Читать книгу Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction - Grażyna J. Kozaczka - Страница 15

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At Midcentury

Polish Americans Writing Their Identity

MONICA KRAWCZYK’S COMMITMENT TO the empowerment of women was not limited to her fiction. She devoted herself to many Polish American causes, especially those that supported education and artistic expression. She was one of the charter members of the Polanie Club of Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, founded by a small group of women in 1927 “to preserve and promote Polish culture.”¹ From its inception, the club, under the influence of Krawczyk, became involved in publishing, especially as she “recognized the dearth of creative writing about the Polish people and their richly emotional and historical ancestry.”² Even after her death, her ideas were preserved through the club’s activities.

In 1964, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Krawczyk’s death, the Polanie Club published a collection, Prize Winning Stories: Monica Krawczyk Short Story Contests 1960 and 1963, which included original texts by twenty-nine contestants and a reprint of “No Man Alone,” the best-known story by Monica Krawczyk, the contest’s spiritual patron. The nationwide contest was the brainchild of Marie Sokolowski, at the time the president of the club, who considered it a fitting tribute to Krawczyk’s literary legacy and her lifelong dedication to promoting creative writing among both Polish immigrants and Polish Americans.³ Polanie’s fiction competitions continued the endeavors of other Polish American women’s organizations, such as the Polish Women’s Alliance, which sponsored essay contests in the early 1900s.⁴ They also fit well within a common trend in the mid-twentieth century when many magazines, for example Mademoiselle, organized “annual short fiction contests for female college students [that] launched the writing careers of such authors as Joan Williams and Sylvia Plath.”⁵ Even though Polanie’s competition did not render such spectacular success, it promoted new ethnic fiction that reflected the interests and concerns of Polish immigrants and ethnics at the threshold of the American cultural revolution. The resulting publication underscored the modeling purpose of the volume as its editors expressed hope that many other fledgling writers would find inspiration there and emulate the example of Krawczyk herself. A biographical sketch characterized Krawczyk as a woman who “not only fulfilled her housewifely obligations, but . . . also worked at various times as social worker and teacher. . . . Most of all, Monica Krawczyk worked at inspiring people to stretch and reach for the ‘sparks’ that come from their imagination.”⁶

The stories recognized in both the 1960 and 1963 contests document and respond to the changes in the patterns of ethnicity in postwar America as well as consider what impact the influx of World War II émigrés had on Polish American communities. While in all of Krawczyk’s fiction, firmly rooted in American reality, gender identity is constructed at the intersection of working-class values (both urban and rural), heterosexuality, Roman Catholicism, and (still ambiguous) race, the writers from the new generation position themselves at quite a different intersection. Their Polish American characters have already achieved social success and assimilated seamlessly into the American middle-class, thus shedding their ethno-racial ambiguity and becoming fully white. As Eric Schocket argues in his study of class in American literature, whiteness becomes a characteristic attached to the advancement of characters from working to middle class.⁷ This process of whitening of European ethnics and immigrants is accompanied, at the time, with the marginalization of ethnic cultures and expressions of ethnicity.⁸

Some of the fledgling prize-winning authors included in the collection turn their gaze back to the original homeland and the trauma of World War II. Such historical settings allow female writers to challenge the strong ideological push to confine American women again within the domestic sphere and curb their freedom to pursue jobs and careers they enjoyed during the war years while men were fighting. As Tracy Floreani contends, during the 1950s, due to Cold War fears, anti-communist propaganda, and the rise of consumerism, gender roles became “a romanticized throwback to Victorian ideals of the public and domestic spheres.”⁹ Likewise, in her study of women’s magazines published during the 1940s and 1950s, Nancy A. Walker notes that the postwar reshaping of American values¹⁰ brought a renewed focus on domesticity, while unprecedented economic prosperity fueled a strong consumer culture. Glenda Riley posits that many women “swallowed postwar propaganda declaring it was their patriotic duty to bear children.”¹¹ Many of the depictions of Polish ethnic and immigrant characters in the prize-winning stories clearly grow out of the increasing tension between the dominant American ideology of domesticity and women’s dissatisfaction with their prescribed roles. Their problem remains nameless—they predate by a couple of years Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)—but in many ways their perceived lack of fulfillment brings these ethnic characters very close to Friedan’s discussion of white, middle-class, college-educated women. This suggests not only that at midcentury Polish American women writers were well assimilated, or at least acculturated, into the mainstream, but also that their fiction entered into the American discussion on gender roles. This discussion was advanced by cultural events and by the 1952 US publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Alfred C. Kinsey’s study published in 1953 as Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, and numerous articles appearing at the time in popular women’s magazines.¹²

