Polish American women writers featured in this study normalize an ethnic group that has been historically burdened with strongly negative stereotypes and give voice to ethnic women who have been rendered silent by both the mainstream and the Polish American patriarchy. By taking possession of the Polish American ethnic space, women writers transform it from a space of working-class marginality to that of middle-class success where women, through their close links to female ancestors, write Polishness into Americanness.
The first chapter of this chronologically as well as thematically organized study enters the discussion of gendered ethnicity with an analysis of Monica Krawczyk’s literary output. Krawczyk, the matriarch of Polish American short fiction, normalized the Polish immigrant “other” in a series of short stories published in mainstream American periodicals from 1931 to the early 1950s. Even though her women seem firmly embedded in the traditionally female domestic sphere within its working-class, heteronormative, and racially uniform world, she grants them a voice and removes them from the realm of invisibility. She makes them fully cognizant of the restrictions embedded in two oppressive cultures—Polish and American—which conspire to limit their self-expression. Krawczyk’s characters work ingeniously and incessantly to liberate themselves both as new American women, empowered to bring education and innovation into their large families, and as ethnic women who keep the memory of their original Polish homeland alive.
The second chapter recovers forgotten texts by amateur ethnic writers submitting to literary contests from the late 1950s and early 1960s and seeks to demonstrate the influence of a deep-seated class division within the Polish American community on the construction of gendered ethnicity. While, at midcentury, middle-class, thoroughly acculturated or even assimilated ethnic women face a highly restrictive secular ideal of American domesticity, the strongly ethnic, mostly working-class women depicted in these texts are similarly oppressed by the Polish Marianism promoted by the Catholic Church. In a desperate search for sources of female empowerment, several authors turn to the still-fresh memories of World War II to illuminate the full range of women’s accomplishments and potential on the home front and on European battlefields, sadly unrecognized and unrealized during peacetime.
Each of the next four chapters focuses on the work of a particular writer or on a theme as it analyzes narratives which for the most part recreate Polish American communities and trace their evolution during a three-decade-long period. The third chapter explores Suzanne Strempek Shea’s construction of gendered ethnicity in Polish American, mostly working-class communities in New England. Strempek Shea’s thirty-something protagonists exist between two normative systems: the Polish American highly restricted, patriarchal, Roman Catholic, and working-class model of femininity and the growing American movement toward sexual freedom and gender equality espoused by the younger, college-educated representatives of the middle class. Strempek Shea’s characters forcefully reject masculinist restrictions imposed on them by Polish American secular and religious ideologies, yet they continue to identify themselves as ethnic women by using nonrestrictive ethnic markers. Suzanne Strempek Shea’s ethnic women characters, supported by extensive networks of female relations, friends, and ancestors, take firm control over constructing their gendered ethnicity.
In Polish American immigrant and ethnic fiction, the relationship between mothers and daughters, the trope of an absent mother, as well as class-inflected enactments of motherhood garner much more attention than sexuality as active elements in constructing women’s identity. Chapter 4 centers on the working-class models of motherhood present in Leslie Pietrzyk’s and Ellen Slezak’s narratives, which explore the absence and the silence of mothers—the old-world mothers left behind when their daughters emigrated, or the new-world mothers missing from their daughters’ lives. This chapter argues that ethnic daughters overcome maternal absence by using memories, stories, and cherished mementos to invent new mother figures capable of helping them tame the foreignness around them. In a subtle way, this process frees ethnic women from some patriarchal controls internalized by their Polish peasant mothers.
Chapter 5 continues to investigate Polish immigrant motherhood in Danuta Mostwin’s novella, “Jocasta.” Mostwin, a World War II émigré writer, explores the destructive quality of the Polish upper-middle-class model of patriotic motherhood embedded in the Matka-Polka (Mother-Pole) ideal. This chapter suggests that Mostwin’s character, incapable of discarding and freeing herself from class-inflected restrictions, becomes a tragic anachronism who destroys both herself and her beloved son.
Chapter 6 isolates instances of rebellious and/or transgressive behavior that either openly or surreptitiously break constraints placed on ethnic women’s expressions of sexuality. This discussion draws evidence from several texts, especially from novels by Elizabeth Kern and Melissa Kwasny, and asserts that Polish American women’s sexual freedom may be curbed by several factors. In Polish American working-class heteronormative communities, women’s sexuality is circumscribed by patriarchal prohibitions supported by the Catholic Church’s teaching linking sexuality to sin and promoting an ideal of womanhood contained in the concept of the Virgin-Mother. This chapter posits that while Polish American heterosexual women who take ownership of their sexuality through entering forbidden premarital or extramarital relations may avoid censure from a Polish American ethnic community, homosexuality seems invariably relegated to a separate queer diaspora.
The next two chapters bring the discussion of gendered and classed ethnicity forward to consider the developments of the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. Chapter 7 analyzes several narratives, many of them written in Polish, by representatives of the latest large immigrant cohort, the so-called “Solidarity cohort,” who left Poland for the United States and Canada as a result of the economic and political upheaval of the 1980s. This chapter argues that, just as the World War II émigré women are controlled by their Polish patriotic heritage, the “Solidarity” immigrants are constrained by the deeply rooted legacy of communist xenophobia, intolerance, and dubious morality. These fictional daughters of communist Poland firmly situate their identity at the intersection of whiteness, the middle class, and heterosexuality. Some of them achieve empowerment by marginalizing the racial and class “other” as well as by ignoring or actively breaking some of the most basic ethical rules with impunity. They perform their gendered ethnic identity within artificially constructed moveable relational homelands that can be transplanted from locale to locale without much effort.
Chapter 8 continues the examination of the “Solidarity cohort” by identifying within it two distinct generational groups—the first generation of immigrant parents and the “1.5 generation” of immigrant children. This chapter asserts that the writers from these two closely related yet distinct generations engage in a literary dialogue that defines the Polish American ethnic woman of the twenty-first century. This latest incarnation of the Polish American woman has the advantage of full acculturation to the mainstream, the benefits of middle-class whiteness and education, as well as freedom from ethnic patriarchy since she lives outside of an ethnic community. Even though the immigrant past still exerts powerful influence over her construction of gendered identity, her American present allows her to choose from a full range of ethnic options. The independent but also isolated Polish American woman of the twenty-first century living in a community of one completes the trajectory of gendered ethnic identity over the last seventy or eighty years initiated by Monica Krawczyk.
The final chapter offers its own timeline and illustrates the development of Polish American young adult and children’s narratives