Introduction
Cultural historians sometimes express the belief that women in early modern Poland enjoyed a much more comprehensive range of rights and privileges than other European women. Scholars support this position by three arguments: cultural, political, and economic. From the cultural point of view, the functioning of landowning families was, of course, based on the patriarchal model, but it did not take extreme forms.Footnote 1 The softening of patriarchal rules resulted from the specific character of the Polish aristocratic ethos, which valued individuality and independence,Footnote 2 and glorified women as mothers and carers for the home. Mothers were accorded the highest respect and honour, and insulting a mother – like transgressing a taboo – evoked disgust.Footnote 3 Women also had considerable authority in home management and enjoyed a certain degree of social autonomy.Footnote 4 Female representatives of the wealthiest families had the greatest freedom of action – sometimes men even opposed their influence in politics.Footnote 5 The women of the gentry could not, of course, enjoy such widespread impact. Still, the nobility’s cultural models permeated the culture of the lower classes and, as long as they corresponded to its prevailing worldview, shaped the attitudes preferred by the peasantry.Footnote 6 They also had a considerable influence on the formation of the figure of the Polish Mother, which still affects the definition of the role of women in Polish society.Footnote 7
During the partition, Polish nobility’s vision of women and their position was reinterpreted in the spirit of the national liberation struggle. Due to the political situation, motherhood was elevated to the status of shaping citizensFootnote 8 and fighting to preserve national identity. Women gained wider opportunities to participate in public life through involvement in the national liberation movement.Footnote 9 Moreover, the scope of their activities was extended to include tasks traditionally assigned to men, that is, running the farm and managing the property in case of the imprisonment or death of the husbandFootnote 10 or in the situation of his total devotion to political activity.Footnote 11
Finally, the processes that contributed to the deterioration of European women’s situation at the dawn of modernity did not affect the position of rural women in Poland, due to the different developmental model of the Kingdom of Poland.Footnote 12 The restriction of women’s access to the labour market as well as to vocational and higher education, combined with the centralisation of power and the development of bureaucratic structures, led to the degradation of women’s position in the society of Western European countries.Footnote 13 The removal of women from earning opportunities and their subjection to compulsory control by husbands or other male guardians relegated them to the margins of public life, to the private sphere.Footnote 14 However, in rural areas, the work of all family members was necessary for the efficient functioning of the farm, which should lead to the partnership rather than competition between spouses on the labour market.Footnote 15 All rural women in Europe were forced to work as soon as possible to relieve their parents in their upkeep.Footnote 16 In the east – because of the peasants’ bind to the land – they worked on family farms or as agricultural labourers within the boundaries of a single estate, sometimes being sent to do serfdom. In contrast, in the west, where capitalist relations developed earlier, young women took jobs as domestic servants, farm or factory workers, and usually quit after marriage. Nevertheless, if there was a need, women’s work outside the home often brought in additional monetary income, contributing to the family’s well-being.
An essential factor in strengthening the position of women in the family was the model of the ‘mother-teacher’ developed by the Catholic clergy in nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote 17 Women – as more involved in the life of the parish, not neglecting the obligatory confession and the Eucharist, participating in pilgrimages more often than men – were designated by the Catholic Church as guardians of the faith. Their sense of satisfaction was to come from exercising moral authority over domestic life and the education of children.Footnote 18 This model has been well received in Poland. The idea of a woman devoted to matters of faith and watching over the family’s morality merged with the abovementioned stereotype of the Polish Mother.
The factors mentioned above – the model of a woman involved in national affairs propagated by the elite, the lack of influence of factors marginalising the position of a woman in the economy of modern Poland, the admission of women to traditionally male spheres, and the Catholic model of women as guardians of the faith – may have influenced the formation of a relatively strong position of women in peasant families. This article aims to answer the question of whether the combination of these cultural, political, and economic circumstances strengthened the power of mothers and wives in peasant families. In an attempt to answer this question, I will refer to a specific sphere of life that men traditionally controlled and to which women, both noble and common, gained access in the eighteenth century, when Polish territory was incorporated into the borders of three neighbouring states: the Kingdom of Prussia, the Russian Empire, and Austria. By this, I mean the management of property and the independent making of the most important financial decisions. Noblewomen, as already mentioned, assumed this role in the absence of the husband. Similar circumstances occurred in the case of women from the community who became responsible for managing the farm when the husband served in the army or – after the enfranchisement of the peasants – seasonally emigrated for work.Footnote 19
Intuition suggests that taking control of the accounts results in increased authority and real influence over family and farm decision-making. This article aims to verify this thesis based on information contained in the diaries of rural women. The study of power relations in the family concerning the division of roles in household budget management will allow us to reconstruct the family influences and dependencies and trace the dynamics of social changes in the Polish countryside. These studies enter the area of family history or, in a broader sense, social history and bring us closer to answering the question about the sources of current social and cultural structures. This issue is significant in the context of the ongoing discussion in Poland about gender roles in the family and society.
Memoirs of rural women
The availability of sources limits the chronological scope of my considerations: peasants in the Polish lands only began to write down their memoirs in the nineteenth century.Footnote 20 The beginnings of peasant diarist are connected with the (initially limited) access to education,Footnote 21 the inclusion of peasants in the culture of writing and printing, and the resulting mental transformationsFootnote 22 necessary to stimulate the ambition to describe one’s own experiences. The time frame of the research is closed by the outbreak of the Second World War, which initiated far-reaching changes in the life of the rural population.Footnote 23
The article will analyse the memoirs of rural women written before 1939, and later years insofar as the memories they contain relate to the prewar period. The specific character of memoirs written by women dictates the choice of these texts. Due to the traditional division of roles in the rural environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women’s narratives present a different perspective and thematic scope than men’s do. First of all, women more often perceived their subordinate position to their husbands. They wrote about the responsibilities they bore and were much more willing to address family-life issues. Similar problems are very rare in men’s memoirs, but this does not mean that they are absent, therefore I will use the peasants’ diaries as comparative material.
