Women of the Teutonic Nations

by Hermann Schoenfeld

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.