Claiming the Shipyard,the Cowboy Hat,and the Anchor for Women: Polish Feminism’s Dialogue and Struggle with National Symbolism

Reclaiming the Shipyard: Feminism Contesting Gendered Nationalism

“Women, do not disturb us, we are fighting for Poland” (Kobiety, nie przeszkadzajcie nam, my walczymy o Polskę)—this slogan is arguably the most recognizable quotation related to the position of women in Poland’s recent history. For more than two decades, it was widely believed that such a sign was painted as graffiti on the wall of the Gdańsk Shipyard during the 1980 Solidarity strike. Cited repeatedly by feminist authors, ¹⁹ it has served as evidence of Solidarity’s sexist bias, a prediction of the political exclusion that awaited women after Solidarity’s victory (i.e., their marginalization in Polish public life of the transition era). In her pioneering book about the history of Polish emancipatory discourse, Sławomira Walczewska interprets the sign—whose historical existence she then took for granted—as evidence that Poland’s gender relations continue to be based on a “knightly contract,” a cultural script where men take on the heroic role of fighters for the homeland, while patriotic women are called on to remain passive, charming, and eternally grateful ladies. ²⁰

It is now certain that no such graffiti was in fact scrawled on the Shipyard wall. In 2012–2013, an extended search for eye-witnesses was conducted by Marta Dzido and Piotr Śliwowski, makers of a documentary film on women in Solidarity. ²¹ Their hope was to find visual evidence to support the link between the rebirth of Polish feminism and women’s role in Gdańsk in 1980, but the search proved futile. All they found was a chain of false leads. The first mention of the sign was made in an article published during Martial Law in an underground journal titled Archipelag. Confronted by Marta Dzido three decades later, the article’s author, Ewa Maria Slaska, admitted it was all a misunderstanding. She blamed it on an editor’s mistake and claimed that, in fact, she saw the sign scribbled with lipstick inside an Gdańsk elevator. ²² Curiously, the misremembered sign persists in collective memory and continues to breed meanings. A Google search with the quotation (in Polish) offers the astonishing result of five thousand entries. The sign continues to be brought up casually in the media; it was used in the theater by a feminist dramatist; it even made it into an official High School examination. ²³

Both the intended meaning and actual authorship of the misremembered sign have been the subject of much speculation. Dzido asked a number of female solidarity activists (who firmly believed in the sign’s existence), what they thought it meant. One response was that it was painted by shipyard workers who hoped to counteract secret police plans to make women dissuade their men from participation in the strike. Another woman was sure that it was the security services (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB) who had painted the sign in order to make the women feel slighted and turn against the men. ²⁴

During her search, Dzido discovered a photographic record of a different but related piece of graffiti, one that expresses the same idea in a more convoluted way: “Remember you are a Polish woman / This fight is for Poland—/ It is a duty to defend her / She is your rival” (Pamiętaj żeś Polka/ O polską sprawę walka— / Obowiązek ją bronić / To twoja rywalka) (Figure 1). ²⁵ The lines are a slightly altered version of lyrics from a patriotic song popular during the November Uprising of 1830–1831. The couplet contains an odd and yet revealing contradiction: the “Polish woman” is asked to defend Poland, her rival. This is precisely the paradoxical injunction offered to women by patriotic discourse: Your rights will always be trumped by those of Poland; hence you must give up on the struggle for your rights, accept the superiority of your rival, the nation, and serve her.

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Figure 1

Gdańsk Shipyard wall during 1980 strike. Last sign on the right reads: “Remember you are a Polish woman / This fight is for Poland—/ It is a duty to defend her / She is your rival”

As far as historical facts are concerned, Dzido’s discovery provides closure to the story. It cannot be established if the actually existing longer sign was in some way the source of the persistent rumor about the existence of the shorter one, in which workers directly appeal to women “not to disturb” them. What calls for further elaboration is the fact that feminists invented the graffiti, that they believed their own invention, and that this belief went unquestioned for decades. Dzido suggests that the feminist invention of the sign was a symptom of unconscious sexism, a contribution to the stereotyping of the passivity of women in Solidarity. Arguably, however, the invented sign captures something important about the status of women in the transition era: the pervasive sense that Poland is in need of constant attention (“fighting”), the view that any claims made by women as a group are a disturbance or obstacle in the national struggle, which is understood as a struggle of men. These ideas motivated the dissolution of Solidarity’s Women’s Section in 1991 and the way the abortion ban was introduced and maintained in the following decades. The exclusion of women from post-1989 politics was legitimized by the juxtaposition between women and the nation, the culturally entrenched juxtaposition of, and rivalry between, Polska and Polka. The former (i.e., Poland) inevitably takes precedence over the latter (individual Polish woman).

