Читать книгу Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction - Grażyna J. Kozaczka - Страница 14

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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 familial responsibilities maintained by the male members of the family, by their own internalized traditional ethos of a Polish upbringing, as well as by well-meaning American women, teachers, and social workers, who from their privileged position took on a mission to educate the ethnics and socialize them into the American culture of phallogocentrism. Krawczyk engages her women in personal acts of rebellion even though she rarely leads them to a full victory. They move their agendas forward in small, often symbolic steps, yet their resistance is strong and fully conscious, as it hinges on their recognition of the familial and societal constraints that bind them.

Krawczyk chooses to focus her fiction entirely on the working-class women who hail back to the 1870–1914 great wave of economic migration from the Polish homeland partitioned among the neighboring imperial powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In the home country, her immigrants had been, for the most part, poor farmers or destitute landless farm hands who, upon immigration to the United States, sought to realize their American Dream on Midwestern farms or in urban industrial centers.¹⁶ David R. Roediger would classify them together with other newcomers from eastern and southern Europe as “new immigrants,” a term which, at the time of which he writes, carried a strongly negative ethno-racial connotation. Roediger asserts that the newcomers were viewed as racially inferior to the “whiter and longer established northern and western European migrants.”¹⁷

Krawczyk’s working-class women—even though products of different historical conditions, different socioeconomic classes, and different ethno-racial attitudes—anticipate the distress of the next generation of women so eloquently presented by Betty Friedan in her 1963 feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique. Krawczyk herself, a second-generation ethnic and a first-generation college-educated middle-class woman, was closer to Friedan’s mostly well-off and well-educated subjects than are her Polish characters. Yet, with great sensitivity, she reveals the depth of feminine anguish felt by simple immigrant women. Such anguish permeates “Quilts,” Krawczyk’s brief story about one day in the life of Mrs. Kulpek, a wife and a mother of five young children. By making quilting an integral part of this story, Krawczyk once again proves her awareness of the changing interests of her reading audience. According to Glenda Riley, the 1930s witnessed a resurgence of this craft as women “purchased less and made more themselves [and] . . . the home again became the focal point for American families.”¹⁸ In Krawczyk’s story, Mrs. Kulpek, on the eve of the Feast of Corpus Christi,¹⁹ tries frantically to finish her beautiful quilt so the house will be properly adorned for the holiday. She is one of Krawczyk’s women who, as Edith Blicksilver claims, “perpetually strive to create and maintain beauty.”²⁰

On the surface, nothing extraordinary or dramatic happens on that day. It is filled with an endless stream of mundane activities. Mrs. Kulpek gets up early after spending most of the night piecing her quilt; cooks breakfast; readies her children and her husband for school and work; takes care of the baby; washes a mountain of soiled clothing at a washtub in her kitchen; cooks a noonday meal; cleans the house; finishes sewing a blouse commissioned by a neighbor; endures an unpleasant visit from Miss Leonard, her son’s teacher; cooks another meal; and finally, when everybody is again in bed, returns to her quilting. Acting outwardly as an automaton, she is emotionally separated from the service to her family while her inner focus is directed toward artistic expression through quilting. To her horror, she realizes that she lacks the required number of pieces to finish it. Even though, during difficult economic times, many quilters worked with used fabric from old clothing or flour and seed bags,²¹ Mrs. Kulpek is fortunate because she has designed her quilt entirely with the upholstery fabric samples brought from the mill by her husband.²² But now there is talk about a strike. If nothing else, it would mean no more samples for Mrs. Kulpek. Maybe her husband could ask other weavers if they have any unused samples to spare, she begs. After long negotiations, he grudgingly secures one final batch of squares for her, but continues to denigrate her piecing as he reminds her that her devotion to the quilt impinges on her duties as a wife and mother. When she explains that she has not managed to finish ironing towels for his morning toilet, he comments, “Always that quilt! You better tend to your house work,” and gives her direct orders: “‘Better sew a button on this shirt! I can’t go to work like this!’ Her husband spoke sternly. What was a quilt to him!”²³ Mrs. Kulpek also endures admonishments from Miss Leonard, who comes in the early afternoon to complain about young Frank’s misbehavior in school. The teacher is visibly taken aback by the disarray in the house: unwashed dishes, unmade beds, and Mrs. Kulpek still at the washtubs. Disregarding the housewife’s embarrassment, Miss Leonard condescendingly advises this overwhelmed and overworked woman: “‘you should do your washing in the morning,’ the teacher suggested, business-like.”²⁴ Undoubtedly, for Krawczyk, Miss Leonard, who appears to espouse paternalistic attitudes, represents common late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas that “more order and cleanliness” lead to “a stronger national fabric”²⁵ and the belief that immigrants have to be acculturated to these notions. Mrs. Kulpek is in a position which Magdalena Zaborowska calls “double ‘otherness’”²⁶ since she is marginalized in two cultures. In this not so subtle way, Krawczyk points to the tensions between the immigrant and the dominant culture and the practice of “othering” the immigrant culture as inferior. At the same time, the episode with the teacher points to a slow process of the immigrant woman taking on “some public functions as the family representative who in her husband’s absence dealt with teachers, priests, social workers, city officials, and policemen.”²⁷