Cover of Prize Winning Stories: Monica Krawczyk Short Story Contests 1960 and 1963 (1964)

The collection of prize-winning stories offers a unique insight into construction of gendered ethnicity at midcentury. Out of the roster of twenty-nine narratives authored by both immigrant and ethnic writers, almost two-thirds are set in Poland and clearly fall into one of several easily identifiable categories. Some extol Polish bravery in the fight against the Nazis during World War II; others present Polish suffering under the Nazi occupation; while still another group focuses on the evils of communism. A few stories retell Polish legends or present traditions typical of a specific region in Poland. Only a handful of plot lines explore the Polish American milieu, so crucial to Krawczyk herself. My analysis of these texts suggests that Polish ethnic and immigrant women’s fiction of the period shows signs of latent feminism as it questions the prevailing American gender discourse of re-domestication and marginalization of women, and often challenges gender inequality by turning to World War II plots that prove women’s capability of achievement when gender restrictions are not enforced.

The drastic changes in opportunities and expectations experienced by many middle-class women in post–World War II America become an important theme in “The Guest,” the winner of the 1960 first prize, by Mitzi Kosturbala. The author is identified in a very brief biographical note as a Chicago resident and a professional journalist and editor born in 1914. Kosturbala belongs to the generation of educated women described by Betty Friedan as the cohort whose prewar dreams of professional careers were shattered just as they reached middle age and could have been most productive.¹³ Kosturbala’s short story is one of the most psychologically complex texts in the collection and offers a rare combination of both American and Polish settings as it captures the tension between the perfectly sanitized, prosperous life of Anya Krystof, a Polish American suburban housewife from Chicago, and the ugly brutality of war forced upon her by the arrival from Poland of her husband’s close relative, Jadwiga. Jadwiga, a Catholic, is a traumatized survivor of medical experiments in a Nazi concentration camp. She arrives in the United States seeking medical treatment for the damage to her body caused by Nazi doctors.

Kosturbala positions her protagonist Anya and her Polish immigrant husband, Mark, at the intersection of the middle class, whiteness, heterosexuality, and Polishness. Thus, for Anya and Mark, social class linked to white ethno-racial identification trumps their ethnicity: their Polish Americanness. The booming postwar economy of the 1950s allows families like the Krystofs to leave their ethnicity behind as they move away from old ethnic communities and to pursue upward mobility by reaching middle-class status. The couple’s move to a “white suburb” illustrates the process by which, according to David R. Roediger, the middle-class descendants of working-class European immigrants, whose race had been viewed with suspicion and who might have been labeled racially as Slavonic, Italian, or Jewish, rather than just “white,” achieve whiteness as soon as they are allowed to purchase homes in middle-class suburbs “protected by firm restrictions against non-Europeans.”¹⁴ Likewise, Tracy Floreani sees postwar suburbanization and the commercialization of culture as “major ways in which a younger generation from Eastern European and Mediterranean immigrant families became absorbed within ‘whiteness.’”¹⁵

