The activities of female oppositionists did not differ significantly from those of their male colleagues. With one exception, albeit a significant one: women were more likely to make their flats available for opposition activities, which must have complicated their family lives enormously. ‘We were young people,’ one of the female activists recalled, ‘none of us had our own flat, the Samsonowicz family, especially Hala [Halina Samsonowicz] was an extremely hospitable person, she put up with our invasions of her one-room flat, she had two children, she behaved heroically, risking so much: her role is crucial, she made it possible for us to meet⁴.

If there were so many women in Warsaw alone, why was it believed that they were invisible and therefore had little participation and influence in the functioning of the union? This was mainly due to the absence of women in the leadership of the movement. The authors of the book Konspira. Rzecz o podziemnej “Solidarności” [Conspiracy: The History of the Underground Solidarity] ironically noted that, even before 1989, organisational Solidarity documents may read like the underground was as a ‘men’s monastery’. There were, of course, some exceptions. The main exceptions included: Ewa Choromańska, Ewa Kulig and Zofia Romaszewska, who, together with her husband, was a very active member of the KOR and undoubtedly influenced the decisions of the movement’s leaders. Paradoxically, it was easier for women to enter the leadership structures after the declaration of martial law and the banning of Solidarity on 13 December 1981 and the subsequent internment of the vast majority of trade union leaders, who were men. However, this did not mean that women were not on the lists of internees. Almost 400 women were interned and taken to the centre at Goldapia, on the border with the USSR.

The problem of the absence of women in the democratic opposition in the collective memory in Poland became part of the public debate relatively late, thanks to the publication of the American journalist and feminist Shana Penn, who travelled to Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s to talk to opposition women in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In her view, despite their numbers, the women involved in the Solidarity revolution were invisible in the movement, their awareness of gender issues was low, and they saw the focus on women’s rights issues as self-serving. This, she argued, had immense consequences for women’s rights in Poland and their presence on the political scene after 1989. Her acclaimed book, which laid the foundations for research on gender in the opposition, was published in 2003 (Polish version) and 2005 (English version).

However, if we focus on interpreting women’s presence in the opposition in the context of their experience of the dictatorship era, the question of their presence in the political world becomes much more complicated. All the more so because the regime guaranteed the possibility of emancipation through work and education, but did little to activate women politically, despite the long tradition of women’s full political rights (since 1918). Thus, we can assume that the success of women’s involvement in the opposition can be measured (from the perspective of gender history) as much by the degree of actual activation of Polish women as by the movement’s ability to produce numerous and articulate female leaders with clear political ambitions.

In the first case, we can even speak of an over-activation of women, especially considering the whole range of social obligations to which they were subjected (motherhood, caring responsibilities, household management, and professional work). In this way, various underground organisations and the legal and banned Solidarity became the ‘school of life’ for women, who in free Poland helped to create the social elite as journalists, creators of new education, and activists in local governments.

In the second case – taking over the real political helm – there was little chance of success. Solidarity functioned in exactly the same social and cultural fabric as the Communist Party, and this culture did not give women political experience or teach them the need to take on political responsibility, especially in a fiercely competitive environment. Such an education could perhaps have come with an independent feminist movement, but there was no place for it in the Polish People’s Republic.