WOMEN OF POLAND
In the great family of the Slavic races the Poles are preeminent by
their ancient civilization, their genius, and their literary and
artistic activity. Their ancient history, like that of most other
nations, is lost in a confused mass of legends, but the rich treasures
of their ancient popular songs reveal to us, largely, their old cultural
status. Especially do many love and marriage songs of ancient origin and
others preserved in Latin versions in old chronicles prove the
conservatism of the mind of the Polish people and their conceptions of
life. The maiden, now as in the olden days, sings before the
all-important act of marriage: "Wreath, delicately bound of roses and
white lilies intertwined, thou shalt for the last time adorn my anxious
brow. Thou art the last of all garlands that I wound in the spring of
maidenhood! By the side of the husband do I wander far away. Farewell to
the mother's heart that bore me through bliss and pain. Might I repay
all her toils with rich treasures...." Adorned with the gaily colored
bridal treasures or tinsel, she kneels to-day as of yore before her
parents to receive their blessing. All the symbolic ceremonies betray an
ancient origin.
Though legendary and mythical, Princess Wanda, daughter of Cracus
(founder of the ancient capital Cracow), symbolizes the virtues of
Polish patriotism, chastity, and grace. She is the noblest type of
Polish womanhood, and her memory lives on and on, in the soul of her
race, as it were the personification of her sex Polonized. She had vowed
eternal chastity, but a German war lord, Ritiger, inflamed by her
beauty, waged war against her people to win her by force. Though the
Poles were victorious, Wanda threw herself from the bridge of the castle
on the Wawel mountain into the Vistula to save her country and her
people from similar wars. Lyric and dramatic poetry, as well as the fine
arts, music, painting, and sculpture, have glorified the self-sacrifice
of the noble Polish princess at the legendary entrance of her race into
history. Only the other great race of the western Slavic family, the
Czechs, begins its history in like fashion with the beautiful and
semi-divine form of Libussa.
With the reign of Mieczyslaw I. (962) Polish history begins. In 965,
this prince adopted Christianity in order to win the hand of Dombrowka,
daughter of king Boleslaw of Bohemia, and thus to consolidate the two
great western Slavic races against the ever-increasing encroachments of
the Germans. Roman Catholicism stands at the cradle of the Poles, thus
placing them from the start in opposition to the eastern Slavs, foremost
among whom are the Russians. After Dombrowka's death in 977, a German
markgravine, Oda, shared the Polish throne.
Polish literature begins with a hymn to the Holy Virgin (_Bogarodzica_,
Mother of God), the national protectress of the Poles, whose worship
pervades their entire life, and whose sacred picture is the essential
part of their national coat of arms of the white eagle and their
national banner. This hymn is the Polish catechism; it accompanies the
schoolboy and the warrior and, in fact, all classes and ages throughout
life. This feminine romantic song and the _Psalter of Queen Margaret_
are the oldest monuments of Polish literature.
The later princes and kings of Poland, a dignity bestowed upon them by
Otto II., Emperor of Germany, married, for dynastic reasons, Czech,
Kief, and German princesses, who, it is true, did not further Polish
national life, but broadened Polish culture by contact with other
nations. Wladislaw Lokietek (the Short), who about 1312 made Cracow the
centre of Poland, being the first monarch crowned there, married
Jadwiga, daughter of Boleslaw, Prince of Kalisz. She was an eminent
woman, and was buried in the magnificent cathedral at Cracow, where her
granite monument still stands.
The early kings favored the common people, who, unfortunately, in later
centuries were reduced to servitude, against the _szlachta_
(_Geschlechi_, nobility), so that in early days the women of the people
(_narod_) attained a high social standard. Especially Casimir the Great,
"the king of the peasants," and of the oppressed generally, greatly
increased the happiness and prosperity of the nation. He even admitted
to his realm the persecuted Jews by virtue of the statute of 1357
(privilegia judaeorum), a favor which, according to an unauthenticated
tradition, was due to his love for a beautiful Jewess _Esterka_
(Esther). This great king was legally married three times. He was
unhappy in his marriage with Anna Aldona, a Lithuanian princess, a union
which remained, however, without political consequences. Anna never felt
at home in Poland; she clung to Lithuanian customs, music, and dance.
She loved the manly sports of horseback riding and hunting, and during
her indulgence in them she was accompanied by Lithuanian flute players.
Her Christianity appeared at all times rather doubtful in the eyes of
the Polish clergy, and the Church pomp and ceremony were to her very
distasteful.
