albeit in forms traditionally accepted as female, or seek learning and new experiences in their new immigrant reality. Krawczyk identifies the economic control exerted on women by the traditional family structure, where the housewife’s work is not valued equally with the work of a husband outside the home, as the main cause of the women’s subjugation and inequality. But she offers a glimmer of hope for the future when the new generation enters into more equal relationships, with both partners empowered economically, like Antek and Edith Kowalek in “No Man Alone.”
Monica Krawczyk consciously chose the role of a writer who normalized her ethnic subjects for the mainstream readers of American popular magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. She, like other ethnic writers of her time discussed by Cyrus R. K. Patell in a study on emergent US literatures, understood that she was “writing from the margins,”53 yet she strove to enrich the center of US culture by adding her ethnic voice. Krawczyk subtly embedded many radical and progressive ideas in her narratives as she wrote to reveal a process of double othering by which Polish American women were defined and excluded both by the American mainstream and by Polish patriarchy. She advocated strongly for women to engage in pushing back at the restrictive forces. To that purpose, she imparted to her female characters an awareness of the economic, social, and familial barriers they encountered at the intersection of social class, ethnicity, and gender that impacted their self-actualization. She led them through countless acts of rebellion and assertiveness: learning and buying books against the wishes of their husbands, finishing their quilts instead of doing housework, refusing marital sex, or finding lawyers to fight abusive husbands. And even if her women had to capitulate under economic pressure and continue in the domestic subservience of wives and mothers, they did so with the self-respect they had gained from their subversive activities. Overall, Krawczyk’s celebration of resilient immigrant women can be classified as gently liberatory.
Krawczyk’s stories not only assert that the immigrant women construct ethnicity by combining old Polish traditions with new American ways, but also that they are the engines of success for their families in America. They read and understand the new environment better than their men, are more flexible in constructing their ethnic lives, and are able to find a balance between assimilatory moves that allow the family to succeed within the American mainstream and maintaining connections to the Polish past, which is represented as providing a healthy rootedness for the entire family. They write Polishness into the new American identity of their families and, even more so than male immigrants, build Polish American communities.
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At Midcentury
Polish Americans Writing Their Identity
MONICA KRAWCZYK’S COMMITMENT TO the empowerment of women was not limited to her fiction. She devoted herself to many Polish American causes, especially those that supported education and artistic expression. She was one of the charter members of the Polanie Club of Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, founded by a small group of women in 1927 “to preserve and promote Polish culture.”1 From its inception, the club, under the influence of Krawczyk, became involved in publishing, especially as she “recognized the dearth of creative writing about the Polish people and their richly emotional and historical ancestry.”2 Even after her death, her ideas were preserved through the club’s activities.
In 1964, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Krawczyk’s death, the Polanie Club published a collection, Prize Winning Stories: Monica Krawczyk Short Story Contests 1960 and 1963, which included original texts by twenty-nine contestants and a reprint of “No Man Alone,” the best-known story by Monica Krawczyk, the contest’s spiritual patron. The nationwide contest was the brainchild of Marie Sokolowski, at the time the president of the club, who considered it a fitting tribute to Krawczyk’s literary legacy and her lifelong dedication to promoting creative writing among both Polish immigrants and Polish Americans.3 Polanie’s fiction competitions continued the endeavors of other Polish American women’s organizations, such as the Polish Women’s Alliance, which sponsored essay contests in the early 1900s.4 They also fit well within a common trend in the mid-twentieth century when many magazines, for example Mademoiselle, organized “annual short fiction contests for female college students [that] launched the writing careers of such authors as Joan Williams and Sylvia Plath.”5 Even though Polanie’s competition did not render such spectacular success, it promoted new ethnic fiction that reflected the interests and concerns of Polish immigrants and ethnics at the threshold of the American cultural revolution. The resulting publication underscored the modeling purpose of the volume as its editors expressed hope that many other fledgling writers would find inspiration there and emulate the example of Krawczyk herself. A biographical sketch characterized Krawczyk as a woman who “not only fulfilled her housewifely obligations, but . . . also worked at various times as social worker and teacher. . . . Most of all, Monica Krawczyk worked at inspiring people to stretch and reach for the ‘sparks’ that come from their imagination.”6
The stories recognized in both the 1960 and 1963 contests document and respond to the changes in the patterns of ethnicity in postwar America as well as consider what impact the influx of World War II émigrés had on Polish American communities. While in all of Krawczyk’s fiction, firmly rooted in American reality, gender identity is constructed at the intersection of working-class values (both urban and rural), heterosexuality, Roman Catholicism, and (still ambiguous) race, the writers from the new generation position themselves at quite a different intersection. Their Polish American characters have already achieved social success and assimilated seamlessly into the American middle-class, thus shedding their ethno-racial ambiguity and becoming fully white. As Eric Schocket argues in his study of class in American literature, whiteness becomes a characteristic attached to the advancement of characters from working to middle class.7 This process of whitening of European ethnics and immigrants is accompanied, at the time, with the marginalization of ethnic cultures and expressions of ethnicity.8
Some of the fledgling prize-winning authors included in the collection turn their gaze back to the original homeland and the trauma of World War II. Such historical settings allow female writers to challenge the strong ideological push to confine American women again within the domestic sphere and curb their freedom to pursue jobs and careers they enjoyed during the war years while men were fighting. As Tracy Floreani contends, during the 1950s, due to Cold War fears, anti-communist propaganda, and the rise of consumerism, gender roles became “a romanticized throwback to Victorian ideals of the public and domestic spheres.”9 Likewise, in her study of women’s magazines published during the 1940s and 1950s, Nancy A. Walker notes that the postwar reshaping of American values10 brought a renewed focus on domesticity, while unprecedented economic prosperity fueled a strong consumer culture. Glenda Riley posits that many women “swallowed postwar propaganda declaring it was their patriotic duty to bear children.”11 Many of the depictions of Polish ethnic and immigrant characters in the prize-winning stories clearly grow out of the increasing tension between the dominant American ideology of domesticity and women’s dissatisfaction with their prescribed roles. Their problem remains nameless—they predate by a couple of years Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)—but in many ways their perceived lack of fulfillment brings these ethnic characters very close to Friedan’s discussion of white, middle-class, college-educated women. This suggests not only that at midcentury Polish American women writers were well assimilated, or at least acculturated, into the mainstream, but also that their fiction entered into the American discussion on gender roles. This discussion was advanced by cultural events and by the 1952 US publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Alfred C. Kinsey’s study published in 1953 as Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, and numerous articles appearing at the time in popular women’s magazines.12
Cover of Prize Winning Stories: Monica Krawczyk Short Story Contests 1960 and 1963 (1964)
The collection of prize-winning stories offers a unique insight into construction of gendered ethnicity at midcentury. Out of the roster of