Magdalena Gawin, Born on 19 January 1972 in Warsaw
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1 The Candidate’s Self-description 1. Name: Magdalena Gawin, born on 19 January 1972 in Warsaw 2. Diplomas, academic/artistic degrees, specifying the name of the degree, the place and year they were awarded and the title of the doctoral thesis: Master of Arts in history from the Institute of History, University of Warsaw – 1996 Ph. D. from the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences – 2002, the degree awarded on the basis of the doctoral thesis: Higiena rasy. Historia polskiego ruchu eugenicznego 1880-1952 (Racial hygiene. A history of the Polish eugenics movement 1880-1952). The thesis was written under the supervision of Professor Janusz Żarnowski. 3. Employment history: Since 1996 – employed at the T. Manteuffel Historical Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw 4. a) Title of the academic achievement: Spór o równouprawnienie kobiet 1864-1919 (The dispute on equal rights for women 1864-1919), Wydawnictwo Instytutu Historii PAN, Warszawa 2015 Editorial reviewers: Professor Grażyna Szelągowska and Professor Andrzej Chwalba b) Description of the academic objective: The book Spór o równouprawnienie kobiet 1864-1919 (The dispute on equal rights for women 1864-1919) shows an evolution taking place over several decades of the idea of women’s emancipation, with an emphasis on political rights. Thus, the book is neither a 2 history of the first wave of feminism nor an overview of milieus of active women. It is a book on the evolution of ideas and strategies conducive to women’s emancipation employed from the 1864-1864 January Uprising until the first parliamentary election in the restored Polish state in 1919. Naturally, the January Uprising viewed as a watershed does not mark the beginning of the emancipation of women as such, but it marks the beginning of its next stage, which differs from the earlier stages by demands for equal rights for women. The dispute mentioned in the title means both a debate and a polemic, which are a space of confrontation between various clashing ideas on women’s place and role in public life. This assumption is not identical with a dichotomous division into advocates and opponents of women’s emancipation. The challenge and response pattern, borrowed from Arnold Toynbee’s1 well-known conception has proved to be much more useful for my analysis. In terms of methodology, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s and Barbara Caine’s books have come in useful. The two last-mentioned authors attempted to demonstrate the various styles of thinking characteristic of Victorian culture by using examples of particular individuals, beginning with their biographies, education, careers as well as the intellectual circles they moved in2. Of major importance to my analysis were the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, which drew my attention to the problem of axiology and suggested a number of interesting interpretation tropes3. The choice of the book’s protagonists may seem arbitrary, but a historian studying the history of the 19th and 20th centuries is always forced to select sources and individuals around whom he spins his narrative. The selection criteria may be limited to the editors of a single journal, to a single organization or a geographical area. I was not, however, interested in any particular territory in Poland, nor in a collective body in the form of a journal, but in culture in its one particular aspects, namely the place where culture and politics mutually permeate. I attempted to get to the most interesting and most inspiring voices of that era so as to avoid the risk of trivialization of ideas, which appears whenever we enter the realm of history of mentality4. Some characters open up the way for showing entire milieus; such is the 1 J. A. Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 2: Abridgement of Volumes VII-X, abridged edition by D. C. Somervell, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1985. Jerzy Jedlicki also uses this method (op. cit.). 2 B. Caine, Victorian feminists, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1992; G. Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society. From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, ed. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1995. 3 Alasdair MacIntyre, After virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana 1984. 4 Gertrude Himmelfarb points to a certain danger inherent in the history of mentality; the process of striving towards an identification of mental structures, such as sentiments, emotions, behavioural patterns, values and the mind, takes place at the expense of ideas that are an emanation of the best thinking styles of the era and its greatest writers. Historians of mentality tend to focus on second- and third-rate literature (acting on assumption that writings of this kind are better tools for exploring the past), ignoring the works of the best writers. She also criticizes the diminishing of the role of politics, an excessively suspicious view of ideas that are supposed to be 3 case with Kuczalska-Reinschmit, Rodziewiczówna and Szczerbińska, while others epitomize the important ideological currents of the time: liberalism (Orzeszkowa, Prus), socialism combined with aspirations to national independence (Kelles-Krauz) and nationalism (Dmowski, Balicki). I have also included figures who, though they were not, and are not, assigned to any particular ideological formations, seriously influenced the direction of the ongoing debate. This is true of the poet Maria Konopnicka as well as of the modernist actress and playwright Gabriela Zapolska. My protagonists are representatives of three generations of the intelligentsia and the landed gentry, major public figures who found themselves confronted with the idea of women’s emancipation5. The work is situated on a borderline between two different genres of historical writing: the history of ideas, mentality, social life and politics6. I was also inspired by books that do not directly touch on women’s emancipation, but from which I learned how to read that era’s intellectual climate, how to compare the values that were called for with those followed in real life, to confront opinions well-established in the existing literature with the sources, and, most importantly, to pay attention to axiological issues. ‘Liberal virtues’, ‘valour’, ‘modernization risk’, ‘the variant of separate spheres’, ‘heroic deed’, ‘social solidarity’, ‘work ethos’ and ‘equality and liberty’: as I kept reading through the sources, they emerged as the main slogans, explaining the way of thinking as well as the tactic employed by selected individuals and, occasionally, by entire milieus7. the property of a narrow elite. Cf. G. Himmelfarb, The New History and The Old. Critical Essays and Reappraisals, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge–Massachusetts–London 1987, p. 99. 5 The oldest characters depicted in the book either participated in the January Uprising or remembered it from the adult’s perspective, the middle generation is represented by people born in the 1860s and 1870s, while the youngest participants of the debate were born in the 1880s or slightly afterwards. There is ample bibliography on the generation-oriented approach to the history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; I would like to mention merely two books here: B. Cywiński, Rodowody niepokornych (The Lineages of the Haughty), Editions Spotkania, Paryż 1985; R. Wapiński, Pokolenia Drugiej Rzeczpospolitej (The Generations of the Second Polish Republic), Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław 1991. 6 On the eclecticism of the research methods in the study of history, cf.: E. Domańska, Mikrohistorie. Spotkania w międzyświatach (Microhistories. Encounters in interworlds), Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, Poznań 2005; M. Kurkowska-Budzan, Historia zwykłych ludzi. Współczesna angielska historiografia dziejów społecznych (A history of ordinary people. Contemporary British social historiography), Towarzystwo Wydawnicze ‘Historia Iagiellonica’, Kraków 2003; J. Topolski, Jak się pisze i rozumie historię; tajemnice narracji historycznej (How one writes and understands history; the secrets of historical narrative), Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm, Warszawa 1998. 7 It was the following works that made it possible for me to notice the dimension of axiology (I am listing the most important ones only): G. Himmelfarb, On Looking into Abyss. Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society, ed. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1994; eadem, One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution, Random House Inc., New York 1999; S. Filipowicz, Pochwała rozumu i cnoty. Republikańskie credo Ameryki (In praise of intellect and virtue. America’s Republican credo), Znak, Fundacja im. Stefana Batorego, Warszawa 1997; H. Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1958; eadem, ‘Berliner Salon’, Deutscher Almanach, 1932. 4 In the existing literature on the subject, women’s emancipation is generally classified as a social rather than a political issue; it tends to be compared with the peasant or Jewish question, together with which it constituted a complementary part of the press debates of a modernizing society. In the analysis presented in this book, the main emphasis has been shifted to the spheres of culture and politics; granting vote to women meant their joining the political community and being given a possibility to determine its destiny. I was interested in the views of activists on modern ideologies, in their responses to political events, in ideas on women’s role and place in politics, in worldview issues and in their attitudes towards religion and the Church.