Her husband, to whom she was married almost in his boyhood, led a very
licentious life. Theodor Schiemann, the historian of the Slavs, relates
how Casimir at the court of Budapest fell in love with Clara von Zach,
daughter of a court official. Casimir's sister, Queen Elizabeth of
Hungary, aided him in seducing the innocent maiden. The father of the
latter, maddened by the disgrace, broke into the royal hall to avenge
himself upon the betrayers of his child, and wounded the royal couple,
but he was finally slain. A terrible judgment was passed upon all the
members of the family of Zach: Clara herself was mutilated and chased,
as a beast might be, to death, but her royal seducer did not interpose a
barrier to her punishment. This event throws a lurid light on the
mediaeval court life in Hungary and Poland.
After the death of Lithuanian Anna, Casimir betrothed himself to
Margareth of Bavaria, who is said to have died of grief at the
approaching marriage to the hated Polish king. His next wife, Adelheid
of Hesse, was neglected and ill treated, and when the king married
another woman, Christina Rokiczan, she left Poland forever. Christina
shared the fate of her predecessor, and the king married in 1365 Hedwig,
Duchess of Sagan, during the lifetime of his undivorced wife Adelheid.
The Pope, however, who had at first called that marriage "a public
disgrace," granted him a divorce from his former wife to legitimatize
the new union. We may draw interesting comparisons between that
otherwise great and tolerant but morally depraved Polish king and Henry
VIII. of England.
The first great Polish woman in the glowing light of history is Jadwiga,
daughter of King Louis of Hungary and Poland, the legitimate queen of
Poland in default of a male heir, crowned on October 15, 1384, in the
Cathedral of Cracow. Betrothed in her childhood to an Austrian prince,
who now came to Cracow and quickly won her heart and actually
consummated the marriage, she was nevertheless compelled by the Polish
nobles, who hated the German and forced him to flee for his life, to
accept Jagiello, the supreme duke of the Lithuanians, a still barbarous,
pagan people, but whose power extended down to Kief. This union was a
political stroke of the first magnitude. Jagiello and the Lithuanians
became Christianized in the Latin form, the united countries became the
greatest power in eastern Europe, and therewith the overwhelming might
of the Teutonic Order was broken forever. The dynasty of the Jagiellos
was founded and reigned supreme in Poland for two hundred years
(1386-1572). When Jadwiga, a great queen and woman, died in 1399, the
Poles, otherwise unruly, retained as their ruler King Wladislaw
Jagiello, who from a great but savage pagan had become a good Christian
and a strong statesman. The destruction of the Teutonic Order in the
battle of Tannenberg, 1410, one of the greatest and most decisive
battles in history, insured for centuries the hegemony of Poland in
eastern Europe. Of this battle we have an interesting letter from
Jagiello to Anna, his second wife, whom he addressed from the camp on
the battlefield as "noble princess, illustrious and dear consort": "We
slew numberless enemies, not through the strength of Our arm, or the
multitude of Our warriors, but solely with the aid of Our Lord, who may
further us in power and virtue!" This document not only shows Jagiello's
adherence to Christianity, but also proves the respect paid to a Polish
queen, even though she was inferior to Jadwiga, who was the reorganizer
and refounder not only of a mighty realm, but also of the famous old
University of Cracow, which before her time had sunk into complete
insignificance. She had obtained in 1397 a papal bull for the foundation
of a theological faculty, and insured the existence of the university
for the future by rich legacies bequeathed on her deathbed.
One century and a half later a royal romance with a tragic ending was
enacted in Poland. King Sigismund (Augustus) II. (1547-1572), on the
death of his first wife Elizabeth, daughter of Emperor Ferdinand I.,
married secretly Barbara Radziwil, of the most illustrious Lithuanian
family. On his accession to the throne he avowed his marriage, and the
princess accompanied him to Cracow to attend the funeral of his father.
The diet of Piotrkow believing a union with a foreign princess more
profitable to Poland, demanded the annulment of his marriage with
Barbara, but the king resisted, and saw her crowned as his queen in
1550. Six months after her coronation, however, she died suddenly,
probably poisoned by her mother-in-law, the hated Italian, Bona Sforza,
who as queen had exercised a baneful influence upon Polish life. The
unfortunate Queen Barbara is idealized in Polish lays, and the portraits
preserved of her show beauty of form and features.
It may be interesting to note the relation of the great Polish king Jan
Sobieski (1674-1696), the liberator of Vienna, and in truth of Europe,
from the Turkish conquerors, to his wife, who exercised an almost
complete dominion over him. We have an admirable description of the
Polish court at the time of Sobieski; of his extraordinary wife and
daughter, and of social affairs there, in a report by a contemporary, an
anonymous French abbe, whose manuscript was found in the Bibliotheque
Mazarin, in Paris, and was published for the first time in 1858. He
describes the Polish nobility as turbulent in the Diet and at home,
tells of their luxury and their habits, the high esteem in which ladies
of high birth were held, and the scandalous treatment of peasant women,
as well as the absolute power of the _szlachta_ over the life and honor
of the serfs and their women.