The memoirs analysed are materials obtained due to competitions held by research institutions since the 1920s, when Polish sociologists saw the lower social strata’s autobiographies as a valuable source for their research. Of course, peasants had written down their recollections spontaneously before that, but men wrote the oldest known records of this kind.Footnote 24 They resembled chronicles and household books,Footnote 25 presented the history of the region and its economic affairs, and at the same time had a reporting character and were devoid of individual features of the author.Footnote 26 These accounts do not provide information on the subject that interests me.
Twenty memoir competitions were announced in the interwar period,Footnote 27 to which entries were submitted on topics specified by the organisers. First, one should mention the competition for peasants’ diaries announced by the Institute of Social Economics in 1933 – 498 recollections were submitted, of which women wrote only 17.Footnote 28 The best texts were selected and published in two volumes entitled Pamiętniki chłopów (Peasants’ Diaries) edited by Ludwik Krzywicki; the first volume, published in 1935, contained 51 diaries, including two written by women. The second volume, published a year later, collected ten extensive works, but these were exclusively men’s memoirs.Footnote 29
Diaries of emigrants also provide essential information on the life of rural women. Letters sent from Canada and the United States, published in 1971Footnote 30 and 1977,Footnote 31 respectively, proved valuable for my deliberations. Although published after the war, these books contain memoirs sent to the Institute of Social Economics in response to a competition announced in 1936. However, the outbreak of the Second World War interrupted the editorial work on this material, so a significant portion of the memoirs was not published until the 1970s. The competition yielded 212 biographies, but the editor does not specify how many of the authors were women.Footnote 32 Judging by the content of these publications (one of 16 published letters from Canada written by a woman and three of 51 letters from the United States), I assume that women’s memoirs accounted for a small portion of the submissions. This would also indicate a tendency evident when analysing the proportion of women’s memoirs among works submitted in response to similar competitions held at the time.
From the point of view of my deliberations, a less critical source of memoirs is also the material obtained due to a contest announced by Józef Chałasiński in 1936 in the pages of Przysposobienie Rolnicze (other magazines for rural youth also reprinted the announcement).Footnote 33 In response, Chałasiński received 1,544 biographies from all over Poland, 381 written by girls. Based on these works, a four-volume study titled Młode pokolenie chłopów (The Young Peasant Generation) was published.
I also looked at memoirs published after 1945 if their authors referred to the period I was interested in. I used the publication Łaknęliśmy wiedzy jak chleba Footnote 34 (We Craved Knowledge like Bread), which contains memoirs of self-taught peasants. The competition was announced in 1965 by the Department of Adult Education of the Institute of Pedagogy. Of the 341 entries received, 310 were judged to meet the competition requirements,Footnote 35 including 139 memoirs written by women.Footnote 36 In the post-competition volume, 55 memoirs were published, including 15 by women.
A rich source of the material are the three volumesFootnote 37 published as the aftermath of a competition for a rural woman’s diary organised in 1970 by the Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The competition attracted 1,200 memoirs.Footnote 38
I also referred to 55 diaries acquired in 2017 due to the Sto lat mojego gosposarstwa (One Hundred Years of My Farm) competition organised by the Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Agricultural Publishing House. This collection included 32 works by women.Footnote 39
The enumeration of sources presented above is not only the result of the pursuit of methodological order. Nevertheless, it serves primarily to show the proportion of women in the group of peasant diarists. Several factors explain the low number of women writers until the second half of the twentieth century: lower participation of women in public life, lower level of girls’ education,Footnote 40 lower readership among peasant women, and finally, the role traditionally assigned to women in rural communities, which did not allow for this kind of expression.
Memoirs elicited through competitions have their limitations when it comes to their potential use in historical research. The main shortcoming is their thematic (and often formal) limitation.Footnote 41 In the announcements about the call for competition entries, there were sometimes very detailed instructions concerning the subject matter, the order of expression, and the text structure.Footnote 42 These recommendations limited the freedom of expression and the need for sincere self-presentation. Moreover, the desire to win the competition motivated authors to follow them conscientiously. The wish to gain first prize may also have led memoirs’ authors to present content they believed would be highly valued in the competition. As much as possible, peasants may thus have limited the thematic scope of their works to fit into the framework set by the regulations or the contest announcement.
Moreover, the influence of the historical and cultural context in which the memoirs were written must not be overlooked. Political propaganda, strongly present in the lives of the inhabitants of the Second Polish Republic and, to an even greater extent, the Polish People’s Republic influenced the authors. Particular emphasis should be placed in this context on forming the intellectual attitude and system of values of the authors, who from the end of the nineteenth century begin to participate in the culture of the elite and assimilate elements of the landed gentry ethos.Footnote 43 Consequently, the diarists were subjected to two kinds of pressures: internal – self-censorship and self-presentation – and external – the expectations of the competition organisers, the current political discourse, and the culture of the elite, in relation to which they constructed their stories.
In the case of secondary analysis of material collected by other researchers in the past, it is also essential to consider the influences to which they were subjected and the objectives that guided them.Footnote 44 It is therefore vital not only to read the call for proposals but also to understand the methodology used by the organisers, the intellectual atmosphere that shaped their approach to science, and the social and political situation in which they conducted their research.