The feminist response is of course rebellion: women cannot and will not accept this scenario. Two sorts of conclusions may then follow. The first is that women’s claims are necessarily at cross purposes with the national project, which must be rejected wholesale. The second is that emancipation must occur by appropriating the symbols, emphasizing women’s contribution to the independence struggle. It is crucial to note that in either case the feminist intervention occurs in dialogue with national discourse; cultural legitimacy is earned through engaging with patriotic symbolism but engaging it on one’s own terms. As the third section will make clear, in recent years the imaginary rivalry between Polska and Polka has given rise to much feminist wordplay. Replacement of the former by the latter is the ultimate battle cry of radicalized women and—according to nationalists—a criminal offense.

To understand the idea of rivalry between women and the nation imagined as woman, we must pause to ask: but if Poland is a woman, what sort of woman is she? As Maria Janion elaborates, in the Romantic tradition, the nation has been represented as a mythic female figure marked by great virtue and enormous suffering. Polonia deserves not just respect but also pity as a woman in chains, a dying woman. In some representations, she is actually dead: crucified or in her grave. If Poland appeared “dead” to nineteenth-century artists, poets, and thinkers, it is because, figuratively speaking, she was indeed dead: The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned; its residents lived under foreign occupation. But in all this suffering, she also reveals a cruel streak, demanding endless sacrifice, which leads to a peculiarly perverse relationship with her sons. In her discussion of Polish romantic poetry and painting—among them canonical works by Mickiewicz and Matejko—Janion writes: “The relationship to the mother in the period of national enslavement is complicated by the fact that she has died and the sons are trying to bring her back from the dead. They often imagine her as a phantasmatic lover, or the victorious rival of the actual lover, which leads the sons to rely on one another as brothers even more.” ²⁶ Thus, Poland as the dead-or-dying mother/lover demands endless heroic sacrifice from her sons, requiring them to abandon their lovers, wives, and sisters. Polonia, it seems, has no daughters (or if she does, she ignores their needs); she presides jealously over an ever deeper homosocial bond of her sons.

Feminist responses to this mythology have been twofold: to reject it altogether and to transform it creatively. One example is the Polish Mother theme of the first Manifa (Women’s Day Demonstrations) on 8 March 2000. The poster accompanying the event stated, “I’ve had enough! Polish Mother” (Mam tego dość! Matka Polka) (Figure 2); the demonstration itself included a street happening featuring the Polish Mother, who came down from heaven clad in a blue apron to announce her exasperation with right-wing politicians. Recruiting the mythic female figure at the heart of the Polish national mythology for a feminist event was, of course, a provocation, one that had an unmistakable aspect of surrealism and the grotesque. The event was a clear challenge to the seriousness of nationalist discourse. However, it also had an aspect of pathos; it signaled feminists’ claim to belong to the national tradition, their desire to transform this heritage rather than reject it. Turner argued that “daring and innovation” are key qualities of changing or newly established cultural systems and the symbolic language generated by communitas. Such language—spontaneous and spectacular, but also innovative and daring—marks a cultural transition. ²⁷ Symbolic activity is marked by ambivalence and open-endedness; sentimentality can be mixed with mockery; pathos is combined with irony. Since its inception in 2000, the Manifa movement aspired to becoming such a liminal stage of feminist history. Arguably, many of Manifa’s symbolic strategies were repeated with far greater force during the Black Protest of 2016. The difference was one of scale as well as intensity caused by urgency of the political situation.

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Figure 2

Manifa 2000 poster. Design by Iwona Mikos

Most recently, the invented Shipyard sign was yet again “remembered” by participants of the Black Protest in the popular Xeroxed sign: “Men, come with us, we are fighting for Poland” (Mężczyźni, chodźcie z nami, my walczymy o Polskę). It seems futile to ask whether the sign was meant to be a mockery or an appropriation of the patriotic discourse. The Black Protest constituted part of a struggle for democratic Poland, while it was also an act of resistance against the expectation that women wait their turn while men engage in struggle.

Poland Is a Woman, and so Is Gary Cooper, or: Who Owns Solidarity?