Sobieski's wife was a French woman, but she became completely Polonized:
Marie Casimire d'Arquien, originally maid of honor of Marie Louise, wife
of Wladislaw and of his brother Casimir successively, had been married
first to the Polish magnate Zamoiski, and after his death to Sobieski.
She is said to have induced her royal consort to assist Austria against
the Turks, very much against the wishes of Louis XIV. of France, who
desired the power of Austria to be broken forever. The King of France
had incurred her ill will by refusing to elevate her father to the rank
of a duke. The queen had the strongest Polish interests and sympathies;
the letters of Sobieski to her are all in Polish; they are of the
greatest historical value, as the king informs her constantly of his
progress; also the personal element in them is highly interesting; they
abound in words of endearment: "My charming and incomparable Mariette."
"Only joy of my soul." The queen, though beautiful and passionately
loved by Sobieski, was an avaricious, despotic, jealous, revengeful
woman. After the death of the great king she lived in Italy and France,
and died in 1716 in the castle of Blois which Louis XIV. had given to
her. Her remains rest with those of Sobieski in the Cathedral of Cracow.
The description of the decline of Poland under the Saxon kings, of the
political and moral decay of the country under foreign rulers, does not
belong to our theme, since the national element in the social life of
the unfortunate country is wanting.
If so much attention has heretofore been given to royal women, it was
done in the conviction that, since, after all, the history of culture is
a comparatively modern branch of scholarship, national life in periods
not too clearly defined in history is best depicted in the highest
circles, which, for good or for evil, will ever serve as a model or a
type to be imitated by the classes below. We need only to glance at the
life of fashion, so essential to women in all stages of society, to
realize the truth of this conclusion.
In spite of all class distinctions, which were stronger in Poland than
in any other country of western civilization, the Polish type of
womanhood was nevertheless more recognizable throughout all the classes
than anywhere else. In spite of all their modesty and womanly beauty,
Polish women were at all times political enthusiasts; at all epochs we
find among them commanding natures, resolute and manly patriots.
Patriotic motives governed their loves, their marriages, their
motherhood, and at no time more than since the partition of their
beloved country. They excel in hospitality, which is their particular
metier, and upon which they lavish, almost frivolously, their earthly
goods. Courage, bravery, even heroism, are common traits, and are
presupposed in their men as prerequisites to winning female affections.
Ideals prevailed at all times; and for ideals, often very empty and
unstatesmanlike, they sacrificed themselves, and also the life blood of
their men, nay, their commonwealth, in fatal contrast to the
self-interested, cool-headed, and cold-hearted statesmanship of their
well-disciplined German neighbors. Upon this noble, but unpractical,
national characteristic is to be based also their lack of an economic
sense; work as such for material reward was always, it may be said,
despised by Polish women; money was, and is, considered a sordid means
for a purpose; and the same training, inculcated into the souls of the
sons of Polish women, was one of the chief reasons for the political
downfall of the nation. A too highly developed sense of individual
liberty, the pursuit of ideals, impracticable even for their own people,
and a contempt for everyday work and commonplace activity, have
destroyed Poland. The eminent Danish literary historian Georg Brandes,
in his Poland, reports characteristically this significant remark by a
distinguished Polish lady: "What company they invited me to meet! It was
made up of workmen, advocates whom we pay, manufacturers who sell goods,
doctors into whose hands three rubles are slipped for a visit."
It is true that it was not always thus with Polish women, and certainly
not with those of the poorer classes. In early times the education of
woman consisted in prayer and work. Learning was not a womanly
requisite; the domestic and agricultural work in the fields belonged to
women, while the tavern was too frequently the abode of the man
(_chlop_). Piety is a most genuine reality with Polish women; they were
at all times a rock of the Catholic Church. Chastity was the most common
virtue, and was strictly enforced. Nitschmann, the German historian of
Polish literature, mentions the fact that as late as A. D. 1645, a young
gentlewoman at the Polish court, who had entertained improper relations
with several courtiers, was condemned to death, together with her
lovers. Strict discipline went so far that, according to old Polish
custom, maidens were chastised with rods every Friday to remind them of
Christ's sufferings and to bring them nearer to God. The prayer of
innocent children was reputed more effective, which was a strong
incentive for young women to keep themselves pure as long as possible.
No wonder that such women attained, in the course of time, a moral
supremacy over their men, and that nowhere in Europe such a genuine
deference was offered to women as in Poland. The almost supreme rule of
the Polish mother over her sons is proverbial. With all her tenderness
for her children, it is the Polish mother who drove the youth of the
land to an almost hopeless struggle against the foreign conqueror, and
to death on the altar of the fatherland. Nowhere has the Spartan
mother's "Either with the shield or upon the shield" become such an
often repeated reality as in the Polish insurrections against Russia.