The reason for Miss Leonard’s visit to the Kulpeks’ house—the son’s unruly behavior—along with her reaction to her perception of an undisciplined and lazy subaltern female unable to keep order and ensure neatness in the home, suggest ethno-racial attitudes prevalent in the early twentieth century among white native-born Americans for whom the whiteness of some of the emigrant groups was questionable. The scene in Mrs. Kulpek’s kitchen illustrates well Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s contention that the coming together of “racism and xenophobia, class and gender” often characterizes locations where racialized women dwell,²⁸ underscored by the frequent references to dirty surroundings of the new migrants, linking poverty with race.²⁹ Not only Poles, but also Irish, Italian, and Jewish newcomers experienced this identification as a separate and inferior “race.”³⁰ A similar commentary on the intersection of race, gender, and class as well as women’s subaltern status is provided by Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska, who as Krawczyk’s contemporary emigrated from the part of Poland seized by the Russian Empire. In some of her short stories, such as “Children of Loneliness” and “Where Lovers Dream,” Yezierska deploys a link between personal habits of neatness, cleanliness, orderliness, and discipline with white American success. Similarly, she equates dirt, messiness, disorder, and poverty with immigrant habits.³¹ For Yezierska’s characters to pass as American and to move out of the working-class Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, they have to acquire “a different skin”³² from their parents: they need to change their race. In contrast to Yezierska, Krawczyk refuses to accept such ethno-racial oppressive power exercised over her characters by white American middle-class women, instead identifying them clearly as not only naïve but also grossly ignorant of the immigrant plight.

In constructing gender within the domestic sphere of Mrs. Kulpek’s home, Krawczyk uses sexual discourse to identify the wife’s resistance to the husband’s power within the relationship. Mrs. Kulpek’s desire to seek self-expression through the only thing that is entirely her own creation leads her to reject or delay fulfilling her husband’s sexual demands. In the evening after the exhausting and frantic day, John Kulpek repeatedly insists that his wife go to bed instead of staying up late to finish the quilt. She flatly refuses. She is not joining him in bed, but would rather continue her piecing.

With her life devoted to practical matters, Mrs. Kulpek struggles to rise above the utilitarian and create a little bit of luxury, which is missing from her own mundane existence. The act of transforming the random squares of fabric into a work of art has the power to transport her out of her daily drudgery:

Her eyes devoured the beauty of each little piece! For a moment she held the first sample, a well made frieze with its shiny rayon weave of a rose pattern. Perhaps it was a part of a covering for a fine big chair in the mayor’s office, or the president’s. . . . She sewed it on closely, evenly, turning it over from time to time, to see the effect on the whole quilt. Then she took the next piece, a tapestry, a corner of a large pattern, perhaps a garden of flowers! Like a picture,—hanging on a wall in some princess’s room! If she could only see the whole thing! But joy of joys, she had a piece of it! . . . And before she even began to sew on it, she held another piece. It was a rich red mohair with a long nap. She pressed it to her cheek to feel its softness. That was a covering for a rocker in the queen’s palace. . . . Oh! She would have the finest and richest quilt in the world!³³

Mrs. Kulpek’s fantasy about the intended destinations for the different textiles she has incorporated into her quilt—the mayor’s office, the princess’s room, and the queen’s palace—provides for her an illusion of crossing the class divide. At least temporarily, she moves away from the images of working-class poverty that surround her to a realm of the highest luxury that, to her European imagination, can only be royal in nature. Mary Jo Bona, writing about Italian American women, posits that needlework provided for subaltern women a way to assert power as “women’s cloth expressivity enabled different kinds of mobility”³⁴ and gave them a voice.