Kosturbala presents Anya and Mark as a typical middle-class American couple exceedingly proud of their suburban home, which, after all, testifies to their mainstream privilege and not to ethnic marginality. It is hardly surprising, then, when Kosturbala tells us that for the Krystofs, “Polishness . . . was incidental,”¹⁶ expressed only through a few decorative artifacts displayed in their home which allow them to claim uniqueness in their homogeneous, ethnic-less neighborhood of what William Chafe characterizes as identical “‘ticky-tacky’ houses.”¹⁷ The story’s deployment of ethnic markers is minimal, as it lacks references to any Polish or Polish American traditions, religious or family holidays, or, most importantly, the Polish language, even though several characters are identified as born and brought up in Poland. The paucity of ethnic markers, Kosturbala’s careful description of the suburban setting, as well as her character construction of Anya’s husband and her brother-in-law as professionals in positions of authority all speak to her awareness of the crucial differences between the mainstream middle and the ethnic working class. In line with Cynthia Levine-Rasky’s clear definition of class distinctions through disparity in educational levels, lifestyle choices, and the pursuit of positions of authority,¹⁸ Kosturbala’s characters are well assimilated and firmly situated within the American middle class.

As would be expected of a young middle-class wife living in a white suburb at midcentury, Anya Krystof exists only within a domestic setting, her domain, of which she is exceedingly proud. She is completely committed to and never tires of admiring her home: “Her mind responded, for the thousandth time, to the pleasure she felt when her eyes roamed around the panelled room with its beamed ceiling and gleaming parquet floor.”¹⁹ She embraces the new consumerism of the 1950s, when, in Chafe’s words, “consumer housewives outdid each other in trying to purchase the latest cookout gadgetry,”²⁰ and translates many of her possessions into socioeconomic class markers. She treasures her Limoges china, her sterling silver, “the lovely cherry wood furniture, the smooth expanse of carpeting, the charming blend of colors, the informality and warmth.”²¹ Her class-conscious acquisitiveness recognizes not only the importance of quality but also of brand names for the construction of the class-appropriate lifestyle. However, it seems that Anya has paid a high price for the easy life in her “charming and comfortable home” with a loving husband and two beautiful and “well mannered” children.²² The narrative matter-of-factly lists some hardships that have left their mark on Anya: her son’s serious illness while her husband was deployed overseas during World War II, the death of her brother who was shot down over France, and, finally, the fact that “she had gone through the difficult postwar adjustment period as thousands of American wives had done.”²³ Anya, like many other women pressured to abandon the public sphere after the war, has to surrender any economic independence and authority she held within the family during her husband’s absence, accept that her “aspirations were systematically circumscribed to domestic life,”²⁴ and find “true feminine fulfillment”²⁵ in the passive and subservient role of a housewife. She is now directed by her husband to reach self-fulfillment through her service to the family and through consumerism—her delight in acquisition of pretty objects, not so much for herself, but for the home and the family.

Anya’s tenuous hold on self-esteem is shaken by a visit from her husband’s cousin, Jadwiga, a woman scarred psychologically and physically by the horrors of war. Kosturbala employs Jadwiga’s character to provide an alternative to and a critique of the white middle-class suburban gender construct represented by Anya. Jadwiga defies the traditional expectations of feminine behavior and attitudes. She smokes like a man and shows absolutely no interest in housework or Anya’s children. Anya’s early attempts to impress Jadwiga with the wealth and comfort of her home fail as Jadwiga’s old-world aesthetic does not recognize the beauty or value of the mass-produced consumer goods. She offends Anya by finding the American décor quaint, while at the same time waxing lyrical about a pair of carved chairs and an old tattered oriental rug she and her late husband purchased at an auction before the war. Since the aesthetic appeal of antiques, actually of anything old, is beyond Anya’s understanding, she does not recognize Jadwiga’s yearning for reminders of the past destroyed by the war, nor Jadwiga’s old-world views on social class. Yet Jadwiga, like many of the Polish World War II émigrés, arrives in the United States with a firm conviction of her own middle-class status. For the Polish woman, upward class mobility cannot be achieved by moving to the suburbs and buying expensive items, because social class is something one inherits from a long line of ancestors, just as one might inherit a pair of old carved chairs or an oriental rug. Anya, brought up on the ideology of the American Dream with upward mobility at its center, resents that Jadwiga’s comments somehow diminish the desirability of her home and her life.