Until the entrance of French fashions, which, however, especially
influenced the higher classes, the costume of Polish women of all
classes was national, beautiful, and many-colored. A cap of fine linen
and a diadem were worn; the neck was left uncovered, as with the Polish
men, and was adorned with strings of beads or jewels; rich furs
ornamented the edges of their garments. The unmarried women wore fine
silken or linen aprons, which are even to-day an indispensable part of
the costume of Polish peasant girls at their social functions, for
example, dances and spinning parties. A gaily colored cloth,
artistically wound around the head, was always worn by the Polish girl
of the lower classes; a white veil, which, however, must not cover the
face, as with Mohammedan women, covered the heads of the maidens of the
higher classes. Since the partition of Poland the gay national costume
of the Poles is prohibited in Russia, but it is still worn, especially
on festal occasions in Austria and Prussia.
The charm and beauty of Polish women is the constant theme of the
national poets. A lyric poet of the seventeenth century, Morsztyn, sings
of the Polish virgin:
"Thou model mine, divine in all thy beauty,
Compared with whom spring's roses even languish,
O brightest star, produced on earthly meadows,
Yet unsurpassed by heaven's luminaries!
"Pure spirit, encompassed in crystal,
From which thou shinest in lofty light of virtue;
Perfected creature by the hand of God,
My spirit's comfort and my heart's delight!"
(H. S.)
If during the more ancient epochs there are recorded no Polish women who
have made a mark in literary pursuits, this is not due to any
intellectual deficit in those otherwise brilliant and gifted
representatives of the fair sex, but to prevailing conditions, which did
not permit them to turn from the maidenly or housewifely occupations,
for
"Woman's virtue never gets along
With novel-reading, sport, and song."
According to the Polish idea, man belongs on the horse, woman to the
hearth; in which respect the otherwise antagonistic Germans and Poles do
not differ essentially, if we may accept Emperor William's formulated
four K's: _Kirche_ (church), _Kuche_ (kitchen), _Kinder_ (children),
_Kleider_ (clothing), as typical of German ideals.
Nevertheless, there were not wanting intellectual women who contributed
to the brilliancy of the Polish genius during the golden era of their
nation's literature. It touches us strangely when the great Polish poet
Kochanowski sings in the elegies upon the death of his little daughter
Ursula, in 1580:
"Thou, Slavie Sappho, singer young and sweet,
The heiress of my poetry shouldst thou be;
This was my hope in cheerful mood,
When lovely songs welled from thy angel lips,
Unconscious to thyself, yet sweet to me....
Alas! too early silent, didst thou part,
Snatched forth by death, beloved poetess!...
Not even death sealed thy poetic lips,
That, full of woe, spoke with heart-breaking kiss:
'No longer can I, mother, serve thee now;
My place near by thy side will be no more;
The honor of the keyboard will not fall to me;
O Loved ones, far from you must I depart.
Thus didst thou speak, and more, angel of death,
Which I forgot in bitter parting's woe."
The first great Polish poetess who created her title of nobility by her
own talent in the dreariest time of Polish literature was Elizabeth
Druzbacka, nee Kowalska. Born in 1687, in Great Poland, she passed her
youth under the care of the cultured Panna Sieniawska, Chatelaine of
Cracow, married the treasurer Druzbacki, and, as a widow, retired to the
cloister of Tarnow, where she died in 1760. Though unacquainted with
foreign languages, and therefore with foreign literatures, she drew her
inspiration from her own poetic soul and rose high above the level of
her poetic contemporaries prophesying a renascence of Polish literature.
Her poetic works, published by Joseph Zaluski, the famous historian and
bibliographer, and later Bishop of Kief, and republished several times
since, show much poetic beauty and graceful originality of composition,
though the material itself betrays sometimes the undeveloped taste of
the time: she apostrophizes the elemental forces in her poem _Water,
Fire, and Air_; she describes in inspired words the life of King David;
the four seasons; she writes allegorically of the fortress built by God,
locked with five gates (the soul of man, with its five senses); she
sings praises of the forests, so dear to the Pole and to the Germans:
"The dense and shady forests glow in richest colors:
White is the birch tree, tender green its branches:
The beech tree proud shines in its youthful fulness;
The noble fir spreads green its lofty branches;
Centuries' strength sleeps in the iron oak tree."
(H. S.)
Toward the end of the eighteenth century occurred the great and terrible
events which, culminating in the tripartitionment of Poland,
accomplished its political destruction as an independent commonwealth.
This important event revolutionized the life, thought and aspirations of
Polish women, suddenly expanded the horizon of their political ideas,
and stirred them up to an understanding of the earnestness of national
existence or national annihilation. These influences are constant, and
ceaselessly interfere with the life of Polish womanhood, either
encouraging them to great efforts or driving them to despair or
denationalization. That great calamity, according to J. Moszczenska in
Helene Lange's Handbook of the Woman's Movement, forced the Polish woman
to take a deeper interest in the condition of her country and her own
position, and impelled her to stand by the Polish man as companion of
his misfortune, his exile, his solitude in foreign lands.
