WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Socially inherited memory, gender and the public sphere in Poland. Anna Reading School of Media, Arts and Design This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © The Author, 1996. This is a scanned reproduction of the paper copy held by the University of Westminster library. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Users are permitted to download and/or print one copy for non-commercial private study or research. Further distribution and any use of material from within this archive for profit-making enterprises or for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: (http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] SOCIALLY INHERITED MEMORY, GENDER AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN POLAND Anna Reading A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 1996 University of Westminster, London, UK **I have a memory, which is the memory of mother's memory' UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER HARROW IRS CENTRE ABSTRACT More recent theories of the 'revolutions' of 1989 in the societies of Eastern and Central Europe now suggest that the underlying dynamic was continuity rather than disjuncture in terms of social and political relations. Yet such theories fail to explain the nature of and the reasons for this continuity in terms of gender relations in the public sphere. The thesis suggests that the clue to understanding the nature of the gendered transformation in Poland's public sphere in its mediated aspects between the years 1980 and 1994 lies in the role of *-socially inherited memory'. Socially inherited memory is the dialectical and gendered process by which a given society both remembers and forgets past events, feelings, thoughts knowledge through and , representations. The key to Poland"s social memory concerns the repressed stories of political right developed during the nation's period of identity formation in the nineteenth century and interwar years. Certain aspects of this social inheritance were recalled by the Polish United Workers' Party and then by Solidarity to legitimize their power: Because Poland's social memory was formed around the public exclusion of women and Poland's ethnic minorities this resulted in the continuation of exclusionary mechanisms and public ghettoization after World War Two, and, in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the evidence of the thesis also suggests that there were sub-plots of women's resistance and inclusion within the public sphere from at least the nineteenth century onwards. Thus the exclusionary impact of socially inherited memory is not an inevitable historical process: At particular historical moments inclusive representations of women and ethnic minorities are recalled or reenacted in the fbrm of Public organisations or alternative cultural productions. Socially inherited memory it is suggested may provide a useful concept for examining the (en) gendering of the public sphere in other societies. 6-12 13-29 Preamble; Reasons, Objectives and Aims of the Research; Hypotheses; Methods and Sources; Questions of Terminology; Structural Overview Chapter one: Theoretical Background- 30-48 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Theories of the Revolutions in Eastern Europe 1.3 Accounts of the Public Sphere 1.4 The Public Sphere and Androcentrism 1.5 The Public Sphere v Public Spaces 1.6 The Public Sphere and the Legacy of the Enlightenment 1.7 Towards a Formulation of Socially Inherited Memory Chapter Two: Socially Inherited 49-68 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Why Is Language Important in Relation to the Public Sphere? 2.4 Why the Polish Language? 2.5 Gender and the Polish Language 2.6 Exclusion and Inclusion in Polish 2.7 Language and Historical Change 2.8 Conclusion Chapter Three: The Gendered Development of Social Memolac in Polandfs Public SRhere 1792-193 69-109 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Poland as a Nation State 3.3 Gender Effects of Partitioning and Nationalism 3.4 Nationalist Struggles and the Development of Mother Poland 3.5 The Working Situation of Women 3.6 The Struggle for Working Class and Women's Representation 3.7 The Jewish Organizations and Jewish Women 3.8 The Interwar Years 3.9 Continuity and Dissonance in the Historical Representation of Gender Part Twoo. Socially Tnherited MemolZi Under State CapitaliMin 1945-1979 Chapter Four: Womews Representation In the Puhlin Sphere Between 1945-79 110-136 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The Jews and Poland's Social Amnesia 4.3 The Legal Position of Women 4.4 The Theoretical Position of Women 4.5 Representations of Women in the Workplace and Education 4.6 Representations of Women in Politics 4.7 Concluding Remarks Chapter Five: speaking