This is a book I waited a long time for. Probably not even fully knowing how much it was needed. Agnieszka Mrozik's work addresses parts of history without which it is difficult to imagine a complete vision of the People's Republic of Poland, or even state-socialism as a project in general. Mrozik reclaims the role of women in building state socialism. The female architects, “Architektki,” were systematically belittled in history, often reduced to partners, daughters or wives, not to mention that the whole fields of their activities were marginalized in political and economic history. Mrozik reminds us about the bold postwar modernization project and reveals the history of state socialism and state feminism nationwide.
The author strenuously digs out a history of women building state-socialism, with Kristen Ghodsee's Second World: Second Sex (2019) and Zheng Wang Finding Women in the State (2017) as important reference points. Despite as famous Polish communist as Wanda Wasilewska (whose biographies serve as a source of discourse analysis), most of protagonists need to be found again, and their role in socialist modernization project, Polish history and global feminism needs to be reclaimed. Some names might sound familiar to readers like Zofia Dembińska, Żanna Kormanowa or Eugenia Krassowska, but so many need to be properly heard: Fryderyka Kalinowska, Halina Koszutska, Wilhelmina Skulska, Anna Lanota and many more. From politicians, writers, activist, to teachers, librarians and sexual educators, Mrozik reconstructs female biographies, but most importantly she focuses on a broader social context and changing realities of state-socialism (also outside of Poland).
Mrozik examines emancipatory polices with their failures and contradictions, but also successes. She analyses popular TV series, movies, letters to the press, but also memory policies that marginalized many of her protagonists. The “feminine” interests and problems like children's rights, education, divorce regulations, reproductive rights, as she argues deserve to stand in the center of postwar change. She claims that communism, offering emancipatory narrative and a promise of feminist modernization can be seen a essential generational experience especially for women.
All this helps Mrozik to escape the danger of focusing on a few, fairly elitist biographies and shift the book's optic to issues often marginalized from the perspective of the political history. All in all, most of “Architektki” became public figures and women in power not only because of their political choices and new order after 1945, but also because of the capitals brought from their intelligentsia homes—even if they were shaping their biographies against their habitus. Mrozik constantly tries to include the popular classes, the so-called average women. For this reason, Mrozik's work not only complements the so-called popular turn in Poland, but also contributes to the women's history both in the case of Eastern Europe and global feminism.
It is not easy to trace biographies of those who are doubly absent in history: expelled by their gender but also by political choices—the totalitarian paradigm intertwines with patriarchy. During their lifetime “Architektki” repeatedly experienced discrimination like belittling their achievements, the glass ceiling or sticky floor—all processes described in the case of advancing women in leadership positions. And all this efforts to by cancelled form the history of feminism by their potential heirs, as shown by Magdalena Grabowska in “Zerwana Geneaologia” (2018). Mrozik's book reveals all mechanisms of patriarchy at work, and moreover exposes also the Western domination in knowledge production: that is the expulsion of socialist modernization by Western feminism, which reproduced itself in a homegrown context after the 1989. She demands to recognize socialist feminism as a part of a general movement, marginalized—if not ousted—part of women studies and the history of political thought. In the 1990s, Polish feminism was hegemonized by liberal western feminism, and socialist heritage was not only forgotten by repulsively locked into the totalitarian paradigm. Mrozik's work brings back these great absentee, the socialist feminism, back to the light. And hopefully thanks to Chiara Bonfiglioli's or Zsófia Lóránd's ERC-founded projects, we can expect more interesting interventions and bringing back of socialist feminist voices in forthcoming years.