When speaking of the unfortunate political situation of Polish women, we
must, however, in justice exclude their sisters in Austrian Poland, to
whom perfect freedom and national self-development are permitted; for a
free and untrammelled national existence is in every respect vouchsafed
to that part of Poland which fell to Austria, namely, Galicia and
Lodomeria, with the capitals of Cracow and Lemberg.
When Poland had actually fallen, the leading patriots began to realize
the sins and follies which had eaten so much of the marrow of the great
nation with the glorious past, and which had allowed their country to
fall an easy prey to the disciplined and superior power of three mighty
neighbors. Superior Polish women began to aid strongly the patriots in
revivifying the slumbering forces of the masses of the lowly people who
had so long been kept in servitude, prevented from participating in the
national progress, and deprived of education and incentives to
patriotism, the lack of which latter in the common people had been so
bitterly avenged on the entire nation. Princess Czartoryska, of the
illustrious house of Polish magnates, undertook to diffuse a universal
culture and national consciousness among the people. By far superior to
her, however, was Klementyna Tariska, born in 1798 in Warsaw, who, in
her Gallicized country, did not at first even learn her national
language, but had to make herself familiar with it through study. In
1824 she began her literary activity, and strongly influenced ethically
and nationally the society of her time, especially the women and the
newly rising generation. This activity was intensified when, in 1827,
she became superintendent of all the girls' schools in Warsaw. Married
at the age of thirty to the historian Hoffmann, she left Poland and died
in France in 1845. Her writings are of classical purity; and her
services to the Polish language, which in its present literary worth and
linguistic form is equal to any in existence, cannot be overestimated.
Her historical portraits of the glorious past of her nation and of its
great literary luminaries exercised a powerful influence upon the
education of the young Poles, inasmuch as she vivified old Polish
tradition and history. Her Jan Kochanowski at Czarnolas reveals the
golden era of Polish literature: its environment, its great
personalities of both sexes, the old Polish virtues and qualities which
made the nation powerful, the commonwealth strong and prosperous. In
short, this great Polish woman strove to raise her sisters to a higher
plane of responsibility, of wifehood and of motherhood, in order to
produce a new and better generation of men of Polish men withal. She was
an opponent to the virago type of advocates of the emancipation of women
who desired to arrogate to themselves what is by natural laws the domain
of man. But realizing that the political conditions might make fearful
gaps in the ranks of Polish men, and that there might be hundreds of
thousands of widows and orphans, she desired to open to women all
possible avenues of independent life and work, and to set before them
the ideal of toil toil with the hands and toil with the head as the one
worthy purpose of life. The works of this remarkable Polish author were
edited in 1877, in twelve volumes, with an introduction, by another
important Polish writer and extraordinary woman, Gabriele Narzyssa
Zmichowska, who herself wrote admirable tales and a collection of
charming lyric poems which reveal a lofty soul and a melancholy
disposition.
Klementyna Tanska's fears of a depopulation of her beloved country
became a reality by the revolution of 1831. Deaths on the battlefield,
wholesale exiles to Siberia, political flight and emigration en masse,
deprived Poland of numbers of her noblest sons. Those who remained
behind were cowed, and reduced to servile obedience: no wonder that
Poland's women lost much of their former admiration for, and dependence
upon, the strong sex. They began to realize that they must become
independent, and wage the campaign of nationalism for themselves, if the
Polish language, literature, and genius were to be saved, or a
regeneration of the aftergrowth was to be possible. The right of a
higher, or rather of the highest education for woman was demanded, to
enable her to participate effectively in the political problems of the
nation, in the social questions and the welfare of the race, to free her
from the shackles of conventionalism which had reduced woman well-nigh
to the standard of a social toy or an adornment of the "salon."
Women were trained to work, to live up to the higher ideals of life and
nationality, to subordinate the common petty interests to a higher, more
universally human existence. A circle of superior women, the so-called
enthusiasts, gathered around Gabriele Zmichowska, who worked for the
rights of man, for the abolition of servitude, for the free development
of the natural forces of their great race. The result was that Gabriele
languished for two years in the fortress of Lublin and the other
prominent members of her circle were scattered by persecution. But
Polish women thus attained their revolutionary citizenship, and,
confessedly or not, they belong to the irreconcilables in the political
systems of Prussia and Russia, biding their time, knowing well that an
open resistance, instead of the policy of passive and latent opposition,
would be both unwise and untimely.