I have only listed the significant difficulties of using competition memoirs in historical research, but the catalogue is much more extensive. However, the subject of my study was not within the sphere of interest of researchers who organised contests in interwar Poland or the Polish People’s Republic; I therefore assume that rural women’s recollections about family relations and managing the household budget were not subjected to far-reaching elaboration. Information about who is responsible for making financial decisions, who has the most decisive voice in the family, what conflicts a lack of resources or disagreements over how to use them brought about, usually appear on the margins of the story. It is therefore reasonable to assume that, as brief mentions, they were not subjected to the authors’ reflection or manipulation. Two issues may raise doubts in this context. First, the diarists often mention financial matters in the context of their husband’s domination of the family, even his domestic violence (economic and physical). In such cases, the mechanisms of self-creation may be at work, the desire to present oneself as a person who has fought or is still fighting against overwhelming adversities. Second, sometimes the authors are accompanied by a sense of mission – using their example, they want to draw the attention of the scientific community to the position of women in general and perhaps initiate some changes in this way:
Having read an article in the weekly magazine Zielony Sztandar entitled ‘Competition for a Peasant’s Diary’, I envied the peasant that he would have the opportunity to express his pains and worries to someone, that he would be able to open his heart and thoughts to someone and confess what ails him, how he lives, works and how he copes in these difficult times. While no one will care about us women in the countryside, the wives of small farmers, no one will ask about anything, I decided to write something on behalf of not a thousand, but probably a million of these forgotten beings.
[Przeczytawszy w tygodniku ‘Zielony Sztandar’ artykuł p.n. Konkurs na „Pamiętnik Chłopa” pozazdrościłam temu chłopu, że będzie on miał okazję wyłożyć przed kimś swoje bóle i troski, że będzie mógł otworzyć przed kimś swoje serce i myśli i wyznać co mu dolega, jak żyje, pracuje i jak sobie radzi w tych ciężkich czasach. Podczas gdy o nas kobietach wiejskich, żonach drobnych rolników nikt się nie zatroszczy, nikt się o nic nie zapyta, postanowiłam w imieniu już nie tysiąca, ale chyba miljona tych zapomnianych istot napisać coś.]Footnote 45
It is necessary to be aware that such intentions may exaggerate the scale of their suffering or exaggerate in describing their husbands’ cruelty. At the same time, it is reasonable to assume that when family relations in property management did not deviate from the norm, the diarists did not write about it. They believed that they did not have anything interesting to say.
Secondly, memoirs written after the Second World War were censored and self-censored because of the political situation. The propaganda of the People’s Republic of Poland promoted an image of a strong, independent woman who did not hesitate to take up traditionally male challenges.Footnote 46 This may have led the authors to believe that it was necessary to emphasise equality themes or pass over topics incompatible with the party’s ideological line, such as the shortage of many goods, forced socialisation, and collectivisation of agriculture. Any mention of poverty, money shortages, or family violence could have been considered undesirable by the selection committee. Authors may have deliberately omitted them as inconvenient threads.
Despite the limitations that autobiographical sources impose on the researcher, it is possible to formulate conclusions about family relations in the peasant community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by reference to them. However, it is necessary to be aware of these limitations to avoid over-interpretation and extract relevant information from the diaries.
The male and female parts of the farm
Researchers of Polish social history emphasise the traditional division of roles in peasant families and the strong influence of tradition based on patriarchal patterns.Footnote 47 All family members were subordinated to the authority of the oldest man in the house; after marriage, the woman passed from her father’s rule to that of her husband and moved into her in-laws’ house or, on rare occasions when the young couple could afford it, into her husband’s house. The division of responsibilities in the household was strictly gendered. Women’s work was considered to be lighter and often not regarded as work at all. Only work in the fields that provided for the entire family deserved such a title.Footnote 48 However, according to a study by the economist Jan Curzytek in the 1930s, a woman was much more burdened with duties on a farm than a man, and she spent on average 500 more hours per year working.Footnote 49 Women’s duties included housework (cleaning the cottage and farmyard, cooking, producing dairy products for sale and personal use, washing and repairing clothes), taking care of children and other dependent family members, caring for animals (feeding and washing animals, raising poultry, milking cows; only grazing was the children’s responsibility), cultivating the garden and helping with field work during harvest and harvesting root crops, as well as planting and weeding them. Women were also responsible for selling the produce of their subordinate sectors of the farm and could manage the money thus earned. This was usually spent on the purchase of goods they could not produce themselves, such as salt, kerosene, matches, clothing, and some household appliances.Footnote 50 A woman’s competence therefore did not extend beyond her designated role in this respect – money from the female part of the farm was spent on running it. On the other hand, men made the decisions that were significant from the point of view of the whole family – regarding the purchase or sale of land, animals, agricultural equipment, construction of houses and farm buildings.Footnote 51 Villagers’ recollections confirm this state of affairs: ‘the father did the farming the older brothers helped him. And the mother took care of the house and the livestock [ojciec zajmował się rolnictwem starsi bracia mu pomagali. A matka zajmowała się domem i inwentarzem]’;Footnote 52 ‘I used to sell the surplus eggs in the store, and there was money for the kitchen [nadwyżki jaj sprzedawałam w sklepie i były pieniądze na kuchnię]’;Footnote 53 ‘my mother-in-law bought a refrigerator with the money from the eggs [z pieniędzy za jajka teściowa kupiła sobie lodówkę]’.Footnote 54 The last passage refers to the 1960s.
