Kręte ścieżki feminizmu

Abstract

The world feminism started in the USA with the women’s struggle for a better pay and working conditions. Transplanted to Europe, and subsequently to the Soviet Union by the communist Clara Zetkin, it promptly died out there, since Soviet women had been made equal with men as for their duties. From then on for numerous decades the aspirations of women, including female artists in Western societies, proved incompatible with the expectations of women within the ‘Eastern Bloc’. This gap was visible already during the role-assigning in WW II, as well as in the means of paying tribute to women’s heroism and their symbolic, or maybe allegoric functioning in social awareness, the latter shaped both by the propaganda and the media and art that came from men’s ateliers. In the post-WW II decades, until the late 1980s, the differences in the approach to goals and means between the conventionally-conceived West and East were still visible. This can be traced on the example of the oeuvre of Polish women artists and their activity in the decades following WW II. It was only after the transformation that Polish women artists-feminists joined in the international discourse, yet maintaining references to their domestic social and political realities, again different from the West, at the same time overcoming subsequent cultural taboos rooted in the collective hypocrisies.