Sociological questions have become prominent in denationalized Poland,
and Polish women have been drawn into their discussion. The tariff
barrier between Poland and Russia having been abolished, commerce and
industry were turned into wider channels. The revolution of 1863, ill
prepared and ill executed, failed utterly, and the only hope left for
the nation was progress along economic lines. The great work of the
czar-liberator, Alexander II., who released the Russian peasantry from
servitude, also revolutionized the problems of economic sustenance in
Poland: the struggle for existence under the changed conditions. Poland,
placed as she is between Russia and her powerful western neighbors,
quickly became an industrial centre. Polish women came forward with
their legitimate claims to participate in this material movement. They
had no easy victory. The Russian government, as such, excluded Polish
women _ipso facto_, even more rigidly than Polish men. But the breadless
women forced their way into the factories, the offices, and the
workshops, _i. e._, into commerce and industry. Finally, even the state
recognized their punctuality, conscientiousness, and frugality, and all
this with consequent cheaper wages, and received them in the postal, the
telegraph, and even in the railway service, and as clerks in the courts.
The teaching profession is still most sought by women, though
instruction, in all the schools, is almost entirely in Russian, or other
modern languages, Polish being excluded. The demand for university
education, though granted to women in theory, is not so in practice. It
is very much restricted, as the University of Warsaw does not admit
women, though the stirring events after the Japanese war, the
constitutional conflict throughout Russia, and the struggle for autonomy
in Poland may change all this in the near future. The Austro-Polish
universities of Cracow and Lemberg have recently opened their doors to
them, a fact which drew the many earnest and studious Russian-Polish
women to those centres of learning, as they had previously been
attracted by the liberality of the Swiss universities and the University
of Paris. As Cracow and Lemberg admit only women who have obtained the
certificate testifying to proficiency for university studies, thus
placing them on a level with the male students, gymnasia for women have
been established in Cracow, Lemberg, and Przemysl. This academic
movement is powerfully seconded by the literary, social, and political
clubs of Polish women. These contribute much to the intellectual
activity of the nation, if such the Polish people can to-day be called,
and they produce able and earnest women teachers, correspondents,
editors of reviews, and authors.
Bismarck, the greatest German statesman that ever lived, and as such,
naturally, the most unmitigated political enemy of the Polish race,
which, in his mind, constituted a constant danger to the empire,
expelled from Germany, in 1886, fifty thousand Poles of both sexes, not
only foreign Poles, but even Germans who had married unnaturalized
Polish women; for experience taught, he said, that such wives invariably
make their husbands, and especially their children, Polish patriots. A
higher testimony to their pride and worth, though unconsciously given,
could hardly be cited, for if any man ever understood what was needful
to Germany, it was Bismarck, the gigantic German statesman, who
subordinated everything to German interests.
Polish women of the aristocracy are born to rule; their pride and
self-esteem never forsake them, even in misery; and the women of the
lower classes are ever faithful to the Roman Catholic Church, which with
the downfall of Poland has lost one of its most precious domains. Polish
women, then, carry the spark of a dangerous patriotism and the torch of
a Church foreign to Prussia and Russia from generation to generation.
_Virgo Maria, Regina Polonice_, is still protectress of the land. And
the woman worship of the "_Sarmats_ ruled by women," as Pliny has it,
still remains; gallantry to their women is a trait ingrained in Polish
men; the word "for a lady" has still a magic charm. Their beauty, the
proverbial perfection of their hands, and the smallness of their feet,
do the rest in the subjection of men.
Georg Brandes, the aforementioned sharp observer, rightly calls Polish
women of rank patriarchal and active only on their country estates,
while at Warsaw they appear immersed in social duties; but this is only
a guise under which they promote the cause of their country in every
enterprise, be it the founding of a library, a hospital, or a sewing
school. Every member of a social, charitable, or economic institute is
also a member of the great army for the future redemption of their
beloved country. The Polish language being forbidden in the schools,
every noble Polish woman becomes a schoolmistress of her language at
home, not only for her children, but also for her servants and those who
are drawn under her sway. Polish women of the higher class once had the
reputation of being frivolous; if so, they have become chastened by the
one absorbing idea of patriotism and the restoration of Poland. They are
elegant _grandes dames_ in a higher degree than German ladies of their
class with their substantial virtues, and more self-controlled and
faithful than their French sisters, though their hearts and heads are
surely not colder. Of course, woman's nature is as complex and as
unclassifiable in Poland as elsewhere, and generalization will therefore
always remain onesided; but the Polish type of womanhood is
unmistakable; so is the preponderance of the feminine element over the
masculine. Brandes is quite right when he quotes the opinion of an
Italian author: "Among Germanic races the men are more gifted than the
women; among the Latin races they stand on the same level; among the
Poles, the most characteristic Slavic race, woman is decidedly superior
to man as to intellectual qualities, passion, courage, wit, patriotism.