However, Zofia Wygodzina, a social activist involved in work in rural areas, noted in 1916 that despite the division into the man’s part of the farm (implicitly: the central part of the farm) and the woman’s part of the farm [gospodarstwo babskie],Footnote 55 a man had the right to see a woman’s expenses. It was up to a husband to make the most important decisions, also when they concerned his wife’s part of the farm.Footnote 56 Perhaps both spouses consulted on major purchases, but rural women’s recollections do not confirm this.
The male dominance in managing household finances manifested itself in the language used by the memoir writers. When talking about investments undertaken or repayment of debts, they use masculine forms: ‘grandfather tried to modernise the farm [dziadek starał się modernizować gospodarstwo]’;Footnote 57 ‘father paid them off as much as he could [ojciec ich pospłacał jak mógł]’;Footnote 58 ‘grandfather invested a lot [dziadek dużo inwestował]’.Footnote 59
From a linguistic point of view, diary no. 3 from the Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development collections is fascinating. Writing about the management of the farm, the author used singular forms of the verb: I sold, I bought, I took a loan:Footnote 60 ‘I managed to get a loan [udało mi się załatwić kredyt]’.Footnote 61 On the other hand, in the passages dealing with family matters, he wrote in the plural: ‘we began efforts to adopt [rozpoczęliśmy starania o adopcję]’Footnote 62 ‘we brought our dream two kids into our home [przywieźliśmy do naszego domu nasze wymarzone dwie pociechy]’.Footnote 63 In this case, the manner of telling is more saturated with meaning than the content of the memoirs themselves. The fact that the author presents himself as the sole manager of the farm, and includes his wife in his narrative only in the context of family life, indicates an internalisation of the traditional division of roles. This way of phrasing sentences also suggests that the woman did not have a strong voice concerning the farm in this family. Instead, in matters concerning the family, decisions were made by agreement of both spouses. It is worth mentioning that the diary was written in 2018, and the phrases quoted refer to the 1980s and 1990s. A thorough analysis of the memoirs of the rural population since the beginning of the twentieth century would make it possible to demonstrate the persistence of specific structures and trace the dynamics of their changes.
Many recollections written down by rural women confirm the operation of the traditional division of responsibilities and two budgets within a single household. This information often appears in the context of a man’s violation of this order or a negative evaluation of his financial decisions. Thus, in both cases, the female authors of the memoirs formulate a complaint against the husband or another man acting as the head of the family (for example, father-in-law, brother).
Women often complained about their husband’s ineptitude in managing the household budget, but because of the power relations in the family, they tended not to question his decisions. One memoirist cites her mother’s recollections:
Even today I often hear stories about my father from my mother – ‘I used to work with him, I only worked like a horse he didn’t do his job, he only went with Walko, various Lis, Duraks … and other fools to break Russian monopolies and it’s a wonder he didn’t get his head blown off … he was supposed to manage well? I was overworked.
[Jeszcze dziś nasłucham się dość często od matki opowiadań o ojcu – ‘użyła ja z nim, napracowałam się tylko jak koń on się nie przyłożył do roboty, latał tylko z Walkiem, rozmaitymi Lisami, Durakami … i innemi głupkami rozbijać monopole rosyjskie i dziwne, że jemu gdzie łba nie urwały … on dopiero miał dobrze gospodarować? Zapracowałam się’.]Footnote 64
Not much is known about this family, but from the fragment quoted it seems that the husband was involved in conspiratorial activities during the partition period. Because of this, he neglected his farm duties, which automatically fell on his wife’s shoulders. Many similar accounts can also be found in postwar memoirs, where women described their struggle to maintain the entire household, neglected by their husbandsFootnote 65 (often due to alcoholism, which I will discuss later).
Particularly moving are the accounts of two women: an emigrant living in the United States, born in 1886, and a housewife from Mazovia region, born in 1904. Their biographies link the fact that they could not count on the support of their husbands, who used physical and economic violence against them. The first of these women rented rooms to workers and earned money as a landlady, but her husband controlled the finances. But according to the author he did not fulfil this task properly.
I only have four peasants, but even with them I can earn a lot of money, if only he let me count the books. He was very clever, but he was very weak and sluggish and only listened to the peasants, not to me. With shouting and quarrelling I tore out those accounts from him and showed the peasants where they had robbed him, how many bottles of beer I wrote down, and how many they told him that they had only taken so much. The more conscientious peasants told him you have a good woman, but you are stupid.
[mam już tylko czterech chłopów ale i przy nich można dużo zarobić żeby on mi pozwolił rachować książki. On był bardzo mądry, ale wielki niedołęga i ospały i tylko chłopów słuchał nie mnie. Krzykiem i kłótnią wydzierałam mu te rachunki i pokazuję chłopom gdzie go okradli, piwa wiele flaszek ja zapisywałam a wile oni mu mówili, że tylko tyle a tyle nabrali. Sumienniejsi chłopi mówili mu masz dobrą babę tylko ty głupi, zaczęło się wypędzanie chłopów i mnie z niemi bo ja się z niemi trzymam.] Footnote 66
The fact that the author resorted to ‘shouting and arguing’ to assert her rights proves her extraordinary determination. Elsewhere in her memoirs she writes about the rules of marital life that were instilled in her: ‘the words of a priest come to my mind – be obedient to your husband, words I heard from old people, girls, never start quarrels at home and you will be fine, do not tell what is going on in your house, I try to stick to it [na myśl mi przychodzą słowa księdza – bądź posłuszną mężowi, słowa zasłyszane u starych ludzi dziewczęta nigdy nie zaczynajcie kłótni w domu a będzie wam dobrze nie rozpowiadajcie co się w waszem domu dzieje, ja staram się tego trzymać]’.Footnote 67 The values instilled in the author by the traditional rural communities of prewar Poland undoubtedly constituted an obstacle to her expressing her opposition to her husband. His behaviour (physical violence, disrespect, not taking his wife’s opinion into account in decision-making, lack of love for the children), however, led her to break the model of a good wife and to fight for her family’s survival.