Soon after Black Monday, Solidarity (the labor union closely affiliated with Law and Justice party) filed a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s office in Gdańsk regarding unlawful use of the Solidarity script during the demonstrations. ²⁸ The incriminated banner was a transformed version of the famous 1989 election poster featuring Gary Cooper, which Solidarity viewed as its property, along with the Solidarity script itself. The investigation was opened but eventually terminated in part thanks to the quick reaction of an activist named Anna Dryjańska, who set up an online petition—a public confession of sorts, immediately signed by several thousand women who claimed they had organized the protest. With too many culprits available, legal consequences were avoided, but the story behind the image is worth examining in some detail, as it speaks volumes about the (en)gendering of patriotic symbols as a feminist strategy of choice.

The original poster was the work of designer Tomasz Sarnecki, who had appropriated an image from the classic 1952 western, High Noon (Figure 3). Armed with a ballot in place of a gun, Gary Cooper closes in on election time: “High Noon, June 4, 1989.” One Solidarity logo is behind him, another one is pinned above his star, close to his heart. Selected as the official 1989 election poster, the image has since attained the status of a cultural icon, one that captures both the spirit of 1989 and Polish culture’s infatuation with American cultural mythology. Years later, Sarnecki thus recalled his choice of Cooper as protagonist: “Here was a great hero from a Hollywood story, a fighter for freedom and justice, an ideal figure. He affected the imagination, he was beyond all divisions and borders.” ²⁹ The unacknowledged aspect of this “ideal figure” is, of course, his hypermasculinity. In 1989, it was part of what made him a “an ideal hero” fit to represent Solidarity “beyond all divisions and borders”; two decades later, the exclusion of women from politics was an important topic of public debate. Hence, the first feminist takeover of the poster: in 2009, the Croatian conceptual artist Sanja Iveković created a remake titled “Invisible Women of Solidarity.” ³⁰ Her version features the silhouette of a woman in place of Gary Cooper. Below her feet, the sign reads: “High Noon: 1989–2009.” The female figure is black and faceless, which suggests the erasure of women, rather than a simple symbolic takeover of the original image. In the fall of 2016, Black Protest participants engaged in the second takeover: they recycled the Iveković image, eliminating the words and dates, in some versions providing the female silhouette with an umbrella (a Black Protest symbol) and superimposing the female figure on the Solidarity script. The resulting image was used as design for fliers and stickers worn at demonstrations (Figure 4), as well as handheld banners. This practice led the Solidarity trade union to accuse feminists of “unlawful use” of their logo (a lawsuit eventually resolved in favor of feminists). The story has led to an interesting and long overdue debate concerning the right to use and interpret culturally significant symbols. Do artists have the right to play with national symbols? Do antinationalist movements have a legitimate claim to Solidarity’s legacy?

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Figure 3

“High Noon 4 June” 1989 Solidarity election poster designed by Tomasz Sarnecki

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Figure 4

Black Protest participants in Gdańsk 2016 with fliers based on “Invisible Women of Solidarity” by Sanja Iveković (2009)

To replace Gary Cooper with a female figure is to call attention to the masculinist bias of Solidarity, while capitalizing on its prominent place in collective memory. Rather than rejecting the legacy of the struggle of 1980, feminists have reframed and subverted it. The same logic applies to other feminist uses of symbols from the partition era and the Warsaw Uprising. Central to all these symbolic struggles is the recognition that Polish nationalism is gendered and this gendering needs to be subverted if women are to become proper political subjects.

“Poland is a Woman” (Polska jest kobietą) and “Poland for women, women for Poland” (Polska dla kobiet, kobiety dla Polski)—these two slogans seem emblematic of the strategy that consists in claiming patriotic sentiment for feminist mobilization and manipulating it to women’s advantage. The first one—structured as a statement of fact: Poland is a woman, not a man—has been used by the Polish Women’s Party, which was founded in 2007 by the novelist Manuela Gretkowska. Her extravagant and provocative manifesto and a call to action by the same title published in Przekrój weekly is one of the key documents of Polish feminism. ³¹ The second slogan—designed as a call for change and a political program—was coined by founders of the Women’s Congress, which originated in 2009 in response to the omission of women in the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of transition to democracy. Both organizations strive to mobilize masses of women, to build mainstream feminism in Poland. Even as they oppose nationalist/Catholic efforts to limit women’s rights, their language, visuals, and rituals are those of patriotic commitment. Both organizations use the shape of Poland in their logos; national flags are generously present at events they organize; each of the ten annual Congresses since 2009 has opened with the collective singing of the Polish national anthem. The main aim is to increase the political representation of women, while success is primarily measured by the number of women brought into politics. As Gretkowska put it in her manifesto: “Picketing the Parliament, demonstrating in the streets, collecting signatures—all these are noble and heroic forms of protest, but as we can see they are also futile. That is why women must enter the Sejm, why they must form an effective force of political pressure—a political party.” ³² The Women’s Congress has never aspired to becoming a party, but its first, largest, and most successful campaign consisted in introducing quotas into the electoral system (the process was initiated in 2009; quotas became law in 2011).