Polish history is pervaded as with a red thread with heroic deeds of
women. They have aroused whole districts to rebellion against foreign
oppressors, fought in battles, endured the hardships of camp and march,
and died on the battlefield." We need only read Henryk Sienkiewicz's
novels to find such real types of Polish women-heroes in all the domains
of warlike and political activity. The rebellions of 1830-1831 and 1863
found female warriors, as real combatants, in every Polish detachment.
The Polish noblewoman Emilia Plater, sung in Mickiewicz's brilliant
pasan, _The Colonel's Death_, raised a detachment of patriots, fought in
many battles, tried to break with the sword the iron girdle of the
enemies surrounding her corps, and finally died in a forest cabin, in
December, 1831, of her wounds and from fatigue and hunger. The female
martyrs who have followed voluntarily their exiled husbands or fathers
to Siberia may be counted by thousands. No wonder that the Poles love
their women with extraordinary tenderness and gladly concede to them the
palm of superiority!
It must be confessed, however, that conditions are quite the reverse in
many places among the lower and lowest classes. The police system, and
the exceedingly faulty and incomplete system of education, which seems
consciously to be bent upon stupefying the lower strata of Polish
society, has destroyed the force of Polish religion, language, and
national characteristics, and has reduced thousands of Poles to the
lowest social level. Much drunkenness prevails among the men, and
consequently much brutal treatment of the women. Coarse vulgarity is
heard in the karczmas (taverns) at dances and carousals. It is an
ancient experience in history that an attempt at a violent
denationalization of a race always produces a deterioration of the
masses, while, on the other hand, the highest elements are steeled and
tested as by fire.
Several eminent women shine as luminaries on the Polish Parnassus. Maria
Ilnicka, born in 1830, excels as an admirable translator of the songs of
Ossian and of Walter Scott, and as a creator of profoundly thoughtful
poems. Deotyma-Jadwiga Luszczewska, the talented Polish improviser and
poetess, published in 1854 and 1858 two volumes of exquisite poetry, and
later an epic, _Tomyra, the rhapsody Stanislaw Lubomirski_, and a
brilliant _Symphony of Life_ for the Beethoven festival in the great
theatre at Warsaw in 1870. Her fine creation, _Poland in Song_,
published in 1887, treats of the Wanda legend in dramatic form.
Omitting a large galaxy of lesser lights two women authors reign supreme
in Poland: Elise Orzeszko and Marja Konopnicka. The former, born in
1842, though too passionate in her plea for her ideals, especially for
the absolute emancipation of woman, whom she believes is superior to the
deceiver and cynic man, is a deeply poetic nature. Her novels and
social-philosophical works have been, in later years, realistic and true
to nature, and are permeated with a humanitarian sympathy for the
oppressed, be they Poles or Jews or women. Her novels _Eli Makower_
(1874) and _Meir Esofowicz_ (1878) treat of the relation of the Jews to
the Polish nobility, and again of the contrast and warfare between the
Talmudic fanatics and the tolerant, cosmopolitan, cultured Jews of the
world. She prophesies to the homeless race a better future. Her
brilliant literary works and her endeavors to inculcate on her people
Polish ideals did not always find friendly appreciation on the part of
the Russian government, which confined her for several years to Grodno.
Her plea for the emancipation of woman found a strong antagonist in
Eleonore Ziemiecka (1869), who declared that the unlimited emancipation
of women is but a dream of unhappy and oppressed women, which, if
realized, would lead society to destruction. Ziemiecka insists that in
any sound society the natural mission of woman is that of a wife and
mother, and as the counsellor of man.
Marja Konopnicka is a lyric or rather elegiac poet of great power and
genius. Her poetry is not soothing and comforting, but painful,
pessimistic, and despairing. Freedom of thought, sometimes verging on
atheism, is the inspiration which she drew from the condition of her
country and of her people. She is the singer of despair; according to
her conception of the world, God has lost his fatherly feeling for the
world, or perhaps for Poland only:
"The thundercloud is thy crown, lightning thy garment,
The sun the stool of thy mighty feet.
What are human tears to thee? Dewdrops!
And yet omniscient, none is shed without thy will!
Indeed I And yet thou hast never dried them?" (H. S.)
Not to end with a misconception of this poet's nature, let it be
mentioned that love is not strange to her; but it is the love for her
native land, and for all those who in some way glorify her native land.
Such love she breathes in her ode to the great Polish painter Matejko,
when she writes of his great pictorial apostrophe to the glory of
Poland, _The Battle of Grunwald_, as _Zaleski_, also, eulogizes Matejko,
"who with the magic staff of the brush resuscitates Poland."
Though dramatic art is not the forte of the Polish race, the theatre has
produced some great actresses, chief among whom are Helen Marcello and
Wisnoska, who found such a tragic death at the hands of a jealous
Russian officer; Madame Popiel Svienska; and, greatest of all, Madame
Modrzejewska (Modjeska), whom Brandes calls a wonder of the nation.