The other housewife, a dweller of Mazovia, struggled with similar problems. In her recollections, she emphasises her husband’s lack of commitment:
Mine were only the children here. I was the only one who had to take care of the bread. And my husband felt independent, he had no responsibilities towards the family he had created. Although I worked beyond my strength, I planted, sowed, dug – all by myself, and my husband took the money. … I, like a slave deprived of all rights, was only to do the work. Even for my tedious work, like the napkins I embroidered in the evenings for a wealthy neighbour, my husband secretly took the money and lost it. … And sometimes I found out that they had sold my chickens, my only means of livelihood.
[Moje to tu były tylko dzieci. To wyłącznie ja musiałam się troszczyć o chleb. A mąż czuł się samodzielny, nie miał żadnych obowiązków wobec rodziny założonej przez siebie. Chociaż pracowałam ponad siły, sadziłam, siałam, kopałam – wszystko sama, a pieniądze to zabierał mąż. … Ja tylko, jak niewolnik pozbawiony wszelkich praw, byłam do roboty. Nawet za moją żmudną pracę, jak za wyhaftowane przeze mnie wieczorami serwetki dla zamożnej sąsiadki, mąż po kryjomu odebrał i stracił pieniądze. … A niekiedy dowiadywałam się, że sprzedawali moje kury, jedyny do mojej dyspozycji środek utrzymania.] Footnote 68
The author’s husband spends money on alcohol and gives it to his parents, leaving his wife and children destitute. Even though she is the family’s sole breadwinner (she works in the fields, builds the house, and fulfils all male duties), the woman has no way to exclude her husband from managing the household budget. Such measures were not foreseen within traditional peasant culture.Footnote 69 It was only after the war that the spouses decided to separate, which is a sign of the moral changes taking place in the countryside. However, the woman did not apply for a divorce, and the husband, leaving, took half of the property that she had earned.
Rural women recorded many similar stories. Not all of them are so drastic, of course. Nevertheless, physical violence and lack of access to decision-making about family matters were the everyday reality for many women during the period under study. Descriptions of women’s hard work on the farm are also widespread. It is not easy to find a memoir in which this theme does not appear. This proves the economic disadvantage of women, who did not have the right to decide about their money or this right was limited despite their considerable amount of work. It is worth noting here that in many memoirs, especially those written after the Second World War, women also described good marital and family relations.Footnote 70 The man’s domination in managing household finances was not perceived by women as a form of discrimination as long as the husband fulfilled the traditionally assigned duties. It was only when the budget was mismanaged or the customary division of roles was violated that women very painfully felt their limitation in deciding the household’s future. The sense of injustice and helplessness resulting from women being deprived of their right to decide on essential family matters may be the reason for such a large number of diaries describing extreme behaviour. The authors may have been strongly motivated to participate in the contest by the desire to express their opinions and complain on the memoir’s pages. The more so because, as was customary, they could not complain about their husbands to neighbours or relatives.Footnote 71
Women’s memoirs point to the established dominant role of the man in the family, which should not come as a surprise given the traditional peasant culture in Central and Eastern Europe. However, it is worth noting inequalities in the burden of responsibilities and income distribution. Rural women’s accounts show that if the husband neglected his duties, the woman maintained the family and did all the work on the farm.Footnote 72 In extreme cases, the husband took the money earned by his wife and spent it at his discretion. In most households, however, these funds were used to meet the needs of family members, with the woman’s needs coming last.Footnote 73 In women’s memoirs, the popular idiomatic expression ‘take away from somebody’s mouth’Footnote 74 often appears, expressing readiness to make the most significant sacrifices to satisfy the needs of other family members, especially children. Scholars define this attitude as compulsory altruism,Footnote 75 one aspect of women’s responsibility for alleviating material shortages.
Women as managers of poverty
Zofia Wygodzina, mentioned above, noted that the farmer had the right to control the benefits from the female part of the farm as long as they were substantial. In the case of a low income, the money was at the woman’s disposal.Footnote 76 Diary accounts do not fully confirm this observation. In fact, it happened that men took the money earned by women, but this was met with resistance by the housewives, who interpreted it as a violation of the rules. Even if they did not have enough determination to oppose their husbands openly, they criticised his behaviour in the pages of their memoirs. However, observation is relevant to the phenomenon of a woman taking over the management of the household budget when it is too small to manage it freely. In this way, the woman enters the role of poverty manager, as Ruth Lister described it.Footnote 77
The feminisation of poverty was identified at the end of the 1970s,Footnote 78 and in Poland, it received increased attention in the late 1990s.Footnote 79 Sociological and economic research indicates that women bore the main responsibility for making ends meet when resources were scarce.Footnote 80 However, taking over these responsibilities from the husband did not mean assuming the position of head of the family, and the hardship associated with organising scarce resources meant an additional burden for women.Footnote 81 It did not, however, go hand in hand with an expansion of power. The observations made on the grounds of sociological research can be applied to Polish society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The content of peasant diaries confirms the findings of researchers on the feminisation of poverty.