Kosturbala repeatedly deploys the commonly accepted gender stereotypes of midcentury America to demonstrate Anya’s total disempowerment and outline the barriers she faces in constructing her identity. This adult woman, a mother of two children who worked and supported her small family while her husband was fighting overseas, suddenly is incapable of thinking critically, and she constantly defers to her husband, who patiently explains Jadwiga’s attitude. Mark’s diagnosis is simple: Jadwiga is just overwhelmed by their wealth of consumer goods, which fills her with envy and malice born of privation. Mark’s judgment exemplifies the attitude prevailing in the 1950s that the life of an American housewife was “the envy . . . of women all over the world.”²⁶ Anya’s brother-in-law reacts even more strongly to her complaints about Jadwiga’s attitudes. In cautioning Anya not to be bullied into “apologizing for being an American,”²⁷ he imbues their domestic conflict with cultural and national significance. After all, at midcentury, consumerism becomes intertwined with expressions of patriotism and American exceptionalism.²⁸

The most unnerving thing to Anya are Jadwiga’s war stories. The World Council of Churches has sponsored Jadwiga’s travel to the United States, where she undergoes reconstructive surgery on her legs to reverse the damage she sustained during the inhuman medical experiments performed on her in a concentration camp. With vivid details, she describes her suffering in Auschwitz: “They opened the long bones in our right legs. Zosia, Hela, and I had slivers of wood, crawling with staph germs, implanted in the marrow. . . . They injected us with germ-killing drugs and tried bone transplants.”²⁹ She tells about the death of her first husband in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II in Poland, and about losing her unborn child after being kicked in the belly by a German soldier. These stories frighten Anya and she does not know how to react or how to comfort Jadwiga. They bring the reality of suffering, human endurance, and courage to the artificial environment of her suburban home. They also remind Anya of the past—of her family’s ethnic roots in Poland and of her old assertive self of the war years. Thus, in spite of herself, Anya is drawn to Jadwiga. However, Anya must medicalize³⁰ Jadwiga’s behavior in order to neutralize this disquieting presence in her own “perfect” family, home, and neighborhood and to dismiss Jadwiga’s scorn of what the Polish woman sees as meaningless social success. Doubtless, Jadwiga must be mentally ill and should be admitted to a hospital where an accurate diagnosis and successful treatment can restore her feminine qualities. Thus, Jadwiga’s struggle to have her suffering acknowledged and the enormity of the crimes committed against her understood—crimes which deprived her of motherhood, her athletic abilities as a champion skier, and her physical beauty and left her to a life of pain—becomes dismissed as unfeminine and therefore an obvious symptom of mental illness. Her victimization becomes offensive to those around her because it brings ugliness and reality into a household where that ugliness of reality is denied. Until Jadwiga’s arrival, any imperfection could have been smoothed over with just a few purchases.

While Anya identifies Jadwiga’s behavior as symptomatic of disease, her diagnosis is ridiculed by Joe, her brother-in-law, and a medical doctor whose advice she seeks. According to him, Jadwiga simply lacks self-control and indulges in female hysterics instead of moving on with her life and taking responsibility for her own well-being. After all, it has been ten years since the end of the war. He even questions Jadwiga’s claims of victimhood by citing his experiences with postwar refugees: “I know these refugees, there are ten of them on the staff at the hospital. Every one of them was a hero in the underground or an escapee from a concentration camp, to hear them tell it. They come in with great big chips on their shoulders.”³¹ Joe attempts to characterize the whole cohort of postwar immigrants who, as Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann suggests, defined themselves as “political immigrants” even though their motives for emigration might have been more complex.³² Joe firmly believes that Jadwiga’s self-indulgent behavior has been exacerbated by a health-care grant she received from the reparations committee that leads to a further loss of her self-esteem. So, Jadwiga’s distress after a chance meeting with the American relatives of her concentration camp torturer is treated by Joe with an injection of morphine. He patronizingly dismisses both women, Jadwiga with her war trauma and Anya with her own hidden uncertainties about the value of her “perfect” middle-class existence, by predictably advising them to visit a beauty salon and spend an afternoon shopping.

