„Ster” pod redakcją Pauliny Kuczalskiej-Reinschmit. Lwów 1895–1897

Date of release of digital version under CC-BY-SA license: May 2024

This publication delivers information about Kuczalska-Reinschmit’s biography; the legal and secret circles and institutions which she co-founded and cooperated with until 1895 in Warsaw (in the Polish Kingdom) and in the years 1895–1897 in Lviv (Galicia); the formation of her emancipation thought under the pressure of political, social and economic conditions (different under Russian and Austrian partitions); the most important themes of her journalism in the columns of “Echo” [Echo], “Świt” [Dawn], “Przegląd Tygodniowy” [Weekly Review], “Kurier Warszawski” [Warsaw Courier] and “Tygodnik Mód i Powieści” [The Weekly of Fashions and Novels]; and established by her “Ster. Dwutygodnik dla spraw wychowania i pracy kobiet” [The Helm. A Biweekly for Issues of Women’s Education and Women’s Work] (Lviv 1895–1897). The publication aims at providing documentary evidence of Kuczalska-Reinschmit’s and her male and female collaborators’ 19th century existential, intellectual and organizational effort and activity in the field of women’s emancipation.

The journalism of Kuczalska-Reinschmit and of her collaborators from Lviv “Ster” shows that Polish women’s pursuit of emancipation was a slow, complicated and difficult process which preceded the political act of granting citizens equal rights “without gender difference” after the Great War in 1918. The process was characterized by clashes between the most visible and loudly verbalized needs and interests of particular social classes, occupational and social groups and between women and men. What came into play was also all these groups’ deep fears of transgressing class limitations, of the manifestation of one’s own unusualness and economic impoverishment and of falling into social disgrace.

As a social activist, a publicist and an editor, Kuczalska-Reinschmit had a deep understanding of all voices in debates on women’s issues, of clearly expressed demands and deep-seated fears. That is why she always reacted to them with logical arguments, scientific research results and everyday facts coming from the lives of other nations at the same time never hiding her own pro-emancipation convictions.

Materials published in Lviv “Ster” have diverse character. They include articles justifying women’s access to secondary and university education and to new professions, texts encouraging women to establish hen-houses and warrens and to receive seamstresses and teachers for holiday periods, reports from international women’s congresses and chronicles of foreign feminist movement activity. The materials show that the emancipation project during Lviv period of Kuczalska-Reinschmit’s life was a total project. When it comes to “Ster” and its readers’ and sympathisers’ endavours it was not only women’s access to higher education, the labour market and suffrage that were at stake but also the rebuilding and democratization of the society. The first step to achieve this was the verification of collective representations of women and men, the change of common attitudes to women’s intelligence, emotionality, imagination, artistic creativity and professional, and particularly physical, work.

Above all, however, the content analysis of “Ster” showed the persistence of emancipatory ideas of the positivist worldview in culture and literature of the beginning of the next epoch called Młoda Polska [Young Poland]. The biographies of Kuczalska-Reinschmit, her mistresses and coworkers and their discourse of gender equality based on concern for common good and the preservation of national identity confirm the modern reading of Polish literature created after the fall of the January Uprising in 1864. The key concept characteristic to them is the idea of “self-restraint”, the attitude of existential “restraint” of people of the end of the 19th century which resulted in the prioritization of the ethics of duty, work and community over individual well-being. In the light of this, Polish positivism becomes a voluntarily restricted “life programme” in which one resigns from asking characteristic for romanticists questions about the “horror of the world” in order to transform the world into a more human-friendly place.

The transfer of the observations on the ground of the history of Polish women’s movement and its press organs allows to perceive Kuczalska-Reinschmit’s biography and the programme of Lviv “Ster” as existential and social projects, in which emancipation is an important but not the most important element. Political nature of these projects could not be openly expressed due to freedom of speech restrictions. Nevertheless, it was their constant feature as the projects aimed at introducing economic and social changes which by strengthening the position of women in the national community would at the same time strengthen the position of the whole community against the occupants. This changed only in the years preceding the breakout of the Great War when the emancipationists gathered round Warsaw “Ster” (1907–1914) accentuated more heavily their gender interests though even then they would underline the necessity of their engagement in the pursuit of Polish independence. The affirmation of “self-restraint” seems to have been the secret of Kuczalska-Reinschmit who was able to consolidate bigger and bigger groups of female coworkers around the Social Committee of 3rd Sewing Room of the Warsaw Charity Society [Komitet Społeczny iii Szwalni Warszawskiego Towarzystwa Dobroczynności], Women’s Committee of the Society for the Protection of Animals [Komitet Damski przy Towarzystwie Opieki nad Zwierzętami], Women’s Work Market [Bazar Pracy Kobiet], the Polish branch of Universal Women’s Union [Unia Powszechna Kobiet], Women’s Labour Delegation [Delegacja Pracy Kobiet] at the Museum of Industry and Agriculture [Muzeum Przemysłu i Rolnictwa] and finally, around Lviv “Ster”.

The project of “self-restraint” goes beyond the period of positivism and appears to be one of the most important concepts of a man’s fate at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, where individuals cooperate because they are more interested in collective rather than individual solutions of social or economic problems and in pursuing other than individual interests. The project also transgresses constituted then opposition between two models of “Polishness”. On the one hand, we have a conservative Pole-Catholic and on the other a radical in the political sense who is in addition liberal in moral terms. The project can also be called “being a human being” project, having its roots in the Enlightenment and in the reflection over the condition of a man thrown into modernity, hence crucial for Polish feminists watchword of equal rights without “gender difference” in the years preceding the Great War. In the second half of the 20th century this is characteristic for the world changing rapidly due to the development of capitalism, urbanization, modernization and democratization of a public sphere and liberalization of a private sphere. What indicates the persistence of such Enlightenment and positivist kind of thinking of a part of Polish intelligentsia at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries is the kind of political, educational, scientific and artistic activity of many Kuczalska-Reinschmit’s coworkers and of Warsaw and Lviv “Ster” after regaining by Poland independence in 1918.

Translated by Joanna Witkowska