ABSTRACT
The quotation in the title was used as a graffito placed on the fence of the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk on the commencement of the workers’ strike in August 1980, which led to the launching of the trade union Solidarność (Solidarity). Symbolically, the graffito, even as it implicitly alluded to the role women performed in Polish history, established the tenor of gender relations for the entire decade: women were called upon not to interfere in men’s struggle for Poland’s independence from Soviet domination. They could, however, assist men in this struggle. The irony of the graffito arises when we consider two facts. One of the two figures who took center-stage at the beginning of the strike in Gdańsk was Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator at the Lenin shipyard, who was also a primary leader of the strike movements in 1970 and 1971. She was an editor of the journal Robotnik wybrzeża (Worker of the Coast), a publication of the Constituent Committee of Free Trade Unions of the Baltic. Her dismissal from the shipyard in August 1980 was one of the main causes precipitating the strike. 1
