“Does a University Have a Gender?”

At conferences, I would sometimes be approached by scholars I did not know. Some of them were women. They told me that the work of feminism is done and that women today are free. "Look," they said, "women can walk the corridors of power and enter the courts of judgment." They also told me that their students regard feminism as an outmoded political position. Then they wandered away. Sometimes, though, scholars came over to tell me that they support the aims of feminism. They said that sexism is still a pressing social issue, and they wanted me to know that they do not accept the persistence of social and economic inequality between women and men. Then they, too, wandered away.Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, 2022, I am no longer approached by scholars eager to tell me that the task of feminism is done. But to be honest, it is the second type of encounter that I have always found more baffling than the first. Why did men and women in the second group feel compelled to tell me that they support feminist goals? Why did they wander away after making their statement? Why didn't they want to talk about feminism (or feminisms)? Clearly, as Jacqueline Rose notes, "the atmosphere the term feminism creates" unsettles many people, even those who agree that women have the right to equality.2 Or, to put it somewhat differently, the term feminism is disconcerting at least in part because it means more than the legal goal of equal rights for women. What exactly does this elusive category of "more" include?In a sparkling essay, Ann Snitow describes how she fell in love with an "inspiring" and "heroic" story of the founding of the New School for Social Research in New York, an institution where she taught for many years.3 The story she knew was, predictably enough, a story about founding fathers. Fired from Columbia University for speaking up against the U.S. entry into World War I, a group of male professors (there were no women professors at Columbia at the time) founded the New School in 1919. Only in the mid-1980s did Snitow discover, thanks to a book by Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, that women, and in particular Clara Mayer, a student organizer, had a major role in establishing and developing the New School.4 Those women were no mere handmaidens; they were central. But they were soon forgotten.The blanks and blind spots of institutional memory and, more broadly, the politics of gender in a university setting are the central subject of Niewidzia(l)ne: Kobiety i historia Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu The invisible: Women and the history of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, a collection of articles edited by Aleksandra Derra, Anna Maria Kola, and Wojciech Piasek and published in the prestigious Scientia – Universitas – Memoria series. The contributors, all of them based in Toruń, take us straight to the front line of feminist critique. The point of their critique is not just to criticize but, by bringing to light what has been sidelined, clichéd away, overlooked, forgotten, or erased, to open up new ways of thinking about what might be done to make things better.The general approach to be found in Niewidzia(l)ne has two goals: to "historicize" ("always," as Fredric Jameson would have it) self-consciously and to gender history.5 More specifically, the contributors propose to widen the purview of what institutional history can be and to chart new directions in the historiography on Nicolaus Copernicus University (UMK) and (if I understand them correctly) other Polish universities as well. They structure their discussion around questions that may sound, if not extravagantly absurd or bizarre, at least eccentric to some and a bit faux-naive to others: "Does a university have a gender? If so, what is the gender of Nicolaus Copernicus University?" (p. 10). The contributors, then, have a very large rock to roll uphill.Their first move is to examine opportunities and challenges that women have found at UMK. They also explore the nooks and crannies of UMK's past to recover the history of women's involvement in creating the university and developing it into a major center of research and learning. Along the way, they address the perennial questions of gender stereotypes, career trajectories, professional recognition, and work-family balance. There is also an occasional suggestion of "love that dare not speak its name," a subtle hint of same-sex or bisexual relations. Five of the volume's ten chapters recount the biographies of some dozen women scholars, teachers, and administrators in the context of broader discussions about disciplinary boundaries and paradigms. The story these chapters tell is primarily a story of UMK's founding mothers and the impact they have had on their respective disciplines and on the university's rise to prominence. The disciplines covered are anthropology, classics, history, and philosophy. The remaining chapters offer a discussion of women's careers in science and technology at UMK, a richly contextualized account of student organizations and their activities at the university, two assessments of UMK's memory culture, and an overview of primary sources by and about women in UMK's archival collections.UMK was established