ABSTRACT
In a documentary film about Solidarnosc According to Women, by Marta Dzido and Piotr Sliwowski, a young female director wanders around the spectral remains of the Gdansk shipyards, in an attempt to challenge the collective amnesia and recover the faces and voices of women who were part of Solidarity. The film about Solidarnosc According to Women shows how the role of small groups of humanist outliers in the revolution of dignity was impossible without one pivotal, and yet occluded, taskforce. The feminist studies shed only partial light on Polish women’s insouciance about fame and recognition. In his Indomitable Pedigrees – a classic of oppositional humanism in Poland – Bohdan Cywinski talks about the emergence of a unique humanist Bildung in 19th-century Poland, one whose bearers were mostly women. As mostly altruistic mentors rather than fighters, Polish women activists were imaginative co-workers and co-creators of Solidarnosc.
