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