shortly after the end of World War II. Most of its founders, both male and female, were refugees and expellees from Poland's eastern borderlands that had been incorporated into the Soviet Union as a result of the Yalta agreements of February 1945. Prior to 1939, many of them had been affiliated with Stefan Batory University in Wilno/Vilnius or Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów/Lviv. They included Zofia Abramowiczówna, Barbara Józefowiczowa, and Stefan Srebrny, all scholars of classical antiquity, Konrad Górski and Artur Hutnikiewicz, both specialists in Polish literary studies, Jan Prüffer, a zoologist, Tadeusz Czeżowski, a philosopher, Aleksandra Zajkowska, Czeżowski's former Ph.D. student, and Halina Jeśman, an office manager. Another expellee, Ludwik Kolankowski, a historian of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, became UMK's first chancellor in 1946. One of the highlights of the biographical chapters in Niewidzia(l)ne is Barbara Bibik's vivid account of Abramowiczówna's resettlement from Wilno to Toruń. For her week-long train journey, she took a supply of food, kitchen utensils, a sewing machine, a sofa bed, and her personal library.Despite massive devastations of the war, work on organizing UMK departments began in the summer of 1945. Two of the buildings that used to house the prewar administration of the Toruń province were requisitioned to set up the Collegium Maius and the Collegium Minus. Student registration for the 1945–1946 academic year opened in October, and classes started in late December. In the passion and determination with which the creation of UMK was undertaken immediately after the war, the old gender order with its male/female hierarchy and static categories of identity seems to have been abandoned. And yet, as the contributors to Niewidzia(l)ne point out time and again, the history of UMK is riddled with paradoxes. The challenge of founding a new university at a time when there was a shortage of everything from textbooks to lab equipment brought empowering opportunities for women's initiatives, but the institution that the female founders helped to create was (in Aleksandra Derra's words) "a difficult environment for women to negotiate" (p. 24). Rafał Kleśta-Nawrocki puts the issue more strongly: the university founded in Toruń in 1945 was "a patriarchal structure," overwhelmingly male in composition and masculine in focus (p. 55). Gender equality was a mirage.The contributors to Niewidzia(l)ne have not found any evidence that UMK's founding fathers acted with conscious discriminatory intent or harbored some kind of generic hostility toward women. On the contrary, evidence drawn from archival documents such as women's letters and memoirs shows that male faculty members were rather supportive of their female colleagues. The contributors suggest that the male-centered institution created in 1945 reflected an internalized or second-nature bias that remains below the radar of conscious awareness. Drawing on Joan W. Scott's conceptualization of gender as "a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes" and "a primary way of signifying relationships of power" and building on Scott's argument that "hierarchical structures rely on generalized understandings of the so-called natural relationships between male and female,"6 Derra posits that the formation of UMK "duplicated a hierarchical structure of prewar Polish universities" with their unequal gender-based relations of power (p. 24). In the end, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that UMK's founding fathers never stopped subscribing, at least subliminally, to the idea that a stable social order requires gender hierarchy. It is helpful to know that from the start, men outnumbered women at UMK. In September 1945, its faculty and staff comprised 52 men and 22 women. Not only did the women constitute a minority in this group, but none of them held the rank of professor. It does not require much theoretical sophistication to recognize that there was a large power differential between UMK's founding fathers and its founding mothers. The story of the creation of UMK testifies to patriarchy's capacity to sustain its myths, emotions, and practices. For all the communist slogans about gender equality, widely disseminated in postwar Poland, everyday reality was rather different.When the contributors to Niewidzia(l)ne move to the political environment some seventy years later, they note that the climate for women at UMK continues to be less than hospitable even though the communist regime is now a thing of the past. They also note the persistent gender imbalance in faculty appointments. Samples of the statistical data that Derra provides about faculty hires at UMK suggest that its record in terms of recruiting women is bleak even by Polish standards. However, the authors choose their rhetoric carefully. They refrain from using terms such as discrimination or sexism and opt for cautious understatements instead. This is understandable. The authors do not assume that all of their potential readers are feminists. They do not want to antagonize their nonfeminist readers. They do not want them to run in the other direction (or to skip their conference panels, reject their grant proposals, or deem them unworthy for