Kosturbala’s story offers a strong indictment of the double assault on Anya and Jadwiga. As masculine power, represented by Anya’s husband’s familial authority and her brother-in-law’s professional authority, reasserts itself in the Krystofs’ household, Jadwiga’s suffering is called into question. She is ordered to suppress her unfeminine rage and accept the proper female role within a family, a role that she disdains. Anya’s growing dissatisfaction, the feeling soon to be analyzed by Betty Friedan and that she shares with thousands of American women, is trivialized. Kosturbala does not offer her female characters a viable solution to the problem she presents them with. At the end of the narrative, both Anya and Jadwiga still exist within the uber-domestic setting of Anya’s state-of-the art kitchen, finally calm and companionable. After their chores are completed, they might after all go shopping, but this time they will search together for beautiful antique Persian rugs. Kosturbala clearly points out that to be acceptable within a middle-class white family structure of 1950s America, Jadwiga, a foreign other, must surrender all that is deemed unfeminine, just as Anya must surrender her unfeminine independence and suppress any doubts she might have about the value of her suburban lifestyle. Yet, this temporary surrender does not provide a permanent solution to Anya’s and Jadwiga’s concerns. The unresolved quality of the story’s ending suggests Kosturbala’s awareness that many issues still remain for middle-class ethnic women.

Kosturbala’s women of the late 1950s have little in common with Krawczyk’s earlier generation of immigrant and ethnic women who existed on the margins of the American society. Their daughters, represented by Anya Krystof, have successfully pursued their American Dream of upward mobility, entered the middle class and gained ethno-racial privilege through a clear identification with all other white Americans. Yet this success was not without a cost. The white middle-class suburbs expected uniformity and not ethnic otherness, so unique ethnic markers had to be substituted with generic American class markers. And most importantly, these seemingly successful and satisfied ethnic women began to chafe under the midcentury construct of femininity. Ironically, Kosturbala’s narrative suggests that ethnic women became simultaneously fully white and oppressed.

To counteract this gender disempowerment, or at least to illuminate it, several texts included in this collection of short stories move their plots to Poland under the German occupation (1939–45), or, like Kosturbala, deploy foreign “other” characters. Maria Laskowska’s “Life Is Beautiful” and Halina Heitzman’s “Initiation” explore the immediate past in order to circumvent the tight patriarchal controls set for women. Both authors are Polish immigrants who completed university education in interwar Poland. Laskowska (born in 1899) earned a graduate degree in Polish language and literature at the University of Warsaw, while Heitzman (born in 1912) received a master’s degree in history from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Their own socioeconomic status motivates their framing of the gender discourse. Unlike many Polish American authors who, although well-educated themselves, hail from a strongly Catholic Polish peasant immigration, Laskowska and Heitzman represent a Polish interwar intelligentsia, university-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class, characterized by its anticlericalism.³³ Paradoxically, both Laskowska and Heitzman set their narratives during the terror of World War II in order to offer their female characters opportunities to break patriarchal barriers and excel in nontraditional female roles.

“Life Is Beautiful” is a brief story, or rather a character sketch, presenting Kaytek, a young woman—not more than twenty—who serves with a first aid patrol during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, an armed revolt of the Polish citizens of Warsaw against their German occupiers. Kaytek’s gender is somewhat ambiguous. She has chosen a male-sounding nom de guerre; her “hair was cut like a boy’s”; like other soldiers she “wore crumpled army trousers . . . and a prodigious shirt made from parts of a German army tent and called ‘tigerskin’ because of the camouflage markings”;³⁴ her actions have been characterized by great physical and psychological courage as well as incredible endurance. At the same time, many of her actions are motivated by the typically female traits of empathy and compassion. In addition to her everyday duties in a field hospital unceasingly under enemy fire, she spends several hours each night searching amidst the rubble for corpses of fallen soldiers and bringing them back for burial behind the Polish barricades. She risks her life in an expedition behind the enemy lines to obtain some milk for starving infants and donates her blood for transfusions to the wounded. She is the only one who does not lose her head when the hospital is hit by an incendiary device, but orders the narrator of the story to help her put out the fire with an enormous cauldron of soup. This courageous woman-soldier also finds love and marries a fellow officer during the last days of the Uprising, explaining to her friends that “If we are about to die, it is better that we be husband and wife.”³⁵ In “Life Is Beautiful,” Laskowska places no limits on Kaytek. During a national emergency, women easily free themselves from the restrictions of the domestic sphere. In a war zone they are capable of actions expected until recently of males only. Through Kaytek’s story, Laskowska escapes the oppressive reality of the 1950s and argues eloquently against gender inequality, as does Halina Heitzman in “Initiation.”

