ABSTRACT
The story of women’s participation in Polish Solidarity (1980–1989) has produced sharply differing evaluations, from gender-blind dismissals or underestimations of women’s roles, to feminist assertions of women’s pivotal activism, to feminist disenchantment with Solidarity women who rejected feminism. This chapter argues that a “third space” developed between public and private realms, which allowed female activists to establish their own agency and pursue political goals while willingly maintaining patriarchal values. Activists’ patriarchism was informed by romantic constructions of the Polish nation and further shaped by the central role of the Catholic Church in anti-communist opposition, in addition to disenchantment with Communist Party norms of gender equality. Polish feminism, as it emerged in the 1980s and after communism, did not evolve from the views of the underground women organizers, few of whom theorized their space through a feminist perspective. Rather, nascent feminist activism challenged patriarchal assumptions and developed separately, on the margins of the underground opposition. The differing origin of the two perspectives helps explain why Solidarity’s women rarely embraced feminism.