Mrs. Kulpek’s single-minded focus on her quilt, the one object of beauty in her drab life, allows her to continue with the daily routine of mind-numbing work. Every now and then, when she is alone, she spreads out the quilt, counts the squares, and admires its beauty: “She rose and hurried into the kitchen, where on a long table lay her quilt. . . . She spread it out, her eyes beaming with gladness. Two hundred fifty-one pieces were already sewed together!”³⁵ Her quilt offers her not only dreams of being someone else, someone special, of seeing beauty only available to the few others in high positions, but her work also carries her back to the happy time of her youth in Poland when, free of her husband’s control, she practiced her needlework skills and produced her first masterpieces. It also allows her to continue the customs she learned in Poland of beautifying the home for the Corpus Christi holiday. But, most of all, she is able to resist her husband’s demands of dutiful wifely conduct and find some measure of freedom to express herself artistically, even if it is through a very traditionally female form of fiber art created and displayed within the confines of the home.

For Krawczyk, the tradition of women’s needlework turns into a discourse on immigrant identity and on patriarchy. Even though quilting has not been a craft traditionally practiced in Poland, Krawczyk’s protagonist applies the old-world skills of fine needlework to a new-world form of artistic expression. An immigrant woman actively constructs ethnic identity by combining elements of both the old and the new, while she achieves a measure of independence and self-fulfillment within an accepted framework of typically female occupations.

In her famous, award-winning story, “No Man Alone,” Krawczyk returns to the Kowalek family she introduced in two other short narratives, “After His Own” and “Wedding in the City.” In “No Man Alone,” a spunky farm wife, Kasia Kowalek, is heavily involved in the life of her small farming community and serves as a vivid contrast to her reclusive and distrustful husband, Stas. She is an active member of the women’s club, whose young college-educated American leaders (one of whom is her daughter-in-law) work on introducing immigrant farmers to efficient methods of farming and housekeeping. Stas, on the other hand, alienated from his American environment, is loath to attend club meetings even though his farming knowledge brought from Poland seems to be sadly lacking. Finally, Kasia, with the help of her daughter-in-law, is able to bring Stas to one of the meetings, during which he not only gains insight into soil conservation issues but also discovers his wife’s accomplishments as a seamstress and rug maker.

Kasia’s need for artistic self-expression through a traditionally female art form, one not acknowledged in her own home, prompts her to seek the approval of the wider audience at the community center. Not only are her creations on display for everyone to admire, but the rug she designed and made, which her husband barely noticed in their home, has found a buyer. “It was a pretty rug. Like a big picture with its wreath of bright red poppies and green vine. ‘Yes, it does look pretty,’ Kowalek said. And he had never even noticed it in the house!”³⁶ When a wealthy collector from the city offers to buy it at any price, the rug acquires a different value. Suddenly, Kasia’s talent, unnoticed and unappreciated by her husband just like her unpaid and unvalued work within the home, becomes validated and assigned a monetary value, which challenges the economic relationship between husband and wife in this traditional marriage. Yet, Kasia’s triumph is short-lived. Not surprisingly, Kowalek refuses his permission to sell the rug. His overt reason seems to be pride in his wife’s accomplishment and the fact that she made the rug for their home. But, since the same rug has not mattered to him before, his decision represents an attempt to reestablish his male power and economic control, undermined temporarily by the external validation of the tangible value of woman’s talents and work within the domestic sphere.

