Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
in works for adults and for children and traces patterns of “girling,” the socialization of girls into the role of a future Polish American woman and mother. The early works within this genre seem much less disruptive to the patriarchal status quo than the adult narratives. For the most part, they equate Polish ethnic identity with strong working-class identification and promote traditional Roman Catholic family ideology. Narratives that provide models of empowerment for working-class girls do not appear until the late twentieth century. The effects that social class has on the construction of gendered ethnicity are particularly visible in World War II stories about empowered and assertive upper-class girls.
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Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction seeks to augment the historical and sociological analysis of Polish immigrant and ethnic women with a discussion of gender and ethnic constructs offered by literature, particularly in long and short fiction published after World War II. By highlighting the boundaries of gender, ethnicity, race, socioeconomic class, community, and nation within discursive contexts of both the ethnic and mainstream cultures of American diversity, ethnic fiction reveals a complex female construct that draws from both Polish and American traditions and represents its own brand of feminism. This literary gender construct amplifies the negative effects on ethnic women not only of the American objectification of their bodies within a tightly controlled patriarchy, but also of the trifurcated Polish social-class legacy: of peasant fatalism defined by passivity and piety; of the intelligentsia’s model of heroism and patriotism embedded in the Matka-Polka ideal;84 and, finally, of the communist model of a superwoman seamlessly combining a public-sphere career with a private-sphere devotion to family.85 At the same time, the Polish American gender discourse is further complicated by American social and political turbulence of the last eighty years. Much of Polish American fiction focuses on the tensions brought on by such compounded Polish and American pressures bearing down on women and presents numerous acts of resistance, rebellion, and defiance that allow ethnic women to achieve visibility, empowerment, and self-actualization within a hostile environment of double marginalization due to both gender and ethnicity.
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Faces of Resistance
Monica Krawczyk’s Immigrant Women
MONICA KRAWCZYK’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS a short story writer and her commitment to introducing the lives of Polish immigrant women to mainstream American readers, as well as to giving voice to the ethnic subaltern, secure for her a prominent position in the story of Polish American literature and identify her as the first popularizer of Polish immigrant women’s narratives in America. Even though Polish immigrant fiction flourished in the United States both in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as eloquently argued by Karen Majewski in her monograph, Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939, these immigrant texts were mostly inaccessible to the wide reading audience as they were published exclusively in Polish and distributed only within ethnic communities. Monica Krawczyk (1887–1954) took the ethnic narrative out of the insular communities and, as one of the first Polish American writers, broke into the American mass-circulation journal and magazine market. Beginning in the early 1930s, she published her work in a variety of popular periodicals such as Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, Journal of National Education, Canadian Home Journal, Country Home, Farm Journal, The Farmer’s Wife, Minnesota Quarterly, and others.1 Born to a working-class family of Polish immigrants, Joseph Kowalewski and Anastasia Fortunska Kowalewska,2 who settled in Minnesota in the late 1800s,3 Krawczyk defied gender, ethnic, and class stereotypes to succeed as a published author, a teacher, and a social worker whose life became defined by her devotion to everything Polish. In Winona, Minnesota, she worked with Polish American youngsters within a parochial-school setting to produce theatrical performances, and was the first one to organize “Polish classes at the University.”4 Even though Krawczyk did not receive any grants from private foundations or the Federal Writers’ Project, the early stage of her writing career coincided with and may have been helped by the interest generated through the government-sponsored insurgence of writing by minority women, often women of color, who “revealed different cultures to the mainstream American reading public . . . [and] wrote books about their history, folklore, and customs.”5 Krawczyk’s focus on female characters within the Polish or Polish American milieu persisted throughout her whole writing career, which spanned almost a quarter of a century from the early 1930s until her death in 1954. It is impossible to overestimate Monica Krawczyk’s role as a pioneer of Polish American literature in English who educated her American readers about being ethnic and who became a crucial bridge between pre– and post–World War II sensibilities. Her narratives reflect her understanding of what much later Judith Butler would call “women’s common subjugated experience.”6 Krawczyk’s immigrant or ethnic women struggle with double marginalization, both from the mainstream American culture, where the economic hardships of the Great Depression “underwrote a reemphasis on women’s domestic roles as wives and mothers,”7 and from the Polish strongly patriarchal and Roman Catholic culture that endorsed similarly rigid gender roles. For her ethnicized or even racialized women, gender is not performed in a vacuum, but intersects with constructions of urban or rural working-class as well as ethno-racial and heterosexual identity.8
In 1950, the Polanie Club of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, a cultural organization of Polish American women of which Krawczyk was a founding member, collected her best short fiction and published If the Branch Blossoms and Other Stories. In his introduction to this collection, Eric P. Kelly situates Krawczyk’s writing among the work of literary women of her generation such as Amy Lowell and Willa Cather and identifies her as a literary heir to Sarah Orne Jewett, “whose earlier stories cling as much to Anglo-Saxon trends as do Mrs. Krawczyk’s to Polish.”9 Likewise, Krawczyk’s sensitivity in constructing women characters anticipates the narratives of Tillie Olsen, who just like Krawczyk was a child of European immigrants, although her Jewish parents came from Russia and not from Poland. Olsen’s short stories, such as “Tell Me a Riddle” and “I Stand Here Ironing,” are populated by women who look back to the turbulent 1930s and 1940s as they consider their attempts to resist the forces that make them forgo their own needs and “move to the rhythms of others.”10 Although Krawczyk’s stories offer much more optimistic messages than Olsen’s narratives, the value of female resistance for both authors rests in the conscious effort to defy, and not necessarily in defiance’s ultimate success, which may after all be unattainable.
Cover of If the Branch Blossoms and Other Stories (1950)
Eric P. Kelly believes that Krawczyk does not “build her stories in epic form,”11 but feels most comfortable within a domestic story, often set in a severely restricted space of a kitchen or a couple of small rooms. Yet, her characters, Polish immigrant or Polish American ethnic women, are anything but small. Edith Blicksilver calls them “visionaries” who “link the traditions and superstitions of the old country with the new,”12 while Thomas S. Gladsky characterizes them as “adaptable, persuasive, independent, future minded, and persistent.”13 They are quicker than men to construct a new self and to respond to their new, foreign environment. These assertions of female power notwithstanding, Gladsky surprisingly sees Krawczyk’s texts as strong proponents of “traditional values.”14 However, a close analysis of Krawczyk’s construction of gender suggests that her stories may be more subversive than previously thought, even though she works within and conforms to the gender discourse promoted by the mass-market periodicals she published in, which “were overwhelmingly domestic in orientation, emphasizing women’s roles as ‘professional’ housewives . . . [and in which] women were assumed to be wives and mothers, or aspiring to this ‘exalted’ condition.”15 In many of her narratives, it is apparent that domesticity becomes a contested ground where masculinist values are challenged rather than endorsed. On this ground, female characters engage in a struggle for personal fulfillment, autonomy, and individual development against the restrictions imposed on them by their