promotion). Most importantly, they want to be heard. Given that the term feminism is still off-putting to many people and that, furthermore, there are many varieties of feminist theory and activism, the authors' position is that it is vital to try to cut through partisan antagonisms and to create a situation of open, conscientious debate so that critical issues can be discussed, clarified, and negotiated on their merits.The contributors' rhetorical strategy also involves avoiding a universalized concept of women as victims. Rather than dwell on barriers to women's success at UMK, they focus on the women who have managed to overcome those barriers. They include the anthropologists Maria Znamierowska-Prüfferowa and Bożena Stelmachowska (introduced by Rafał Kleśta-Nawrocki), the historian Jadwiga Lechicka (presented by Wojciech Piasek), and the classics scholar Zofia Abramowiczówna (discussed by Barbara Bibik). In writing the biographies of these women, the authors are keenly aware that founding an academic program, jump-starting a discipline, or transforming disciplinary paradigms is always more complex than just the story of a single charismatic woman or man. At the same time, they confront us with yet another paradox: the scholarship and professional service of the women they discuss have established them as major figures, but their achievements have not been integrated into the history of UMK. It would be extravagant to say that all of them are the forgotten founding mothers in the attic, but it is evident that the history of UMK has focused on the men's contributions, with the female faculty and staff assigned, for the most part, to a realm of invisibility.A separate chapter, by Wioletta Kwiatkowska, discusses women's careers in the so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at UMK. It goes almost without saying that in STEM an arsenal of gender stereotypes is particularly well-stocked and the gender gap, or the underrepresentation of women, is the largest. UMK is no exception. The women scientists whom Kwiatkowska has interviewed not only reflect on their stereotype-defying career paths but also offer advice to younger women who are undaunted by a pervasive view that science and technology are not a suitable field for females. Tellingly, Kwiatkowska is compelled to point out that these women scientists "have been able to combine work and motherhood" and to retain their admirable personal attributes—"unpretentiousness and naturalness" (p. 209). If one needs to assure readers that, despite their career choices, women scientists have not lost their personal charm or abandoned their children, it is evident that anxieties about women in science and technology continue to be strong in Polish society.Inspired and empowered by feminist scholarship, Niewidzia(l)ne is in part an act of historical recovery. As I have noted earlier, this project began with the recognition that the women's role in creating UMK and developing it into a thriving intellectual center remained largely outside the purview of institutional memory. A result of painstaking labor in the archives, Niewidzia(l)ne makes the women visible as active participants. At the same time, this deeply researched and closely reasoned book has ambitions well beyond its immediate subject. The contributors are keenly aware that the response of many nonfeminist historians to research aimed at recovering women's history is likely to be acknowledgement and then separation or dismissal (e.g., "let feminist scholars do women's history" or "my understanding of the history of UMK is not changed by knowing that women have been part of it"). While recognizing that such reactions are unavoidable, the contributors reject the idea that research on women's history should merely serve to supplement existing historiography. Their larger project brings to mind V. Spike Peterson's argument that "feminism is neither just about women, nor the addition of women to male-stream constructions"; rather, "it is about transforming ways of being and knowing."7 The contributors' overarching concern is to integrate their findings into UMK's history and to open the way to new thinking about UMK. At first sight, this goal seems unexceptional. In fact, it is no less than a gauntlet thrown down. Here, it is necessary to bear in mind that UMK, named after the towering figure of Copernicus, has been perceived as a male-gendered, even masculinist institution, focused on research in STEM that is still commonly associated with men. To recover the invisibilized history of women at UMK, then, is to challenge a firmly entrenched master narrative about UMK and "to modify its institutional identity" (p. 9).At a time when there are still numerous sixteenth-century thinkers around, coming up with sixteenth-century answers about male and female natures, abilities, and roles, Niewidzia(l)ne offers a welcome intervention. To be sure, there is by now extensive scholarship published in the many subfields of women's and gender studies—a rich array of work that radically challenges and destabilizes presumptions about the relationship between biological sex and socially and culturally constructed roles for women and men. But that scholarship is largely ignored by authors of history textbooks used in Polish schools. For example, Iwona