Significantly, the need for political representation of women is legitimized in mainstream feminism not by women’s desire for power but by the need to serve Poland better. Women want to join the political elite, it is argued, so that Poland can better compete and cooperate with other nation states. By employing this line of persuasion, the Women’s Congress has revived a strategy central to nineteenth-century feminism, with its oft-repeated claim that the struggle for women’s emancipation is but a means to achieving greater progress in the national cause. ³³ The contemporary version of this patriotic-feminist reasoning consists in stressing women’s commitment to Poland’s modernization and Europeanization, and, conversely, the significance of gender equality to EU policy. Mainstream feminism in Poland—that is, nongovernmental organizations focused on women’s rights and the Women’s Congress, which grew, to a large extent, out of their efforts—has been consistently pro–European Union and opposed to anti-EU forces in Poland. Activists and lawyers focused on implementation of EU equality directives pertaining to areas such as equal pay, sexual harassment, violence against women, equality in education, etc. Between 2002 and 2010, Poland’s Labor Code was amended several times to comply with EU standards. One typical example is the introduction of a ban on taking negative measures against an employee who submits a complaint of harassment or sexual harassment. ³⁴ While “EU standards” were a strategic reference point in exerting pressure on the government, much care was taken not to appear too cosmopolitan, detached from the needs of Polish women. This commitment was signaled on the symbolic level through the anthem singing and through the Poland-shaped Congress logo. I asked Prof. Małgorzata Fuszara, sociologist, lawyer, and one of the leaders of the Women’s Congress, about her understanding of these images, ideas, and practices. Here is what she told me:

The very idea of the Congress was born in reaction to exclusion. Women were being invited to listen to the male narrative about victory over communism, which led to the possibility of building a new, independent Poland. The official version of history excluded them: It was a men’s story and men’s history. . . . This is why our logo is a woman’s profile inscribed into the shape of Poland. . . . By singing [the anthem], we are sending a message: this is our country, the symbols are ours, too, we intend to shape Poland. ³⁵

Feminist patriotism is thus strategic and context-related; the struggle is one over legitimacy in the public sphere. In recent years, this struggle has been especially intense on Independence Day (11 November), the national holiday that right-wing extremists have chosen for their own massive street demonstrations, often leading to riots. ³⁶ In 2011, feminists and left-wing activists organized a street event designed to challenge the extreme right’s claim on history and patriotic symbols. The event, named “Colorful and Independent” (Kolorowa Niepodległa), was designed to prevent the Independence March from passing through Warsaw’s center. More than a mere blockade, it was also an effort to provide antifascist protesters with a set of patriotic rituals: speeches by celebrities, a concert, the waving of national flags, and the collective singing of patriotic songs. The aim was not just to express outrage at the opponents’ symbolic appropriations but also to give voice to a left version of patriotism, one that includes minority rights and women’s rights. The name was significant: Colorful and Independent Poland is a female figure, emphatically not the sort of woman that the nationalist right imagines. In fact, “Poland” herself was present at the event—a young girl dressed in both the national flag and the rainbow flag of the LGBT movement.

One might object that Colorful and Independent was not a feminist event but rather a patriotic challenge to nationalistic forces (true to the Lipski distinction). The fact that it was co-organized by feminists is, however, significant, especially in the light of later developments. Admittedly, joining the antifascist movement requires feminists to (temporarily) downplay their own agenda. The logic of rivalry between Polka and Polska is activated here: not unlike the national struggle, the struggle against nationalism means that Polish women must await their turn, because Poland—suffering and in need—needs urgent attention. Six years later, the Black Protest would face a similar dilemma. As soon as it became clear that the demonstrations were massive and could successfully pressure the government, organizers faced expectations that they transform their initiative into an anti–Law and Justice force, putting women’s rights on a back burner. These hopes hinged, for instance, on the fact that it was a group of fourteen women (and no men) that tried to block the march organized by right-wing extremists on Independence Day 2017. It was wrongly assumed that the act was somehow gender-neutral, separate from these same women’s identity as feminists. ³⁷