Unfortunately, the range of Polish dramatic poetry and the despotically
ruled theatre at Warsaw could not satisfy Modjeska's genius. Her
repertoire is drawn mostly from the creations of Shakespeare and
Schiller; and with her art she has fascinated until her old age--she is
now about sixty-three--vast audiences in the capitals of almost all the
European states and in the United States, and vivified the noblest
creations of the greatest thinkers and poets.
We are forced to treat superficially so great a theme, for the women of
Poland crowd the history of their country, especially since its fall. We
cannot give the gallery of eminent Polish women, for this task belongs
to the painter and to the historian of Polish literature and culture.
But whenever a great man came under a Polish woman's spell, he succumbed
to it: Napoleon the Great for once became a romantic lover under the
influence of the beautiful Countess Walewska; the first German emperor
felt his heart bleed when dynastic reasons forced him to give up a union
with Countess Radziwil; Goethe grows enthusiastic, at the age of eighty,
when in August, 1829, the great Adam Mickiewicz and his friend Odyniec
presented themselves at Weimar, introduced by Madam Szymanowska, a great
court pianist at Saint Petersburg; he exclaims spontaneously: "How
charming she is, how beautiful and graceful!" The Polish poet's loves,
adduced by Brandes, are different from all the others: they are ardent
and wild, but never sensual; they are repressed or chastened by the
constant emotions of sorrow for their country, their own condition, the
desperate future. So are also their poetic creations: Polish women are
either heroic amazons struggling for the holy cause of the fatherland
(ojczyzna), or they are angelic beings belonging to another world. Nor
is the motherhood of a Polish woman sweet or idyllic; the same pain
prevails in bearing a Polish son whose future fate is the sorrow of "the
man who lost his fatherland." Mickiewicz strikes the real chord of this
sentiment in the celebrated ode To the Polish Mother: "Take thy son in
time into a solitary cave, teach him to sleep on rushes, to breathe the
damp and vitiated air, and to share his couch with poisonous vermin.
There he will learn to make his wrath subterranean, his thought
unfathomable, and quietly to poison his words, and give his being the
humble aspect of the serpent. Our Redeemer, as a child, played in
Nazareth with the cross on which He saved the world. O Polish mother! In
thy place, I would give to thy son the toys of his future to play with.
Give him early chains on his hands, accustom him to push the convict's
dirty wheelbarrow, so that he shall not grow pale before the
executioner's axe, nor blush at the sight of the halter. For he will not
go on a crusade to Jerusalem, like the olden knights, and plant his
banner in the conquered city, nor will he, like the soldier of the
tricolor, be able to plough the field of freedom and water it with his
blood! No! an unknown spy will accuse him; he must defend himself before
a perjured court; his battlefield will be a dungeon underground, and an
all-powerful enemy his judge. The blasted wood of the gallows will be
the monument of his grave; a few woman's tears, soon dried, and the long
talks of his countrymen in the night-time will be his sole honor and
memorial after death." (Transl. Brandes, Poland.)
Such is the character of Polish womanhood, in reality and in poetic
fiction. Inexhaustible riches dwell in its type. The sins of past
centuries have been avenged bitterly upon them and their children; but
they live on, true to their Polish nature. The variety of the human
races, created by Divine Providence, with all their manifold
peculiarities, their virtues and faults, would suffer greatly, and the
human family would be seriously impoverished, should the species "Polish
Woman" ever be merged in the conquering nations and vanish with them,
however great and nobly endowed the latter may be. If the realization of
this wish be the hope of statesmen, the historian of culture can only
desire that the race remain according to a Tacitean word regarding the
Teuton "similar only to itself."
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
PREFACE
I. THE WOMEN OF THE PAGAN TEUTONS.
II. THE YEARS OF THE WANDERINGS.
III. THE YEARS OF THE WANDERINGS (CONTINUED).
IV. THE CENTURIES OF SUBMERGENCE AND OF NATIONALIZATION.
V. THE DAYS OF THE MINNESINGERS.
VI. THE COMING OF THE MASTERSINGERS.
VII. WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION.
VIII. AN ERA OF INTELLECTUAL DESOLATION.
IX. WOMAN HELD IN TIGHTENING BONDS.
X. THROUGH STORM AND STRESS TO CLASSICISM AND HUMANISM.
XI. EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN.
XII. WOMEN OF RUSSIA.
XIII. WOMEN OF POLAND
List of Illustrations
Emma carrying her lover, G. L. P. Saint-Ange.
Capture of Thusnelda, H. Konig.
A Teutonic alliance, Ferdinand Leeke.
Fredegond watching the marriage of
Chilperic and Galswintha, L. Alma-Tadema.
Princess Sophia and the old and new school
religionists, V. G. Peroff.
Kalmuck interior, Racinet.