The experience of poverty is one of the main themes taken up by participants in the 1933 competition of the Institute of Social Economics. The organisers encouraged this theme in the contest announcement, as the 1930s was a period when the Polish countryside was struggling with the effects of a severe economic crisis.Footnote 82 Farmers often quoted prices of individual products,Footnote 83 complained about price scissorsFootnote 84 and high taxes,Footnote 85 and even presented a breakdown of farm income and expenses.Footnote 86 The women’s memoirs submitted for this competition do not contain such detailed information. Nevertheless, the authors reveal their knowledge about the costs of running the farm, taxes and prices of agricultural produce,Footnote 87 which indicates their involvement in managing the farm budget. One of the housewives wrote: ‘What my husband neglected I tried to fix. I started vegetable farming, which was quite successful on our land, I reared calves, sowed flax and made linen, in short, I worked as hard as I could. [Co zaniedbał mąż to ja starałam się naprawić. Zaprowadziłam warzywnictwo, które na naszej ziemi niezgorzej się udawało, chowałam cielęta, siałam len i wyrabiałam płótno, słowem pracowałam, jak tylko mogłam.]’Footnote 88 This account indicates that the woman was much more involved in raising money. Although she mentioned elsewhere in her diary that ‘both my husband and I worked’, when she lists the family’s sources of income, she limits herself to traditionally female spheres: selling vegetables and dairy products.Footnote 89
A graduate of an agricultural school gives an interesting account. After graduation, she convinced her parents (not without difficulty) to change the usual ways of cultivating the land. The author lived in her father’s house and got educated thanks to the help of social organisations (money was not spent on girls’ education, especially in low-income families, as such an expense was considered excessive).Footnote 90 Some fragments of her memoirs suggest that she had the money she earned herself:
The seeds for the competition were bought by the organisation, which allocated a certain amount of money for this purpose. The harvest from the field gave me the opportunity to buy gardening seeds for the following year, subscribe to a newspaper, or buy a useful book.
[Nasiona kapusty konkursowej zakupiła organizacja, która asygnowała pewną kwotę na ten cel, rzeczywiście ten zbieg okoliczności na który oczekiwałam przyczynił się dodatnio na bieg spraw moich związanych z gospodarstwem na przyszłość. Plon z poletka dawał mi możność nabycia nasion ogrodniczych na rok następny, prenumeratę jakiejś gazetki, kupno pożytecznej książki.]Footnote 91
It is worth noting that the author had not yet started her own family, so she had more freedom to spend money on her own needs. On the other hand, she wrote about the times of increased crisis (in the 1930s) that she endured ‘all difficulties in life together with her father’.Footnote 92 This may suggest that the money she raised went into the joint budget in worse times. Moreover, considering that her family consisted of six people who undoubtedly also experienced the effects of poverty, the author writing about ‘difficulties shared with her father’ must have had in mind those related to running the farm. It can therefore be assumed that she had an important advisory function on the farm.
Although very different in many respects, the relations I have cited are linked by the woman’s involvement in managing the household budget. On the one hand, there is the housewife who, in the face of her husband’s insufficient involvement in earning a livelihood, takes on the task herself. The woman in this situation has no choice but to shoulder the responsibilities neglected by the man, because the family’s livelihood depends on it. These kinds of life stories are quite common. On the other hand, we have an educated girl who has an advisory role on the farm. Her involvement in farm management was determined by the competencies she acquired in an agricultural school. She pushes forward innovative ideas to increase agricultural productivity and thus help her family out of poverty. There are few such stories, especially from the period before the outbreak of the Second World War.
It is important to emphasise that both authors derive their income from the female part of the farm. Although they both help their husbands or fathers with field work, when for various reasons the income from agricultural production is insufficient to support the family, they put their energies into growing vegetables and raising dairy cows. This feminine activity makes it possible to acquire additional sources of livelihood or at least food products for personal consumption. Women’s entry into the male role is thus illusory. It turns out that when the male areas of agriculture do not bring in sufficient income, women step up their efforts in their own field of activity. Their management of the household budget is a consequence of the fact that it is made up of money customarily managed by the housewife, not the farmer. Because of strongly held beliefs about the separateness of masculine and feminine responsibilities, a man taking control of the garden or dairy income could be interpreted in terms of dishonour. As I have already noted, such cases occurred, and were probably not at all uncommon, but they were seen as a disruption of the age-old order. Moreover, this kind of situation often occurred in dysfunctional families,Footnote 93 and therefore, despite its frequency, it can be considered a kind of aberration.
There was a widespread belief that doing women’s work was a disgrace to men.Footnote 94 Women’s paid work was treated as a necessity when men’s income was insufficient, but it did not increase women’s authority in the family.Footnote 95 Even if the money from the female part was crucial for the maintenance of the household, the work done by the woman was not considered important. In families with limited resources, everything was spent on meeting basic needs, so women’s financial decisions remained limited to the kitchen, home, and farmyard realm. This is probably the reason for the lack of involvement on the part of men, who even in studies from the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries showed a tendency to relinquish budget management when it was modestFootnote 96 and were more willing to give women command in spheres they considered less important.Footnote 97 Managing the budget under such conditions should be seen as an additional burden rather than a privilege. Women’s traditional responsibilities were augmented by wage labour and organisational work geared toward the efficient management of scarce resources.