In all three stories featuring the Kowalek family, Krawczyk endows Kasia with a steadfast persistence in overriding Kowalek’s decisions, especially his refusal to accept his son’s choice of a bride because Edith is an American and a city girl. Kowalek’s resistance to his son’s marriage outside of the ethnic community illustrates field research conducted by Eugene E. Obidinski and Helen Stankiewicz Zand, who found that “the parents as a rule were unhappy over such an event . . . [and] the community . . . in general, did not look kindly upon a marriage outside the fold.”³⁷ Contrary to her husband, Kasia perceives the relationship between her son and Edith as both inevitable and positive, a sure sign of the family’s assimilation into American society. Still quite aware of her own limited opportunities, Kasia openly admires the independent womanhood represented by Edith, who is college educated and moves easily between the domestic and the public spheres. She holds a job outside the home even after her marriage to young Kowalek and takes on publicly visible leadership positions within their farming community. Krawczyk again advocates a model of womanhood in contrast to the expectations of the mainstream culture, where professional women were discouraged from continuing their careers after marriage because, after all, “marriage and family were all that really mattered”³⁸ and they should seek self-realization as “‘professional’ housewives.”³⁹ The marriage of Edith and young Kowalek represents a new type of a relationship built on consensus where both partners compromise: the wife sacrifices her city life so the husband can return to the beloved farm, while the husband sacrifices his expectations of a traditional stay-at-home wife so the wife can continue her thriving professional career. Gently, Krawczyk introduces a possibility of new aspirations for young women as well as a path for assimilation of Polish American families into the dominant society. As Eric Schocket suggests, “the working class will not be forever excluded from the political and social prerogatives of . . . white skin privilege.”⁴⁰

“No Man Alone” occupies a unique place in Krawczyk’s oeuvre as it articulates a strong social message about overcoming political and social exclusion: the inevitable assimilation, or at least acculturation, of Polish immigrants into the dominant society can run smoothly in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding. Through her female characters, Krawczyk clearly identifies Polish immigrant women as agents in this process of claiming white privilege. Able to ignore the age difference, Kasia is ready to learn all about the American way of managing her household from her young daughter-in-law and to use her as a mentor in the process of acculturation, while Edith and her wealthy American parents are sensitive to and accepting of the Kowaleks’ ethnic culture. The optimistic vision of a harmonious, multicultural, yet unified society which celebrates the richness of its diversity, even if firmly rooted within the white Eurocentric tradition, is emphasized by the story’s final scene, when Kasia and her husband attend a concert featuring the musical heritage of all the different ethnic groups represented in their farming community.⁴¹

Krawczyk’s immigrant women strain against the bonds of masculinist culture not only by seeking self-fulfillment through the arts, but also by struggling to find educational opportunities denied them both in the old and in the new worlds. Without ambiguity, Krawczyk contends that through internalizing male configurations of power, women themselves become guardians of the oppressive system. She asserts that women’s passivity and the total focus on the domestic sphere are reinforced by their mothers who buy into the oppressive system. Assertiveness and experimentation with new ideas and patterns of living are immediately perceived as a threat to the comfortable, male-dominated status quo. Antosia, the heroine of “For Dimes and Quarters,” finds herself in such a predicament. Since her childhood in Poland, she has always been admonished by her mother to curb her curiosity and her desire to learn and know. Her mother attempts to correct Antosia’s attitude because the older woman has internalized the discriminatory practices against women rooted in religious beliefs. She understands the hardships faced by the rebellious under the threat of social ostracism, since, as William H. Chafe suggests, “clearly defined gender roles provided comfort and security for many, but . . . also discouraged deviancy.”⁴² Antosia’s mother’s favorite cautionary tale for her daughter has always been the biblical story of Eve: “Antosia, be not too bold, for curiosity is the first step to hell.” And when the daughter, a young woman now, with her husband and two small children decides to emigrate to America, “her mother warned her with a threat in her voice, ‘Antosia, you are such a crazy one to see . . . to know everything. Just stay home and take care of your man and your children.’” But how can this bright young woman heed her mother’s warning while “her big blue eyes sparkled with every new idea, every new thing that came to her”?⁴³

