God and State Above All

Abstract This article explores how politically active Polish women starting in the late nineteenth century until the start of World War II viewed themselves and their duties vis-a-vis the Polish nation. It traces the women's movement in Poland from the first calls for women's right to work, to their eventual enfranchisement under a newly independent Polish state in 1918. Challenges to women's equality took many forms: men from both sides of the political spectrum viewed women's entry into the salaried workforce and the public sphere as largely undesirable and deployed a variety of arguments to reinforce traditional gender hierarchy. Yet many educated Polish women, even from conservative, Catholic perspectives, viewed their engagement in the public sphere as necessary work for the good of the Polish nation. This article uses letters, political pamphlets, and published works to explore how modern Polish women attempted to strike a balance between breaking and preserving traditional notions of gender in order to secure new rights for themselves in a volatile political atmosphere. While Polish women's groups differed on their vision of the ideal Polish state, they generally agreed that women's roles as mothers provided the moral legitimacy required to act in the public sphere. They successfully carved a space for themselves in the new Polish state of 1918 but remained marginalized in a separate and unequal status in the interwar period.