An unambiguous legacy. Women and Solidarity

Polish woman holds a sign the reads "Solidarity is female" Photo: Pamelapalmaz (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

At the ASEEES conference and on various social media forums since the Women’s Strike began on October 22nd, colleagues who lived during, participated in, and/or studied the Solidarity movement were comparing the current day mass mobilisation’s similarities and disparities to Solidarity. For me the differences were more pronounced than the commonalities, which I will discuss further on. Suffice to say at the outset that although Solidarity aspired to be democratic, it was not, which is evident in its treatment of and policies regarding women.

Time of loss?

While some believe that Solidarity abandoned women in 1989 when the new democratic parliament proposed to curtail abortion, others assert that Solidarity had forsaken women from its inception in 1980. The feminist ferment animating Polish society this past autumn 2020 impelled me to discuss these revolutionary events and their origins, not through the lens of Solidarity, but rather, to write about Solidarity and its aftermath through the lens of this watershed moment in Polish and feminist history, which came into existence partly in spite of Solidarity’s legacy.

During the 1980s, I witnessed the momentous events in Poland from afar and worked with human rights groups to lend support to pro-democracy activists. By 1988, I prepared for my first research visit to Poland to examine Solidarity’s gender dynamics. I was struck by the seeming lack of a feminist consciousness in Solidarity as well as in the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian dissident movements, which I also studied. What stood out was that Solidarity was a democratic movement that did not advocate gender equality. Hungarian and Czechoslovak opposition groups also did not espouse gender equality, but they were not mass-based workers movements, as was Solidarity, with intellectual advisors, many of whom espoused leftist leanings. How did the provocative contradiction within Solidarity’s stated democratic principles impact the movement’s life and afterlife, as well as women’s lives?

I would like to reflect briefly on those impacts, taking my lead from the work of historian Joan Kelly, who wrote an essay in 1977, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in which she argued that for women what we call the Renaissance was a time of loss. As the bourgeois family came into being, women lost property privileges and became themselves private property. Her point was that if you look at what she called “Women’s Time,” you would have to re-periodise much if not all of history. This aspect is common to marginalised groups – African Americans in the US, Jews in Europe, like women, often do not share the same experiential ebbs and flows with the dominant groups in society. In Solidarity history, the key seminal events are routinely considered to be the August 1980 strikes and the 1989 political changeover; in these events, men take centre stage. However, Polish women’s testimonies reveal that the most meaningful period for women starts with the imposition of martial law in 1981 through 1988. This is when women were able to act with more personal and political agency than before or afterward.

Poland’s Communist Party claimed to be both the workers’ party and the party that liberated women. Solidarity co-opted socialist rhetoric to assert itself as the authentic workers’ movement. In crucial ways, argues David Ost, Solidarity was a leftist democratic movement and an independent trade union movement. It might logically follow that Solidarity would also expose the hypocrisy in the state’s claims to female emancipation by similarly strategizing to empower women as citizens and workers and ensure gender equality in all facets of public and private life. 

However, Solidarity’s intellectually progressive bent was undercut by traditional and religious norms that cast women as secondary wage earners, whose primary domain was the household, not the workplace, whose primary identity was Matka Polka (Polish Mother), not citizen. The literary scholar Izabela Morska was the first to point my gaze past socialist theory and state socialist praxis towards the patriarchal substructure of Polish society that predetermined Solidarity’s gender dynamics, which, during much of the 1980s, neither men nor women challenged.

Solidarity’s patriarchism was informed by Catholic-embedded, romantic constructions of the Polish nation and further shaped by the central institutional role of the Catholic church and Pope John Paul II in anti-communist opposition. Catholic symbolism became an integral part of Solidarity’s iconography and ritual, from the strikes through martial law: strikers kneeling in prayer, graffiti of the Black Madonna waving a “V” for Victory sign. Solidarity also became structurally intertwined with the church, a relationship that strengthened during martial law and far beyond. Catholic notions of good and evil gave the opposition’s struggle a binary typology of “us vs them”, which was critical to sustaining unity, but obscured discourse on gender, ethnicity and class. According to scholars, the typology pitted “a unitarily conceived state against an equally undifferentiated society, which left little space conceptually or organisationally for a gender consciousness or voice”.  

Was Solidarity democratic?

In the transition from the luminous liminal bonding experienced by all in the August 1980 strikes, to union organisation and decision-making structures, Solidarity put in place policy precedents that constrained women’s rights. Through a gender lens, Solidarity’s leadership organising structure and policy platform were not democratic. Women comprised half of the labour force and half of Solidarity’s membership, yet they were distinctly underrepresented in leadership entities: eight per cent of delegates to the National Commission were female union officials; on the National Commission’s decision-making bodies, 1 of 19 members on the Conciliation Commission was female. One of 82 on the National Commission, and 3 of 21 on the Auditing Commission.    