the Unsl2eakble: Censorshi]2 and Re-presentations of Women Under State CapjtAjj, -m 137-175 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Censorship under state capitalism 1945-79 5.3 Censorship and Gender 5.4 Women and Media Re-presentations 5.5 Women and Literary Production 5.6 Contradictions and Alternatives: The Case of Anna Swir 5.7 Concluding Remarks Chapter Six: 176-215 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Re-presentations of Women by the Polish United Workers Party 6.3 Women in Government Policy in the 1980s 6.4 Women in Official Politics in the 1980s 6.5 Women in Education in the 1980s 6.6 Women in the Workvlace in the 1980S 6.7 Gender Mechanisms at Home 6.8 The Official Women's Movement 6.9 Concluding Remarks Chapter Seven: 216-260 7.1 Introduction 7.2 The Advent of Solidarity 7.3 Women and Political Activity 7.4 Women's Early Participation in Solidarity 7.5 Socially Inherited Memory: Nationalising Women 7.6 Socially Inherited Memory: Domesticating Women 7.7 Socially Inherited Memory: Criminalizing Women 7.8 Socially Inherited Memory: Violating Women 7.9 Socially Inherited Memory: Economizing Women 7.10 Socially Inherited Memory: Idolizing Women 7.11 Socially Inherited Memory: Illegalising Women 7.12 Socially Inherited Memory: Including Women 7.13 Concluding Remarks Chapter Eight: The Example of Socially inherited Memory in Telo nd the Transition 261-297 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Polish Television and Democracy 8.3 Socially Inherited Memory and Broadcast Space Before 1989 8.4 Socially Inherited Memory and Broadcast Space After 1989 8.5 Socially Inherited Memory (En) Gendering Media Policy 8.6 Socially Inherited Memory in the Commercial Broadcast Sector 8.7 Comparing Poland with Hungary and The Czech Republic and Slovakia 8.8 Concluding Remarks Chapter Nine: Conqlusion 298-313 9.10 Introduction 9.20 Theoretical Questions and Answers, 9.21 Poland's Repressed Story of Political Right 9.22 Subplots of Political Rights and Women's Cultural Spaces 9.30 The Dialectic of the Private and Public 9.31 The Contradictory Process of Socially Inherited Memory 9.40 The Broader Implications of the Thesis Bibliography 314-358 6 I Preface "Clinicians know the privileged moment of insight when repressed ideas, feelings and memories surface into consciousness. These moments occur in the history of societies as well as in the history of individuals" (Herman, 1994: 2) "Life cannot be separated from knowledge... who we are means what we know" (Spender, 1983: 30) People often ask me where my interest in Poland comes from. The honest reply is that its genesis lies in the context of my family upbringing as well as the public context of the time. I am, like many, the product of a private as well as public Cold War. Embodied within me is the 'socially inherited memory' of the ideological and military battle between the Eastern Bloc and the West; between Communism and capitalism and the changes that occurred with Solidarity, Glasnost and the fall of the European "communist, ' regimes in the 1980s. That battle and that memory provided part of the genesis for this thesis on Poland. At the same time I am the gendered product of a private cold war. ostensibly, I was a bright middle- class girl brought up in democratic England. But as Judith Herman points out: 'A well-established democracy in the public sphere could coexist with conditions of primitive autocracy or advanced dictatorship in the home' (1994: 28). In reality I was born into a hidden continent in which the head of state, my father, ruled through coercion and mystification, abusing family members. Unable to change the reality of my f amily, I changed it in my mind: I hid subversive thoughts and feelings behind a public mask and routinely practised what czeslaw Milosc in The Captive Mind (1985) called Iketman' or double-think, like the citizen of a totalitarian 7 regime. Trying as a teenager to f ind some sense in this private war, ' I turned my attentions outwards to the peace movement in the 1970s. Through this public and social movement I understood that I was a pacifist and, simulataneously, that there could be no real peace without equality. Through the peace movement in my early teens I learnt that the beliefs that I held meant that I was also a communist because I believed in equality and in the struggle for a better world for all. Later, at the University of York, as an undergraduate, I understood that I was also a feminist. My involvement with the Greenham Common Women's peace camp in the 1980s provided one arena for the expression of my beliefs. I, like others, saw the razor wire fence at the military base as representing the division of Europe, the division between Communism and capitalism, as well as the division of common land into parcels of private or military property.