Unawareness and Expertise: Acquiring Knowledge about Sexuality in Postwar Poland

Abstract

I n a n I n t e r v I e w c o n d u c t e d I n 2018 , Elżbieta, a female laboratory technician born in 1961 and living in the large industrial city of Łódź in central Poland, narrated her experience of sex education: “When I was fourteen or fifteen the famous book Sztuka kochania [Art of love] was published. And during winter holidays, it so happened that the secondary school pupils did a work placement at a press, and each of us got a copy. So the four of us [who did the placement], two boys, a girl, and myself, had the book, and we lent it out as well. It had influence. Of course, our parents did not know what kind of a book it was. We considered it to be forbidden fruit, because we were still underaged.”1 Individual and collective interaction with expert literature was central to Elżbieta’s narrative of how she acquired sexual knowledge. This article examines personal narratives of formal and informal sex education by two generations of Poles, the first coming of age in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the second approximating to their children’s generation. We argue that the state-supported expertization of sexuality and reproduction played an important role in the development of sexual identities among Polish men and women during the second half of the twentieth century. We demonstrate how, from the 1950s onward, knowledge about the sexual body began and continued to be framed as valuable and symptomatic of modernity, as well as necessary for personal and familial happiness. The