Heitzman situates the plot of “Initiation” in Kraków in September 1939. German troops have just entered this ancient Polish city and the citizens are quickly learning about the Nazi terror. The story’s protagonist and narrator is sixteen-year-old Anka, whose idealistic patriotism rebels against her parents’ resignation to the Nazi occupation and what she sees as their mundane concerns about food and safety. Anka feels ready to take up arms in defense of the homeland. She does not consider her gender to be an obstacle and joins a neighborhood group of teenagers, both boys and girls, who begin to plot clandestine actions against the occupiers. They consider plans for bomb making, smuggling information and messages, or “carrying on an armed resistance somewhere in the woods.”³⁶ However, they lack both the expertise and necessary connections to the Polish underground army. Anka spends her days walking the city streets, observing troop movements and thinking of killing Germans, until Stephen, a friend’s brother, approaches her with a plan. He quickly enlists her help in a clandestine operation. German authorities have turned the courtyard of the town hall into a temporary prison for Polish POWs. An underground organization prepares an escape plan that hinges upon the delivery of civilian clothes to the prisoners. Anka can serve as a courier. Armed only with a fake pass as her security, Anka has to walk through the heavily guarded entrance to the town hall and unobtrusively drop a package of clothes in the courtyard. The young woman overcomes her fears, successfully completes her mission, and returns home elated. As a seasoned conspirator now, she keeps her accomplishment a secret but is deeply satisfied in her knowledge that her parcel has meant “freedom for one of them.”³⁷

Both “Life is Beautiful” and “Initiation” use the war setting to open new possibilities in gender constructs by taking young women out of their traditional domestic settings and pushing back at the restrictions binding them during peacetime. It is of prime importance to the authors that these women-soldiers are no different from their male co-conspirators in their devotion to the homeland, their desire for freedom, and their courage in carrying out orders. In addition, their empathic abilities make them even more effective than their male comrades. While these wartime heroines share some admirable qualities with Monica Krawczyk’s self-aware Polish American women of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, they also remind readers in the early 1960s that in times of war women proved their equality to men both on the home front and on the battlefield. They rely on their own judgment, believe themselves equal to male comrades at arms, and do not feel the need to defer to male authority. For both Laskowska and Heitzman, the tragedy of war, which seriously disrupts or even obliterates restrictive domesticity, offers women a measure of gender equality. In such extreme conditions, these heroic characters demonstrate resiliency, determination, loyalty, courage, and creativity certainly of different magnitude but of similar quality to Krawczyk’s characters who stand up to peacetime adversity.

The short stories from this prize-winning collection do not offer a single unified construct of Polish American gendered ethnicity at midcentury. Socioeconomic class identification strongly affects both the representation of women by male authors and the self-construction of gender by female writers. Stories anchored in the working-class milieu, for example, are characterized by a strong presence of Catholic teachings, and thus suggest a common pattern in the construction of gendered ethnicity regardless of the author’s gender identification. In these stories, Polish American working-class characters still inhabit the margins and seem hardly acculturated in the mainstream. Not only male but also female authors tend to proudly offer unwavering and unambiguous endorsements of a gender inequality firmly grounded in Catholic imagery and ethics, which circumscribe women’s roles and limit their range of acceptable behaviors.

