The Feminization of Culture: Polish Women’s Literature, 1900–45

Abstract

The generation of women writers born in the 1880s and who made their debut in the first decade of this century executed, especially in the early period of their creativity, a process of feminizing culture. By ‘feminizing’ I understand the ‘superimposing’ on neutral cultural phenomena of sexual interpretations, for example the opposition between female and male, violence and virginity, apathy and inspiration. Feminization manifested itself in two versions: a weak and a strong version. An expression of ‘weak’ feminization was the privatization of national or social conflicts, such as the treatment of the revolution of 1905 in Nalkowska’s novel Ksiaze (The Prince, 1907). ‘Strong’ feminization consisted in demonstrating that the worlds of biology and of culture were not separated by any fundamental dividing line, but that all biological phenomena were translatable into the language of culture (albeit at the price of infringing certain taboos), and that a biological motivation might be ascribed to many cultural behavioural patterns.