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Department of History

Polish émigré women: resilience, identity, and legacy in postwar America

Beata Halicka, Fernand Braudel Fellow at the EUI History Department, delves into the lives of Polish émigré women, exploring their resilience, migration stories, and influence in shaping postwar American society and culture.

17 January 2025 | Research

2025.01.17_EUIResearch_Polish

Beata Halicka, Fernand Braudel Fellow through the EUI Widening Europe Programme, is currently leading a research project titled 'Polish Women in Postwar America: Female Agency, Migration, and Knowledge Transfer'. The project examines the experiences of Polish women who migrated to the United States during and after World War II, bringing with them the impacts of war, occupation, and forced migration.

Your research examines the agency and contributions of Polish émigré women to the Polish American community and society at large, particularly in journalism, literature, and academia. Could you share some defining experiences of these women during World War II and the immediate postwar period?

The Second World War began with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939, followed by the Soviet Union's invasion on 17 September 1939. Polish citizens suffered almost six years of occupation, both German and Soviet, changing the lives of not only men but women as well. During the Second World War, with men absent from their homes, many women had to fend for themselves and their families. It could even be said that the war further emancipated women: Women showed strength and resourcefulness in caring for their families during and after the war.

Women also formed the backbone of the anti-Nazi resistance. They participated in military actions, most notably as Home Army soldiers in the Warsaw Uprising. Probably the most diverse military roles were performed by women in the Polish People's Army, where they formed a separate battalion and many of them joined the ranks of officers.

In my research, I am primarily concerned with those migrant women who fled their home country due to the war and the establishment of a communist system in Poland, or who, if already abroad, decided against an originally planned return in view of these developments.

How did the roles of women in interwar and wartime Poland differ from those in postwar America?

One of the aims of my project is to explain what kind of experience of women's agency in interwar Poland the female migrants brought with them to the United States, thus it is important to understand the historical context of their lives before emigration.

In 1918, the reborn Polish state granted women the right to vote. In 1921, the Constitution of 17 March proclaimed gender equality before the law, removing all formal barriers to women's education, employment, and representation in parliament. However, women's actual participation in public life was still subject to significant restrictions, particularly concerning women's property and custody rights. There were strong cultural stereotypes that still relegated women to the domestic sphere and motherhood. As a result, women continued to face discrimination in many sectors of public life. Only women from wealthy families and members of the Polish intelligentsia1 had access to education at almost all levels and were able to pursue their professional ambitions.

Can you elaborate on the cultural or societal challenges these women encountered in the US, and how they navigated them to achieve professional success?

After arriving in the US in the late 1940s and 1950s, Polish émigré women were often confronted - especially in the middle class - with the division of society into male producers and female reproducers, and with gender differences in which women were inevitably associated with motherhood and the family, and men with the public sphere of economic and political activity. During the war, many American women transgressed traditional gender boundaries by taking up employment or going to the front as nurses. But the American domestic ideal became reinforced after the war. Gender roles were fixed again and difficult to change. Postwar "stabilisation" and the Great Society idea centred a white, patriotic, heterosexual man at the head of every family. Initially in the 1960s, civil rights activists, feminists, and gay rights activists, animated by broader visions of citizenship, began to fight for equal rights, protections, and opportunities.

Polish emigrant women, whether with families or alone, experienced a difficult initial period of adjustment in the US, typical of all emigrants. In the US, they were outsiders. They found themselves on the lower rungs of society, not only because of their gender, but also because of their non-elite status. Many started out as blue-collar workers and remained in the working class despite their professional skills. Those who found themselves in the middle class were confronted with strong patriarchal roles in this group of American society. If they managed to get a job, they were often paid below their qualifications and demoted professionally.

The 1960s were a time of great change in American society, brought about by the second wave of the feminist movement and other events that created many sources of role tension and conflict. However, this allowed women to develop a complex and flexible social life space. The aim of my research is also to examine how Polish women in the USA have reacted to these changes and how they have challenged them to regain their position in society.

How has your understanding of gender, migration, or Polish-American history evolved during your research?

Studying the biographies of these women shows how much willpower, determination, self-confidence, entrepreneurship, and other talents were needed to achieve their goals. At the same time, I was able to see both the obstacles they faced and the things they failed to accomplish. Very often Polish émigré women were not happy with new roles they had to play. The story of these women provides a better understanding of both Polish and European history, as well as American society. Immigrants not only integrated into the mainstream society, but also implemented their values and cultural patterns in their new homeland. This means that American culture is the result of a specific process of acculturation in which women have played, and continue to play, an important role.

How do you hope your research will contribute to the fields of migration studies, gender studies, and Polish-American history?

After many years of researching the history of migration, I have found that the best way to approach it is by presenting individual biographies that represent a larger group of people. When I write a biography, I not only follow the story of one person, but also describe that person's network and the whole historical context. This is a very good way of presenting history to a wide range of readers, not just historians.

My contribution to the field is books that present very interesting biographies. I published Borderlands Biography. Z. Anthony Kruszewski in wartime Europe and postwar America (Polish 2019, Eng. 2021, Ger. 2024). Next year, my biography of Danuta Mostwin, one of the Polish émigré women in the US, will be published by Ohio University Press. Building on this work, I plan to produce a monograph – a kind of "herstory" of post-war American Polonia – that tells the history of this community from the perspective of women.

 

1The intelligentsia is a status class composed of the well-educated people who engage in the complex mental labour by which they critique, shape, and lead the politics, policies, and culture of their society. Conceptually, the intelligentsia status class emerged in the late 18th century, during the Partitions of Poland (1772-1795), as a professionally active social stratum of the patriotic bourgeoisie; men and women whose intellectualism would provide Poland with moral and political leadership in opposing the cultural hegemony of the Russian Empire.

 

Beata Halicka is a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the EUI History Department and a Professor of contemporary history at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her research interests include nationalism, forced migrations, borderlands, memory culture and politics, German-Polish relations, Polish diaspora in the world. She is the author of eight books and has published numerous articles in academic journals and edited volumes.

The Fernand Braudel Fellowship special call for applications was launched in the framework of the EUI Widening Europe Programme, which is supported by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States. The programme is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in targeted Widening countries.

Last update: 17 January 2025

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