Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka

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СКАЧАТЬ “ethnic authenticity” of the selected texts has also been tested against the definition of American ethnic fiction provided by Sollors in his seminal study, Ethnic Modernism, where he asserts that “works of American ‘ethnic’ prose literature [are] written by, about, or for persons who perceived themselves, or were perceived by others, as members of ethnic groups.”³² A strong presence of female characters and clear concepts of gendered and classed ethnicity within Polish American Roman Catholic communities constitute the key criteria for the selection of literary texts.

      The texts chosen for this study have been drawn from several categories of literary texts. First, a substantial number of them represent work of Polish American women writers who are themselves descendants of Polish immigrants, often representing the third generation. Many of these ethnic³³ authors take up themes from the past, mainly their own past of growing up in the quickly disappearing ethnic enclaves of the Northeast and Midwest,³⁴ and consider what it means to be an ethnic woman in a multicultural society forced to negotiate among multiple gender constructs. The second category of texts includes English-language writing by Polish immigrant authors.³⁵ In their largely autobiographical fiction, they set out to explore the common immigrant themes of nostalgia, guilt, anger, and alienation as they struggle to construct a new gender identity that draws from their Polish experiences but also allows them to function within their new American reality. The third and final group represents work produced by Polish immigrants, temporary migrants, émigrés, and exiles, many of whom wrote and continue to write in Polish.³⁶ A few of them experienced the trauma of immigration and sometimes forced exile as adults and recreated it in Polish specifically for audiences of their compatriots proficient in the language. Both Polish literary studies³⁷ and American literary studies focused on texts written in languages other than English³⁸ acknowledge their substantial literary output.

      IV

      Polish immigrant women and their Polish American daughters and granddaughters represent a heterogeneous group stratified by social class, economic circumstances, level of education, and ethnic/national consciousness. Many Polish American characters in fiction trace their roots to the stara emigracja, often also referred to as the za chlebem (“for bread”) immigration, when both rural and urban poverty forced thousands of Poles to seek economic relief elsewhere in Europe as well as in North and South America.³⁹ The most significant numbers of Poles from this immigrant cohort began arriving in the United States in the 1870s. James Pula finds that between 1875 and the outbreak of World War I, which put a stop to this mass migration, “some 9 million Poles”⁴⁰ sailed across the Atlantic. A desire to escape grinding poverty motivated them but many viewed themselves as temporary migrants who fully intended to return to the Polish countryside after amassing substantial savings. They were mainly peasants who left behind a country that had no political identity between 1795, when in the Third Partition the Kingdom of Poland was dissolved and its lands and people put in control of the three neighboring powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria—each part thereafter enduring varying degrees of economic and political hardship and anti-Polish policies—and 1918, when modern Poland began to form. For the most part, these emigrants were escaping poverty, religious and national persecution, and, in case of men, conscription into a foreign army. The majority grounded their identity in Roman Catholic faith as well as in their okolica (the village or region of their origin), and, as Michael Novak suggests about immigrants from Italy, “often it was America that taught them they were ethnic.”⁴¹

      Women arriving with these first immigrant cohorts were at an additional disadvantage, since, in large numbers, they were illiterate in their own language. In Poland, as late as 1931, “almost every other woman in the age group between 25 and 49 years (41.3 per cent of the total number of women in that age group) . . . could not read and write.”⁴² This was especially true, as Krystyna Wrochno suggests, among the rural women whose families were the most traditional:

      in which all decisions were made by the father, the interest of the farm being the primary consideration. . . . It was the father who made the decision on the son’s education and he did so from the point of view of its costs and usefulness for the farm . . . disregarding the child’s abilities and interests. Girls were, as a rule, not being educated because, apart from the lack of financial means for such education—there prevailed the belief that women were in no need of knowledge.⁴³

      Even if elementary education was made compulsory, as was the case in Galicia under the Austrian occupation, the insufficient number of village schools prevented children from obtaining even basic literacy skills. In Russian Poland, many parents refused to send their children, especially girls, to school:

      They were motivated not only by a resolve to defend their children (at least girls) from Russification, but also by traditional ways of thinking. They assumed that contact with the authorities, with institutions of public life—in which a Russian schooling might have been of use—were reserved for men; hence girls did not need the same education as boys. Thus, women in Polish lands did not have equal access to general education, and in the Polish kingdom and Galicia even to elementary schools.⁴⁴

      Unfortunately, the meager educational opportunities for the daughters and granddaughters of the stara emigracja persisted in the United States. Helena Znaniecka Lopata reports that even as late as the 1980s “women still received less education than did the men” and that, out of all European immigrant groups, “the gap between men and women was highest for the Poles and the Russians.”⁴⁵ Thus, patterns of gender-based oppression established in Poland—and clearly linked to a specific socioeconomic class—seem to persist in the new world several generations later.

      A cursory overview of historical and sociological research of the latter part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century focusing on the za chlebem immigrant women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their immediate descendants, reveals that most scholars situate these women firmly in the familial private sphere. Thaddeus C. Radzilowski, a historian, drawing from the work completed by both Helen Stankiewicz Zand and Donna Gabaccia, posits that “despite the family’s patriarchal forms, sometimes recast and actually strengthened by the immigration experience, and despite a division of labor, resources, and support that was often unequal and disadvantageous, most Polish immigrant women . . . probably found their identities and most of life’s satisfactions in their families.”⁴⁶ This assertion notwithstanding, Radzilowski provides a wealth of examples of immigrant women who managed to break the stereotype of a marginalized yet happy and fulfilled wife and mother, including women who sought a life of professional work and power through entering religious orders; women who ran their own boardinghouse businesses; women like my own mother-in-law, who continued working in the New England textile industry even after she was married and had children; women who led strikes in these textile mills or used clubs and rolling pins to fight against the strikebreakers threatening the jobs of their husbands; women who in 1898 created their own national insurance fund, Związek Polek w Ameryce, when the two Polish fraternal organizations refused to admit them as full members;⁴⁷ and women who believed “that the emancipation, education, and protection of women would strengthen the nation and preserve Polishness.”⁴⁸

      John J. Bukowczyk cautions against ascribing such revolutionary activities of Polish American women to the feminist or even proto-feminist movement without a clear understanding that they have always been firmly rooted in the milieu of “male-dominated families, churches, organizations, and ethnic communities.”⁴⁹ For Bukowczyk, these male-dominated social structures, be they present in mainstream American culture or Polish American Catholic culture, engaged equally in the “othering” of Polish immigrant and Polish American ethnic women of a specific socioeconomic class, that is, the rural and urban working class. They strengthened the contradictory stereotypes always aimed at controlling women through assaults on their self-esteem or through limiting their opportunities. The message directed at the immigrant women was clear: all their achievements outside the home notwithstanding, their work as “wives, mothers and СКАЧАТЬ