Even though Antosia Milewski is a part of a strong ethnic community, she becomes aware of the subtle influence of the new culture on her immigrant friends when one of them abandons the customary kerchief for a beautiful hat purchased downtown. Thaddeus C. Radzilowski posits that American fashion became a strong “lure of modern life”⁴⁴ for immigrant women. Antosia herself interacts with a couple of American women who offer different patterns of behavior, represent diverse values, and suggest new aspirations. She likes nothing better than visiting her children’s school and talking, in her broken English, to Miss Cook, the children’s teacher. Through Miss Cook, she also receives her first paid position, as a cleaning woman, which strengthens her self-esteem as a wage earner. However, her great desire to learn is repeatedly thwarted by her husband, who, although attending a night school himself, consistently refuses to allow her to join him. His answer is always the same: “A woman’s place is in the home. . . . With everything you want to get mixed up. . . . Better you just watch the kettles on the stove.”⁴⁵ He even withholds his textbooks from her when she wants to study at night. Restrictions placed on Antosia’s educational goals bring to mind Tillie Olsen’s poignant novella, “Tell Me a Riddle,” where Eva, a young immigrant wife and mother, struggles to assert her right to intellectual stimulation against her husband’s indifference and self-absorption. He never relinquishes his social activities so she might leave the house full of their small children to join her friends in an evening discussion circle, and often when he returns home late at night “stimulated and ardent, sniffing her skin” as she is reading and nursing a baby, he orders her to go to bed, to “put the book away, don’t read, don’t read.”⁴⁶ Contrary to Krawczyk’s Mrs. Kulpek, who chooses her quilt over her husband’s lovemaking, and Antosia, who does not capitulate in the face of adversity, Eva’s spirit is crushed and even in dying she is denied, in Mary Ann Ferguson’s phrase, “personal fruition.”⁴⁷

In Krawczyk’s “For Dimes and Quarters,” Antosia continuously changes her tactics to find a way of crossing the boundaries set by her husband. If she cannot go to school, she studies at home; if she cannot share her husband’s books openly, she searches through all his belongings clandestinely to locate the precious objects and attempts to make sense of the lessons alone while he is at work. All these small acts of resistance culminate in her big decision to purchase a thirty-six-volume set of encyclopedias from a traveling salesman. Unquestionably, Antosia’s choice has been determined and empowered by her economic circumstances, by the fact that however small her earnings as a cleaning woman have been, she has her own money, which she keeps separate from the family budget.

The books’ arrival leads to a split in Antosia’s family straight along gender lines. While she and her two daughters are delighted with the books, her husband and both sons are scornful or dismissive. The boys never have enough time to read and the husband rages, “‘Are you crazy? Books are not bread. They cost money. . . . The children have books at school. I already pay taxes for them. What craziness got into your head? Remember,’ he shouted, ‘I do not pay a cent!’ He walked out slamming the door.”⁴⁸ Thus the husband’s domination is again asserted through the economic pressure of the breadwinner. When unexpectedly the bill for the full, not the discounted price of the encyclopedias comes in the mail, Milewski explodes again, angrily chastising his wife for her extravagance and naïveté in trusting a salesman. Milewski joins several other husbands in Krawczyk’s stories who control their wives’ behavior or punish them by withholding financial support. For example, in “My Man,” Mrs. Sobota tells a tale of her husband’s insane jealousy, which leads him not only to abusive behavior toward her but also to his pressuring her through stopping her grocery or fuel credit. Yet, she does not allow herself to be victimized and seeks help from her son’s teacher in finding a lawyer and pursuing a divorce: “Now I got to fight! I got to fight for my rights!”⁴⁹ Mrs. Sobota does not divorce her husband and the spouses make up at the end of the story, but Krawczyk still refuses to construct a female character who meekly accepts abuse and victimization. In considering a divorce, Mrs. Sobota is willing to endure the censure of her community and its religious leaders rather than stay in an unhealthy relationship that harms not only her but also her young son, Edvard.

Antosia Milewski possesses a similar defiant streak. Her husband’s anger over the purchase of the encyclopedia set notwithstanding, she blissfully devotes herself to perusing different volumes while her daily chores remain unattended to. The books have the power to transport her back to the country of her youth when her daughter reads to her the encyclopedia entry on Poland, and the pictures of the Polish countryside bring Antosia to tears. Even though Antosia manages to convince all her four children of the value of education hidden within the encyclopedia, the husband remains in opposition. If it were not for the help of Miss Cook and the children, Antosia would lose her battle and would have to return all thirty-six volumes. But she does triumph, and “the books would remain in her house.”⁵⁰ Undoubtedly, Antosia’s story pays tribute to Krawczyk’s own Polish immigrant mother, Anastasia Fortunska Kowalewska, who not only mothered eleven children of whom Monica was the firstborn, but also “taught herself English and bought books for herself and her children,”⁵¹ and endured her neighbors’ censure for sending Monica to school instead of forcing her to work, as was the practice of most Polish immigrant families at the time.⁵²

