Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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were at an additional disadvantage, since, in large numbers, they were illiterate in their own language. In Poland, as late as 1931, “almost every other woman in the age group between 25 and 49 years (41.3 per cent of the total number of women in that age group) . . . could not read and write.”42 This was especially true, as Krystyna Wrochno suggests, among the rural women whose families were the most traditional:
in which all decisions were made by the father, the interest of the farm being the primary consideration. . . . It was the father who made the decision on the son’s education and he did so from the point of view of its costs and usefulness for the farm . . . disregarding the child’s abilities and interests. Girls were, as a rule, not being educated because, apart from the lack of financial means for such education—there prevailed the belief that women were in no need of knowledge.43
Even if elementary education was made compulsory, as was the case in Galicia under the Austrian occupation, the insufficient number of village schools prevented children from obtaining even basic literacy skills. In Russian Poland, many parents refused to send their children, especially girls, to school:
They were motivated not only by a resolve to defend their children (at least girls) from Russification, but also by traditional ways of thinking. They assumed that contact with the authorities, with institutions of public life—in which a Russian schooling might have been of use—were reserved for men; hence girls did not need the same education as boys. Thus, women in Polish lands did not have equal access to general education, and in the Polish kingdom and Galicia even to elementary schools.44
Unfortunately, the meager educational opportunities for the daughters and granddaughters of the stara emigracja persisted in the United States. Helena Znaniecka Lopata reports that even as late as the 1980s “women still received less education than did the men” and that, out of all European immigrant groups, “the gap between men and women was highest for the Poles and the Russians.”45 Thus, patterns of gender-based oppression established in Poland—and clearly linked to a specific socioeconomic class—seem to persist in the new world several generations later.
A cursory overview of historical and sociological research of the latter part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century focusing on the za chlebem immigrant women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their immediate descendants, reveals that most scholars situate these women firmly in the familial private sphere. Thaddeus C. Radzilowski, a historian, drawing from the work completed by both Helen Stankiewicz Zand and Donna Gabaccia, posits that “despite the family’s patriarchal forms, sometimes recast and actually strengthened by the immigration experience, and despite a division of labor, resources, and support that was often unequal and disadvantageous, most Polish immigrant women . . . probably found their identities and most of life’s satisfactions in their families.”46 This assertion notwithstanding, Radzilowski provides a wealth of examples of immigrant women who managed to break the stereotype of a marginalized yet happy and fulfilled wife and mother, including women who sought a life of professional work and power through entering religious orders; women who ran their own boardinghouse businesses; women like my own mother-in-law, who continued working in the New England textile industry even after she was married and had children; women who led strikes in these textile mills or used clubs and rolling pins to fight against the strikebreakers threatening the jobs of their husbands; women who in 1898 created their own national insurance fund, Związek Polek w Ameryce, when the two Polish fraternal organizations refused to admit them as full members;47 and women who believed “that the emancipation, education, and protection of women would strengthen the nation and preserve Polishness.”48
John J. Bukowczyk cautions against ascribing such revolutionary activities of Polish American women to the feminist or even proto-feminist movement without a clear understanding that they have always been firmly rooted in the milieu of “male-dominated families, churches, organizations, and ethnic communities.”49 For Bukowczyk, these male-dominated social structures, be they present in mainstream American culture or Polish American Catholic culture, engaged equally in the “othering” of Polish immigrant and Polish American ethnic women of a specific socioeconomic class, that is, the rural and urban working class. They strengthened the contradictory stereotypes always aimed at controlling women through assaults on their self-esteem or through limiting their opportunities. The message directed at the immigrant women was clear: all their achievements outside the home notwithstanding, their work as “wives, mothers and kinswomen”50 was the only thing that mattered. It is hardly surprising, then, that the only recent book-length monograph devoted in its entirety to a study of Polish American women, The Grasinski Girls by sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans, situates its subjects, five working-class women born during the 1920s and 1930s, in the domestic sphere. Even though these women “constructed their identity mostly in the domestic sphere,” Erdmans concludes that a significant element of their identity is resistance to the limiting forces of patriarchy. As the “sites of resistance,” they chose what they could control: their own families and their minds. They also sought support from other women, since “being around women, they could more easily dismiss a male-centric set of values that devalued them.”51 Their personal resistance did not blind them to the waste of unfulfilled potential, but it did not turn them bitter.
The other distinct waves of Polish immigrants began arriving in the United States as a result of World War II. Znaniecka Lopata separates them into two discrete cohorts: the displaced persons directly affected by the war, who saw themselves as political exiles, and the group of political asylees, separated family members, and temporary economic migrants that arrived after 1965.52 Mary Patrice Erdmans isolates the most recent period of vigorous immigration, the 1980s, when “the Solidarity union and democratic opposition in Poland emerged and the political and economic communist system began to crumble.”53 The newest immigrants included a mixture of political exiles, expelled from Poland for their anti-communist activities, along with a substantial number of people exhausted by the everyday hardships of the failing economy who dreamt of a safe and prosperous life.
The level of education for immigrant women improved dramatically with the arrival in the United States of the émigrés, exiles, and displaced persons who were forced out of Poland because of World War II or the political and economic pressures of the postwar communist system. In general terms, Polish women and girls reaching the United States after World War II had an advantage over the earlier arrivals. Many of them belonged to the Polish intelligentsia, a high socioeconomic class, and were educated in Polish schools during the interwar period. Some young women were university graduates or students before the war, since, as Anna Żarnowska suggests, “Educational aspirations stemming from the needs of everyday life were characteristic of the whole of the intelligentsia, males as well as females.”54 They were, of course, also considered the elite group charged with spreading education to the lower classes,55 and thus they exhibited a strong sense of mission. Even so, they were not free from “a rather strict division of social roles . . . deeply rooted as a principle in Polish consciousness, as a tradition-sanctified model to which all should aspire.”56 More often than not, women were isolated in the private, domestic sphere while men were expected to perform in the public sphere.57 The school curriculum, different for boys and girls, supported such separation.
Women from the next generation of immigrants, the ones brought up and educated in communist Poland, were able to take advantage of equal educational experiences, and even preferential treatment in college admission if they came from the working class, whether rural or urban. The low standard of living in communist Poland, the constant consumer shortages, and the skewed currency exchange rate led, then, to paradoxical situations in which Polish professional women chose to migrate temporarily to the United States to work as domestics in order to purchase middle-class comforts for their families in Poland. On the other hand, the high educational achievement of many Polish women allowed some of them to enter professions upon their immigration and within one generation move into the American middle or upper-middle class. Yet, their high educational and professional achievement notwithstanding, they were not free of the constraints of the patriarchal family model. Krystyna Wrochno writes that as late as 1969, already a quarter of a century into Poland’s communist system,