Women’s resourcefulness in managing a modest budget manifested itself in thrifty use of reserves (often accompanied by resignation from satisfying their own needs), undertaking additional gainful employment or intensifying work on their own farms: ‘the father liked to drink, but the mother argued with the father about it, and she herself was hard-working and thrifty, so somehow it evened out [ojciec lubił popić, lecz matka robiła o to awantury ojcu, a sama była pracowita i oszczędna, przeto jakoś się wyrównywało]’;Footnote 98 ‘mother was somehow able to manage these things, so the milk and eggs were her own, and there was no need to sell it all [matka jakoś umiała tymi rzeczami gospodarzyć, tak że mleko, jajka były swoje i nie było potrzeby, aby to wszystko sprzedawać]’;Footnote 99 ‘whatever my husband did, I also did, because when winter came, my husband would leave the house for days, and I had to look after the farm and the children [co robił mąż, to robiłam również i ja, bo jak nadeszła zima, to mąż wychodził z domu na całe dnie, a ja musiałam pilnować gospodarstwa i dzieci]’;Footnote 100 ‘after my sister died, I was left alone with my brother-in-law, who drank even more, sold everything in the house and chased me to work [po śmierci siostry zostałam sama ze szwagrem, który pił jeszcze więcej, co było w domu, to sprzedawał, a mnie gonił do roboty]’.Footnote 101
Significantly, men show helplessness in the face of deprivation. One woman wrote that ‘we had to do something extra’Footnote 102 but did not specify who took the extra work and what it consisted of. Most diarists indicate that in a situation of poverty, men withdrew – either there was no information about them taking constructive action, or they found succour in alcoholism. The withdrawal of men from this area was sanctioned by tradition. However, it can also be assumed that economic failure was a problematic situation for peasants to accept. In the absence of alternative sources of livelihood, a sense of helplessness may have led to a desire to detach from reality. In the conditions of the Polish countryside, this most often meant regularly getting into a state of alcoholic intoxication.Footnote 103 The problem of coupling poverty with alcoholism still appeared in studies on Polish villages at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuriesFootnote 104 and often recurred in memoirs from the period of the People’s Republic of Poland.Footnote 105 Men’s alcoholism, which the female authors interpret as irresponsibility, immaturity, and lack of involvement in household matters, may have resulted from a deep sense of helplessness and shame coming from failure to fulfil traditional male duties, among which family maintenance came to the fore. However, the man’s escape into addiction added to the housewife’s misery and was an additional challenge for her, especially when it involved the depletion of family’s property.
Symbolic power
In a situation of poverty, it was women’s responsibility to generate additional income; they were responsible for making ends meet. This responsibility resulted in additional tasks for women: producing and selling dairy products, sewing and repairing clothes themselves, preparing cheap but time-consuming meals, asking for support from family or neighbours. Women were also the last to meet their own needs, looking after the welfare of children, husband and animals first: ‘The day is divided in my case into short sleep and working hours chasing each other: feeding, cooking gruel, running a kitchen for many people, daily laundry, cleaning. The constant carrying of buckets of water and peat. [Doba dzieli się u mnie na krótki sen i godziny pracy, w którym gonią się nawzajem: karmienie, gotowanie kleiku, prowadzenie kuchni dla wielu osób, codzienne pranie, sprzątanie. Ciągłe noszenie wiader wody i torfu.]’Footnote 106
Anna Titkow called this type of organisation of work at home and management of an insufficient budget ‘managerial matriarchy’.Footnote 107 In her opinion, in the communist countries of Eastern Europe, success in the organisational field was a source of satisfaction and a sense of domination for women. The feeling of superiority was supposed to stem from the conviction of being the ‘indispensable manager of family life’ – the person who makes ends meet, who devotes all her time and energy to tasks that are often beyond the capacity of a single person.Footnote 108 ‘Managerial matriarchy’ thus gave women a sense of power,Footnote 109 and studies of rural communities in the 1980s showed an actual increase in the position of women in the family.Footnote 110 It is worth noting that the increase in the importance of women did not result only from them taking over the management of household finances (such a model became widespread in Poland at the end of the twentieth century),Footnote 111 but it was also influenced by changes occurring after the Second World War. It must not be forgotten that the progressive equalisation of rights and social status between men and women also contributed to changes in power relations within the family. Without a remodelling of the way of thinking about the role of women in the family and society as a whole, an increase in their position would not have been possible. However, although Titkow referred in her research to the period of the People’s Republic of Poland, when almost every Polish family was struggling with the problem of a shortage of basic goods, the phenomena she described correspond with the style of budget management in poor rural families before the outbreak of the Second World War.
In the period I am interested in, the perception of a woman’s place in the world was strictly defined. Although enfranchisement and the spread of education (also for girls) initiated specific changes in this respect, they progressed so slowly that it is difficult to capture their impact on the actual position of wives and mothers in rural families. In the interwar period, one can observe the formation of the foundations of a model in which the housewife manages the budget and organises work in the home and on the farm according to the family’s economic interests. However, in this context it is difficult to speak of a ‘matriarchy’ as a form of extension of a woman’s field of power. As has been already stressed many times, budget management was an additional burden for rural women, which was not followed by an increase in their authority in the family. However, they received a kind of compensation in the form of a sense of a job well done and moral superiority over men. This phenomenon differed from ‘managerial matriarchy’ in that the feeling of superiority was not accompanied by a sense of power, let alone an actual increase in the authority of housewives.
The authors of the memoirs wrote of total dedication to the welfare of the family: ‘I had to stay (in my in-laws’ house) and continue to torment myself [musiałam zostać i męczyć się nadal]’;Footnote 112 ‘I was the only one who had to take care of bread [wyłącznie ja musiałam się troszczyć o chleb]’;Footnote 113 ‘I also had to think about everything [musiałam też o wszystkim myśleć]’;Footnote 114 ‘I don’t care about myself at all, I deny myself everything except tears, just to relieve the plight of the child [nie dbam wcale o siebie, odmawiam sobie wszystkiego oprócz łez, byle tylko ulżyć doli dziecka]’.Footnote 115 When reading women’s diaries, one can often hear them complaining about their fate, but at the same time one can read between the lines that their authors had nothing to reproach themselves for. Sometimes they explained their failures by objective factors or insurmountable difficulties. The memoirists were aware of their position and were able to notice failures, but at the same time they interpreted their role as the most important (and sometimes the only) support of the family. They were aware of the importance of their work, contrary to men’s belief that it was light and unimportant.