Solidarity bequeathed to women an ambiguous democratic legacy.  In the Gdańsk Accords, postulate number 17 addressed the needs of working mothers, through family and maternal protection policies. Yet, it neglected the realities of working women who did not have children or who were not living for their families alone. Scholars assert that the Accords shifted the emphasis from the socialist ideal of labour participation to the patriarchal ideal of women’s family role. This framing served as a precursor of what was to come after 1989, which began with assaults on reproductive rights and media campaigns pressing women to turn their jobs over to men and go back to the home.   

In research on women’s hidden leadership role in the Solidarity underground during martial law, I focused on a group of women editors who published the most important newsweekly of the underground, that became the voice of Solidarity. These women helped engineer what British historian Timothy Garton Ash aptly called a tele-revolution. The women acted in the shadows, so they would not get caught. Their political agency in response to martial law illustrates Women’s Time. In the absence of men, who were imprisoned or in hiding, martial law empowered women to act and lead. However, their extraordinary organising remained invisible, even after there was no longer a need for secrecy. During and after Solidarity’s victory in 1989, they were not duly recognised, in part due to gender discrimination, and partly due to an absence of collective reckoning.

No ritual or moral closure

As sociologists Jan Kubik and Ireneusz Krzeminski have each argued, Poland needed a national ceremonial rite of passage from communism to post-communism. Its absence has had serious consequences for public life. Instead of a cathartic reckoning, the end of the old order and the beginning of the new were marked by two traumatic events for both women and men: capitalism’s undoing of labour, unions, state-owned factories and shipyards, which David Ost examines, and the parliament’s legislative effort to restrict abortion. Warsaw activist Agnieszka Maciejowska told me in 1990: “It will be harder to restrain the Catholic Church than it was to overthrow Communism.”  

You may recall that at the time of the changeover, the international media examined whether women would lose the rights and benefits that communism had provided. The media asked: “What costs do women pay, and what costs does a society pay when gender justice is not fundamental to the building and safeguarding of democracy?” The question is still not resolved, but it is certainly on the table today!

Between 1989 and 2016, feminism grew increasingly visible, vocal and influential within each new generation, through gender studies programs, NGOs, leftist happenings, coalition building, and the liberal Women’s Congress. The crux of feminist critique has consistently targeted the separation of church and state.

Between 2016 and 2018, women demonstrated nationwide to stop the government’s newest legislative restrictions on abortion, already one of the strictest abortion laws in the European Union. The new proposed law would cause a near total ban on abortion, The Black Protest, Women’s Strike and Black Monday exceeded expectations: the government withdrew the legislation. “2016 will go down in history as the birth of the mass women’s movement in Poland,” declared Warsaw feminist scholar and activist Agnieszka Graff. The late Ann Snitow saw in this unprecedented rise of a grassroots feminism in Poland, a celebratory moment in Women’s Time. She called it “the defeat of shame”. Clearly, there is no evidence of shame in the recent, unabashedly feminist dissent.

There are certainly connections to be explored between the Solidarity past and the feminist present, particularly in gaining insight into Poland’s future: we can observe two nationwide mass mobilisations of historic proportion; the exultant sense of communitas, of power and possibility; a passionate activism dominated by young people who have had enough; a red lightning bolt to the power structure that marks the beginning of its end. At the same time, today’s women demonstrations might also represent a repudiation of Solidarity’s inability to dignify women’s citizenship or to prevent religion from dominating democratic governance. As the pioneering feminist historian Joan Scott wrote in the 1970s: “The point of looking to the past is to destabilise the present, to challenge patriarchal ways of thinking that legitimated themselves as natural.”

One thing seems clear: Women can no longer be marginalised; they’re now central to democratic activism in Poland. “The real stake is our perception of ourselves as a society … The protests will probably expire soon, PiS will do what it wants about abortion, but the cultural change will be irreversible,” Graff wrote in OKO Press last November. It is a civilisational change, underscored Olga Tokarczuk, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in the New Yorker. “Yes, it is revolution. In a very painful and dramatic (sometimes also funny) way, the old world is melting now and a new one is crystallising.”

 Shana Penn is the executive director of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture. In 2013 she was awarded Poland’s Commander Cross of the Order of Merit for her contribution to the development of Polish-Jewish dialogue and Polish gender studies. She is the author of Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland.

Poland, Solidarity, Women's rights