In both “For Dimes and Quarters” and in “Quilts,” Monica Krawczyk deploys a symbolic object—an encyclopedia and a quilt—the value of which, even though universally recognized by the dominant culture, escapes the Polish immigrant men and is appreciated only by the women. Krawczyk’s women are certainly better at understanding the new environment and “reading” the value system of modern America. In her short stories, Krawczyk repeatedly suggests that women face a difficult struggle to convince the men to adapt to the new-world values in order for their families to thrive.

Undoubtedly with her mainstream American readers in mind, Monica Krawczyk offers subtle patterns of ethnicity in her stories. Only “If the Branch Blossoms,” the title story of her collection, is set in Poland, on a prosperous farm where a family practices the traditions which also find their way to America with thousands of Polish peasant immigrants. In her ethnic stories, set in both urban and rural settings, Krawczyk, like many other writers after her, conflates ethnicity with social class: her Polish immigrant characters are mostly farmers or represent the urban working class. She uses typical ethnic markers such as a few Polish expressions, descriptions of Polish holiday customs or traditional foods, and stories about life and family left behind in Poland. Such ethnic elements notwithstanding, her characters are mostly immigrants who seek assimilation and success in their new environment. Using an ethnic milieu, Krawczyk constructs her female characters within a domestic sphere, which turns into a space where the triumvirate of gender, socioeconomic class, and race come together. This domestic immigrant sphere is only rarely invaded by American white middle-class women, and then Krawczyk underscores ethnic and class differences rather than racial solidarity. Her characters perform the traditional tasks expected of wives and mothers, but she also endows them with the ability to understand that they, alone or with the support of other women, have to seek a self-fulfillment impossible to achieve just through repetitive housekeeping tasks in an oppressive environment. Motherhood also falls short of providing exultation and self-satisfaction, since Krawczyk’s women seem to be consumed by the drudgery of the continuous care for their numerous offspring. Many of them attempt to express themselves through art, albeit in forms traditionally accepted as female, or seek learning and new experiences in their new immigrant reality. Krawczyk identifies the economic control exerted on women by the traditional family structure, where the housewife’s work is not valued equally with the work of a husband outside the home, as the main cause of the women’s subjugation and inequality. But she offers a glimmer of hope for the future when the new generation enters into more equal relationships, with both partners empowered economically, like Antek and Edith Kowalek in “No Man Alone.”

Monica Krawczyk consciously chose the role of a writer who normalized her ethnic subjects for the mainstream readers of American popular magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. She, like other ethnic writers of her time discussed by Cyrus R. K. Patell in a study on emergent US literatures, understood that she was “writing from the margins,”⁵³ yet she strove to enrich the center of US culture by adding her ethnic voice. Krawczyk subtly embedded many radical and progressive ideas in her narratives as she wrote to reveal a process of double othering by which Polish American women were defined and excluded both by the American mainstream and by Polish patriarchy. She advocated strongly for women to engage in pushing back at the restrictive forces. To that purpose, she imparted to her female characters an awareness of the economic, social, and familial barriers they encountered at the intersection of social class, ethnicity, and gender that impacted their self-actualization. She led them through countless acts of rebellion and assertiveness: learning and buying books against the wishes of their husbands, finishing their quilts instead of doing housework, refusing marital sex, or finding lawyers to fight abusive husbands. And even if her women had to capitulate under economic pressure and continue in the domestic subservience of wives and mothers, they did so with the self-respect they had gained from their subversive activities. Overall, Krawczyk’s celebration of resilient immigrant women can be classified as gently liberatory.

Krawczyk’s stories not only assert that the immigrant women construct ethnicity by combining old Polish traditions with new American ways, but also that they are the engines of success for their families in America. They read and understand the new environment better than their men, are more flexible in constructing their ethnic lives, and are able to find a balance between assimilatory moves that allow the family to succeed within the American mainstream and maintaining connections to the Polish past, which is represented as providing a healthy rootedness for the entire family. They write Polishness into the new American identity of their families and, even more so than male immigrants, build Polish American communities.