Polish communist women, postwar socialist emancipation efforts, and how to write about them today (Agnieszka Mrozik)

Who were the communist women who designed and implemented the socialist project of women’s emancipation not only in Poland, but around the world? How did they conceptualize emancipation? How to write about them today, when any association with communism arouses resistance, and communists are either erased from history or stereotypically captured as traitors to the nation? We talk with Agnieszka Mrozik about her book "Female architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist women, literature, and women’s emancipation in postwar Poland" (2022).

 

Agnieszka Mrozik is an associate professor of literary studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is affiliated with two research units: The Center for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism, and the Women’s Archive. She was a fellow of the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena (2017), the Institute for Advanced Study CEU (2018/19), and the DAAD program at the University of Hamburg (2019). In the summer semester of 2023/24, she was a guest professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). She is the author of Architektki PRL-u: Komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce [Female architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist women, literature, and women’s emancipation in postwar Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2022) and Akuszerki transformacji: Kobiety, literatura i władza w Polsce po 1989 roku [Midwives of the transformation: Women, literature, and power in post-1989 Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012). She has co-authored and co-edited several collective volumes, including Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944–1989 (CEU Press, 2021), Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond (Routledge, 2020), and Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism (Routledge, 2018).