The traditional system of values binding in the Polish countryside in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was primarily based on Roman Catholic teaching, and religion occupied an important place in the life of local communities.Footnote 116 The model of a good mother and wife propagated by the Church, modelled on the figure of the Virgin Mary,Footnote 117 included praise for modesty, devotion, and sacrificing one’s ambitions on the altar of the family. A woman was also expected to be a guardian of morality, setting an example for her children and, if possible, dissuading her husband from sin.Footnote 118 The Church, therefore, assigned mothers and wives a crucial function – that of transmitters and guardians of religious tradition. This gave them independenceFootnote 119 and recognition in the religious sphere and gave their work and daily duties a value and meaning that they were denied in everyday life.Footnote 120 The Church and religion thus became an area for women to compensate for their unsatisfied need for recognition and respect. As Andrzej Leder noted, this bond between women and the Church enabled a strengthening of their position and the formation of a ‘psychological matriarchy’. It was based on strengthening the position of women in the family by giving them authority over children and men in the area of morality; wives and mothers had the exclusive right to decide what was morally right and what was not.Footnote 121 This interpretation seems accurate, although the recollections of rural women do not support it. Probably they were not aware of the functioning of the mechanism described. It is worth remembering that seeking comfort in religion was for them such a natural and obvious activity that they did not give it a thought. Only some of the authors paid attention to the function of the Church in upholding the traditional division of roles:
a woman in the countryside is too religious to seek her rights, and although such a husband mistreats her in the cruellest way, she considers it a godsend, endures it all with admirable resignation and waits patiently for death to free her from this torment.
[kobieta na wsi jest na szukanie swoich praw za religijna i choć taki mąż znęca się w najokrutniejszy sposób nad nią, ona to uważa za dopust Boży, znosi to wszystko z podziwu godną rezygnacją i czeka cierpliwie, aż ją śmierć z tych mąk wyzwoli.]Footnote 122
Thus, some women were aware of the Church’s role in sanctioning an unjust order, but they did not perceive the compensatory function of religion (or did not address this topic in the pages of their memoirs). It is worth adding that the ‘psychological matriarchy’ was independent of the duties performed by the woman. It was conditioned only by her inferior position in relation to her husband and the scale of her suffering and sacrifice for the good of the family.
Sources researched indicate that the foundations of a model of household budget management by the woman began to take shape at the beginning of the twentieth century. This phenomenon mainly concerned low-income families, so women with modest means perceived this situation as an additional burden. This responsibility was not associated with a sense of power and agency; on the contrary, the authors write rather about a sense of injustice and powerlessness. Thus, in the period under study, based on the ‘psychological matriarchy’ complex, which grants women competence in the family’s religious life, a ‘managerial matriarchy’ begins to germinate, expanding women’s sphere of influence to include patching up holes in an insufficient budget. However, it is not yet possible to speak of an actual increase in the importance of women in the family.
Summary
Contrary to the opinion expressed by some historians and cultural studies scholars about the relatively strong, privileged position of Polish women in the family, rural women’s diaries provide examples of their subordination to men in patriarchally organised societies. The memoirs of rural women are full of bitterness resulting from the recognition of their subordination, lack of decision-making power and ability to act, as well as descriptions of violence suffered from husbands, brothers, and in-laws. The factors that were supposed to sanction women’s authority – appreciation of the role of a mother, wives taking over their husbands’ duties, economic activity, taking care of the handing down of traditions – gave women power in a symbolic dimension. However, this did not translate into an actual increase in the authority and capacity of peasant women to act.
Analysis of the memoirs regarding the division of responsibilities for managing the household budget showed that homemakers controlled household finances only in the most impoverished families. This was because income from farming (the male sector of the farm) was insufficient, so the family subsisted on the traditionally female branches of agriculture: gardening and dairy production. Women therefore managed the money, which in wealthy families was also at the disposal of the housewives. Moreover, control over finances did not bring authority or empowerment within the family but only constituted an additional burden and source of stress, especially in families affected by alcoholism.
In this challenging situation, women sought consolation in the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings, stressing the importance of self-sacrifice. This narrative strengthened peasant women’s conviction of their moral superiority over men and gave meaning to their work by performing an important compensatory function. It is possible that it was due to a specific sense of mission that women could perform work that was sometimes beyond the capacity of a single person. The conviction of moral dominance did not translate into a sense of power; rather the authors of the memoirs wrote about powerlessness and helplessness in the face of authoritarian husbands. ‘Symbolic matriarchy’ only marginally counterbalanced the omnipresent patriarchy in social life.
It was not until the 1980s that the position of women in Polish families began to strengthen as a result of the spread of a model in which the wife takes care of household finances.Footnote 123 In an economy of scarcity, women proved to be better organisers and more efficient planners than men, which, combined with cultural changes and tendencies to equalise women’s and men’s rights, translated into an actual increase in housewives’ power in families. However, household chores were still considered unimportant,Footnote 124 and men relinquished control over the household budget because they found the task too demanding.Footnote 125 This indicates the persistence of cultural patterns that are changing in a non-dynamic way.Footnote 126