In an exception to the organizing principle of my study, which primarily discusses Polish American women authors, I include a brief analysis of “Hearts on the Pilgrims’ Road,” which won an honorable mention in the 1963 contest for Joseph S. Wnukowski (born in 1915). Wnukowski’s investment in comprehensively disempowering and shaming his young female protagonist within the context of a religious event cannot be easily classified as merely an example of Catholic misogyny. Several of the prize-winning women writers who explore the same intersection of working-class and Catholic identity, for example, likewise develop female characters who internalize and normalize male superiority. “Hearts on the Pilgrims’ Road” tells the story of a few hours in the life of a young woman, Wanda Kulpinska, who travels to the American Czestochowa,³⁸ a shrine in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Wanda is drawn from her home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Pennsylvania’s American Czestochowa together with a group of Polish American sodality women “prompted by her petition that the Miraculous Lady of Jasna Góra might help her find a husband.”³⁹ Consumed by her desire to get married, Wanda employs the only means acceptable within her traditional community to fulfill her wish. Since she has to simultaneously preserve her absolute innocence and purity as well as attract the attention of marriageable men, the only course of action open to her is to hope for a miraculous divine intervention secured through numerous religious exercises. Unfortunately, so far none of her novenas, devotions, and special prayers has produced the desired outcome. “Now at twenty-six, Wanda was beginning to feel the panic of a woman condemned to spinsterhood,”⁴⁰ especially since she does not hold a job nor pursue a career, but depends on the charity of an elderly working-class woman who adopted her as an orphaned Polish refugee child traumatized by her time in Stalin’s Siberian gulags. Thus, it appears that a marriage for Wanda would mean just a change of economic sponsorship from her elderly savior to a husband.

During the pilgrimage to the American Czestochowa, she decides to take the matter into her own hands when she is attracted to a handsome young man with “a Polish patrician’s face.”⁴¹ She abandons even the pretense of piety and single-mindedly follows his movements both during the services and on the church grounds, devising ways to get close to him and strike up a conversation. Yet, such unwomanly behavior, which presupposes an active and assertive role for a female, cannot be rewarded: when Wanda begins to flirt innocently with the “patrician” young man, he introduces her to his attractive wife and child. At this moment, Wanda’s shame and mortification are great. She has been reminded of the rules: women do not act but are acted upon by men. Wanda has learned her lesson. She “was silent all the way back to Pittsfield. Despair had sealed her lips.”⁴² This is the time when mercy can be shown to the penitent woman: after all, a miracle happens. She is chosen by a man, the bus driver bringing the pilgrims back home, and asked on a date. If only she had waited patiently to be singled out by a man, any man, she would have been spared the embarrassment brought on by her forwardness. Even though she hardly noticed the driver before, she accepts the invitation gratefully.

Pilgrimages to Polish or Polish American holy sites are favored as settings for other contest writers. They help transmit religious values as well as illuminate desirable gender characteristics sanctioned by the Catholic Church. In “Mary Kowalewski,” by Dianne A. Pomietlarz (born in 1945), identified as a college student, the protagonist-cum-narrator remembers her childhood in Poland. She describes her mother as a model of self-sacrificing womanhood who takes her small children on yearly pilgrimages to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Częstochowa and performs a great feat of physical endurance by carrying a sick six-year-old daughter all the way there. Her life, full of adversity and heartache, is devoted to the service of her family and God. Mary Kowalewski explains, “Though dad’s death was a great shock to her she always seemed more concerned with our welfare than her own. She told us always to be good children so that we’d be prepared to die when our time came. Mama was, it always seemed.”⁴³ Death comes to her suddenly at the beginning of World War II, during a bombing raid in Warsaw in 1939, and with her dying breath she encourages her son to become a priest. Now an orphan cared for by distant relatives, Mary emulates her mother in her devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the narrative progresses from one religious observance to the next. Each time, Mary is able to prove her compassion for others, her ability to sacrifice her own needs, and her willingness to serve others. Her life becomes a living example of what John J. Bukowczyk identifies as “the Marian virtues ascribed to—and prescribed for—the Ideal Polish Woman in this Marian formulation—meekness, mildness, long-suffering, empathy, purity, chastity, devotion, self-denial, self-sacrifice.”⁴⁴ For such a life of female virtue, Mary Kowalewski is rewarded during one of the pilgrimages when she meets a Polish American family, Joe and his dying mother. Again, she willingly takes on the care of the sick woman, who herself finds happiness in preparing spiritually for imminent death. Mary’s exemplary life of virtue and extraordinary piety leads her to great happiness: her marriage to Joe and emigration from communist Poland to the freedom of America.