Chmura-Rutkowska, Edyta Głowacka-Sobiech, and Izabela Skórzyńska, who conducted a large-scale research project on textbooks in 2010–2014, conclude that Polish history textbooks continue to favor men: "In every textbook we analyzed, regardless of a period covered, male figures constitute approximately ninety percent of the persons identified by name. This does not mean that these male figures are always well-known. Quite the contrary."8 The authors go on to say: The few women who are mentioned in these textbooks are portrayed in traditional, usually family roles and in those contexts and spheres of life that are culturally considered to be typically feminine. Women are not only underrepresented in history textbooks; also, information about them is often distorted or simply untrue. The topic of the (in)equality between women and men as well as the history of women's emancipation movements . . . is not considered worthy of inclusion in Polish textbooks.9In short, the rather grim take-away message of many Polish history textbooks is that the true begetters of public institutions and historical events are male and that women are "unworthy of history."10Niewidzia(l)ne deserves praise for making an eloquent case for more sustained attention to women's achievements, for the wealth of information presented in its pages, and for the high level of discussion, including resourceful use of a captatio benevolentiae, the rhetorical technique with which orators or writers try to win the good will of their audience in order to obtain a favorable hearing. The editors' commitment to conceptual and methodological diversity is further grounds for praise, given that "there is no 'ordinary, generally accepted usage' for gender; instead, it is a site for intense debate."11 Some of the contributors use gender as a social and cultural category that attributes meaning, identities, and roles to sexed bodies; in their usage, the term gender carries with it a statement about inequality or power. Other contributors engage a methodology that rests on the single variable of physical (biological) difference; from their perspective, gender is largely a distraction from the unfinished business of righting wrongs against women. Several contributors resist universalizing the category "women" and pay close attention to the proliferation of categories of women—by religious affiliation, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation (to name only a few possibilities). I want to be careful not to overgeneralize here, but it is fair to say that although all the contributors recognize that the social and cultural constructions of femininity have helped to perpetuate inequalities between women and men, some of the contributors nonetheless resort to the discursive convention that casts women as naturally nurturing, caring, compassionate, and highly sensitive. For example, Kleśta-Nawrocki goes so far as to claim that women possess "a special sensitivity" szczególna wrażliwość that makes them uniquely equipped to conduct anthropological research (p. 56). By reviving the notion of supposedly innate feminine traits, this line of reasoning contributes to the reductive, stereotypical thinking about women that the editors of Niewidzia(l)ne want to oppose.Such moments of disagreement aside, there is (to reiterate my earlier point) a great deal to admire about this book. One of its major strengths is the contributors' determination to engage in critical self-reflection and self-questioning rather than indulge in smug moralism. It is their argument that all of us, men as well as women, can collude in pushing women into the background in academia. As Derra puts it, "Regardless of our specific discipline, we (un)consciously perpetuate a narrative without women by citing almost exclusively research by men, especially those with high name recognition. When writing dictionaries, encyclopedias, or textbooks, we almost automatically omit the names of women who have made important contributions to their disciplines. We pay no attention to the number of female participants in debates, conferences, decision-making bodies, grant committees, etc." (p. 36) Given that the invisibilizing of women still comes in many different variations, even in a university setting, Derra's critique is a plea for a debate that will not try to sanitize itself.It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Niewidzia(l)ne. This courageous, clear-sighted book recovers women's forgotten, neglected, or reductively understood contributions to creating and developing UMK. In doing so, it revises UMK's history and makes a bold case for modifying UMK's institutional identity. At the same time, it reminds us (we tend to forget such things) that the progress of women, despite the many hard-won advances, continues to be slow. In the acknowledgments, the editors express their gratitude to Andrzej Tretyn, chancellor of UMK, and Stanisław Roszak, dean of the Wydział Nauk Historycznych at UMK, who welcomed the Niewidzia(l)ne project, supported research for this volume, and provided funds to cover publication costs. At a time when efforts to silence dissenting voices and censor scholarly debate escalate, the support of UMK's chancellor and one of its deans for a project critical of UMK is heartening. Feminism, as it were, begins at home.