Industrializací za rovnoprávnost polských žen
Through industrialization for equality of Polish women

Summary/Abstract: Fidelis, Małgorzata: Kobiety, komunizm i industrializacja w powojennej Polsce. Translated from English by Maria Jaszurowska. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo W. A. B., 2015,366 pp., ISBN 978-83-280-1532-6. The book by the Professor of the Illinois University in Chicago was originally published in English under the title Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and deals with the journey toward women’s emancipation in post-war Poland in the context of the socio-economic development in the country. She focuses on the process of socialist industrialization, which involved mass employment of particularly country women in industrial enterprises, including mines and heavy industry factories. However, the independence and new lifestyle of young female workers were also causing moral criticism, which was combined with a rejection of the previous policy in the process of de-Stalinization after 1956. As a result, women were forced out to more traditional and less paid professions. According to the reviewer, the authoress not only offers new information, partly based on oral history, but places it into an appropriate context and presents it in an unconventional manner. At the same time, she does not provide an a priori assessment of the efforts to radically resolve the women’s issue in Poland before 1956, but attempts to understand them in a comprehensive manner and provide their historical interpretation.

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