Even though Pomietlarz and Wnukowski represent two different generations, they both construct gender at the intersection of social class, ethnicity, and religion. In their stories, the ethics of Catholicism endorse desirable character traits of submission, self-abnegation, empathy, and service to others and severely restrict desirable life goals for women, limiting them to marriage, motherhood, and a good death with a promise of eternal life. Both protagonists from the stories by Pomietlarz and Wnukowski are constructed to exhibit particular devotion to Our Lady of Częstochowa, which serves as a strong support to John J. Bukowczyk’s claims that “Polish Roman Catholic Marianism has provided a discursive framework for the construction of an alternative model of the Polish and Polish-American woman.”⁴⁵ Roman Catholic Marianism is not unique to Polish and Polish American cultures, but rather is “a movement within the Roman Catholic church.”⁴⁶ Evelyn P. Stevens, discussing the influence of Marianism on gender discourse in Latin America and to some degree in Italy and Spain, suggests that religious practices strongly influence gender expectation in Latin societies. The practitioners of Latin marianismo link the image of an ideal woman to “semidivinity, moral superiority, and spiritual strength . . . [which] engenders abnegation, that is the infinite capacity for humility and sacrifice. No self-denial is too great for the Latin American woman, no limit can be divined to her vast store of patience. . . . She is also submissive to the demands of men.”⁴⁷

Polish American professional and amateur female authors writing at midcentury often bifurcate their construct of gendered ethnicity as the social class divide enters fiction. Due to the postwar growth of educational opportunities as well as the economic boom, many Polish American women of the second and third generation join the ranks of the American middle class, assimilating into mainstream white culture and loosening their ties with traditional ethnic centers. They disappear into the white invisibility of the suburbs and, just like their nonethnic sisters, try to alleviate the pain of disempowerment with consumerism. Polish American women who remain firmly embedded within the working-class life of ethnic communities experience numerous obstacles created by the Polish patriarchy supported by the Catholic Church. Their gendered ethnicity is constructed out of the memories of homeland, while religious teaching and especially the veneration of the Virgin Mary confirm a traditional gender binary. For them, the only path to self-fulfillment leads through service to the family, the community, and the Church in hope of the eternal reward. Not surprisingly, the stories in the collection do not suggest changes even if they, like Kosturbala’s “The Guest,” acknowledge the marginalization of women. Monica Krawczyk’s advocacy for self-improvement and self-fulfillment through, among other things, artistic endeavors seems long forgotten. On the other hand, immigrant authors representing the Polish interwar intelligentsia approach some sense of female liberation when they explore the heroic narratives of the recently ended World War II and construct women war heroes. Their stories prove that in times of crisis, when traditional cultural barriers disappear, women demonstrate patriotism, courage, assertiveness, and intelligence. Immigrant women authors write Polish patriotic traditions into gendered ethnicity as they celebrate women soldiers willing to assume roles that for centuries have been deemed acceptable for men only. Their fearless female fighters often out-soldier male combatants. These two attitudes illustrate the generational, class-based split within the Polish American diaspora: ethnic women writers whose ancestors were working class understand and therefore construct their gender identities in ways that are fundamentally more traditional and obedient than those characters constructed by later arrivals from the World War II émigré class. The fact that stories written by representatives of both groups appear in the collection means that, though individual stories may represent limited, distinct understandings of gender, the collection as a whole shows the nuances that define the larger Polish American community.