Women Writers in Polish Literature, 1945–95: From ‘Equal Rights for Women’ to Feminist Self-Awareness

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century the social position of women, their participation in culture and their literary output, changed faster than in the course of the previous hundred years. The end of the war meant not only liberation from the German occupation but also a radical transformation of all areas of Polish life. The state, which had enjoyed its regained independence between the two world wars after more than a century began a new existence in 1945 within completely different borders. Under the terms of the Yalta Treaty and by the will of the victorious powers (America, Britain and the Soviet Union), its position on the map of Europe was shifted hundreds of kilometres to the geographical west. Politically and culturally, however, it was locked into the eastern zone, against the wishes of the vast majority of Poles, who treated the imposed Soviet dominance as a catastrophe. For culture, and particularly for literature, the split between the population resident in Poland and those who had emigrated (to Britain, France, America and elsewhere) was a particularly painful blow. Only in 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, did the invisible barrier keeping emigré literature out of Poland disappear. With the exception of the Stalinist period (the end of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s), this blockade was never completely impenetrable, but it was sufficient to ensure that the image of contemporary literature accessible to readers in the Polish People’s Republic was impoverished and deformed.