This paper examines the experience of the first generations of women studying in Switzerland. The text corpus consists of autobiographical accounts, letters, and fiction by German, Russian, and Polish authors. Among the first female students in Switzerland, there were such figures as Vera Figner, Olga Lubatovich, Franziska Tiburtius, Ricarda Huch, Rosa Luxemburg, Anna Tomaszewicz-Dobrska, Gabriela Iwanowska-Balicka, Zofia Daszyńska-Golińska, and Józefa Joteyko. The paper discusses the issues of (international) female cooperation and solidarity, on the one hand, and, on the other, it highlights the disparity between the self and the world, as well as the efforts to maintain the separateness of the national group.

* Artykuł przygotowany ze środków projektu finansowanego w ramach programu Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego pod nazwą „Regionalna Inicjatywa Doskonałości” na lata 2019−2022, nr projektu 009/RID/2018/19, kwota finansowania 8 791 222,00 zł.

The text investigates the history of the Polish Association of Equal Rights for Women (1907–1914) – one of the first legal feminist organisations in the Kingdom of Poland. The Association was the product of ideological and social clashes within the environment of the emancipationists gathered at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries around Paulina Kuczalska-Reinschmit, the leader of Polish suffragettes. The group was organised around the Women’s Labour Circle attached to The Society for Support of Industry and Trade (1894–1905), and then in the informal Polish Union of Equal Rights for Women. In 1907 the suffragettes formed the Union of Equal Rights for Polish Women, and the proponents of the integration of the fight for gender equality and Polish independence established the Polish Association of Equal Rights for Women. The relations between the Union and the Association were characterised by competition for succeeding in being the first to introduce new ideas into the mainstream and good practices inside the organization.

*Materiały do artykułu zostały zebrane w ramach grantu Narodowego Centrum Nauki OPUS 4 DEC–2012/07/B/HS2/00335 zrealizowanego w latach 2012–2017 na Uniwersytecie Szczecińskim.

The article discusses the relations between protagonists and episodic figures on the pages of late 19th and early 20th century novels thematising female students. As shown in the analysis, episodic characters, most of all those with negative attributes, are most informative in the context of the novel’s discursive and ideological underpinnings. Besides, negative episodic characters contrast with the idealised protagonists. The transfer of negative features onto the episodic figures turns them into vehicles of social criticism. Their contrast to the protagonists is instrumental in placing the novel inbetween the utopia and critique, creating both a fairytale and literary representation of oppression.

The article presents an analysis of selected interwar comedies written by women – Marcelina Grabowska, Maria Morozowicz-Szczepkowska, Maria Pawlikowska- -Jasnorzewska and Magdalena Samozwaniec – and dealing with issues related to the emancipation discourse: motherhood, abortion, shaping a new female role model, and relationships in women’s groups. The heroines of those plays, increasingly liberated and self-aware, demanded the rights traditionally assigned to men, while trying to free themselves from widespread stereotypes.

The authors of the dramatic works used various comedic techniques and traditions: satirical, ludic, or Young Poland’s “black comedy.” Comedy influenced the construction of the depicted world and its individual elements as well as the linguistic forms. The amusing heroines became negative characters, going beyond the limits of femininity accepted by the society or postulated by the authors, and their awkwardness evoked compassion in the audience or revealed the malfunctioning of social institutions.

The article is devoted to the writing and biography of Anna Kowalska. The first part discusses the shared home of Maria Dąbrowska and Anna Kowalska, in which women hired as housekeepers played a vital role. Then the article briefly analyses Kowalska’s novel Safona (Sappho), which depicts the aging Greek female poet surrounded by her young protégées. The main focus is, however, on the novel Gruce (The Gruca family), co-published in 1936 by Anna Kowalska and her husband, Jerzy Kowalski. The novel was heavily revised by Kowalska and reprinted in 1961, and then in 1968. One of the side motifs of this vast work explores a women’s agricultural cooperative in a village near Lviv in the second half of the 1930s. The utopian projects of feminism and cooperativism are criticised here, while the entire novel fits in the “dark” formula of psychological and social (“populist” in the language of the era) realism, characteristic of that decade.

In Children of the Holocaust (1979), Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History (1997) and The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma (2017), Helen Epstein shows an unusual bond created between her and her mother – Franci Epstein, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. The bond was so strong that it led to the phenomenon of identification which resulted in many negative consequences. On the one hand, it put the daughter’s experiences in danger of being appropriated by her mother, but on the other, it contributed to the developing bodily symptoms that seem to have been inspired by the camp experience of her mother. The relationship between Franci and Helen proves that the community can be seen not only as a way of restoring bonds of transgenerational communication, even if they appear as a form of postmemory (Marianne Hirsch) or rememories (Toni Morrison), but it can also create completely new traumas.

This article presents Mistrzynie myślenia Serbski esej feministyczny (XIX−XXI wiek) [Woman Intellectual Mentors: The Serbian Feminist Essay (From the 19th to the 20^thCentury)], a book by Magdalena Koch. This is a significant monograph that clarifies the role and place of women in Serbian literature and culture, as well as the essay as an important tool in the process of emancipation of Serbian women. Polish researcher provides a diachronic panorama of the genre over the past two centuries. The book’s crucial point is its focus on the clear presence of the tradition of the feminist essay in the cultural space in Serbia.

The book Płeć awangardy [Gender of the Avant-Garde] is the first attempt of this kind at a comprehensive, gender-oriented presentation of the avant-garde tradition in Polish literary studies. The review of the volume starts with an outline of its place in the worldwide humanities, especially in the face of the increasingly dynamic development of women’s studies on the avant-garde. Individual texts are slightly different from the editorial introduction and its assumptions: a materialistic attempt to reclaim and reestablish feminism in the heart of the avant-garde. Thus, they are presented as a result of a meeting of several methodological schools with clear patronages at the University of Silesia: art historians, literary historians, literary critics, representatives of men’s studies, women’s studies, feminism and gender studies. Despite the political background of many of them, connected with avant-garde ideas of social and aesthetic emancipation, it is easy to see how far their dictionaries have diverged from each other and how difficult it is now to meet and establish a common understanding of basic concepts such as avant-garde, sex/gender or even political engagement.

The paper is a review of the co-authorship book entitled Biopolityka męskości [Biopolitics of Manhood]. The author notices that this scientific monograph locates the Polish masculinities studies on the new field of biopolitics, immunisation and tanatopolitics, giving a hope to elaborate an alternative methodology of studies on literature and culture of this range. The author appreciates researchers’ achievements and suggests a few contexts expanding their reflections. Both the prior conference and subjective publication, in author’s opinion, open the new chapter of the Polish men’s studies.