The strategy of symbolic appropriation was extremely prominent—and remarkably effective—during the 2016 wave of anti–Law and Justice mobilization. First, let us note that the Black Protest was indeed black. As a color worn by women, black has a powerful tradition in international feminism thanks to Women in Black, but this seems only marginally relevant, as the group was never prominent in Poland and the protest’s organizers, Polish Women’s Strike (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet), had no connections to it. ³⁸ Far more significant is the local patriotic association. In Poland, the spectacle of masses of women taking to the streets while dressed in black brings back the memory of women wearing mourning dress following the anti-Russian demonstrations of 1861. Women’s mourning as patriotic protest was a massive phenomenon for half a decade under Russian rule and women were persecuted for it. These facts and related images are part of Poland’s collective memory that was revived during Women’s Strike 2016. ³⁹ The Black Protest engaged a sizeable portion of the population: according to polls, 64 percent of Polish women were interested and sympathetic, 17 percent claimed to have worn black that day, while 4 percent took part in person. ⁴⁰ For women to wear black on such a scale as a sign of political protest was to signal a link between their grievances and those of the nation. On Black Monday, through the act of collective mourning, the rivalry between Polka and Polska was finally suspended.

Claiming the Anchor: How Polska Became Polka

Małgorzata Fuszara’s words, cited in the previous section, illustrate mainstream feminism’s complex attitude towards patriotism, which seems both heartfelt and strategic. Next to a genuine sense of belonging and very real anger at exclusion, there is political pragmatism if not calculation: if the language of patriotism is the one in which claims to legitimacy are most effectively made in Poland, then liberal feminists are willing to use this language. This strategy is not, however, understood by them as a compromise with the nationalist right. Quite the opposite: to demand that one’s work for equality be recognized as patriotic is to oppose the increasing presence of the extreme right in the public sphere and the right-wing claim that feminism is a foreign import in Polish culture. The feminist invention of the graffiti on the Shipyard wall; the appearance of Matka Polka at Manifa in March 2000; the “Colorful and Independent” event during the November 2011 blockade of the right-wing march; the use of the Solidarity’s Gary Cooper poster at the Black Protest—all these feminist interventions aim to challenge the right-wing monopoly on patriotism.

The opposite standpoint, however, also merits attention. Profound skepticism about any engagement with patriotic symbolism has been central to the development of Polish feminism as an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement. Here, the strategy is to deconstruct the entire tradition of Polish patriotism, to violently reject its legacy, to cannibalize rather than claim its imagery. The purpose is to bring into public view nationalism’s disregard for women, as well as its parochialism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, and general oppressiveness. This strand of feminism tends to deny or ignore the distinction between patriotism and nationalism that liberal feminists uphold. The ironic, and at times furious disavowal of national discourse has been undertaken repeatedly in feminist literature and art. ⁴¹ Polish culture is portrayed in such discourse as irreparably xenophobic and sexist. From time to time, essays and polemics penned by radical left-wing feminists attack feminist efforts to reclaim or resignify patriotic symbolism as at best naïve, at worst opportunistic or cynical. ⁴²

The most vivid example of discord regarding uses and abuses of patriotic symbols unfolded in recent years in relation to the “Fighting Poland” sign (Polka Walcząca), popularly known as the Warsaw Uprising anchor. The story of feminist appropriation of this symbol—which, as we remember, had already been appropriated by right-wing groups—begins in 2013, when the Women’s 8th of March Alliance (the collective in charge of Manifas), designed a poster inscribing the anchor into a sketch of a woman’s body. The graphic was titled “O Polkę Niepodległą” (Struggling for Independent Polish Woman) (Figure 5). The phrasing echoes and transforms the patriotic phrase “O Polskę Niepodległą” (Struggle for Independent Poland), claiming independence for women as individuals rather than for the nation state. Interestingly, the activists who came up with this idea were attacked from two directions. It was argued by some that such irreverence toward national symbols is unacceptable, a blasphemy against the legacy of the Warsaw Uprising. Others (representatives of the radically leftist, antinationalist strand of feminism) insisted that the very use of such symbols makes their users supporters of nationalism.

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Figure 5

Manifa 2013 graphic. Design by Maja Rozbicka

In response to these attacks, one of Manifa’s organizers, Katarzyna Bratkowska, wrote a manifesto carefully explaining her (and the group’s) take on Polish patriotism:

Let there be no mistake: the theme of this year’s Manifa is INDEPENDENCE OF THE BODY. The independence of a woman’s body in a country known as Poland, so it seems it is the Polish woman [Polka] we are talking about. We inscribe ourselves into patriotic discourse with this woman’s body on purpose, just as we dressed up as bishops and priests last year. . . . Uninvited, we come to the places that strive to annihilate us. By means of the female body we expose the utter emptiness of these symbols. . . . The Polish woman is not dead as long as we stay alive [Jeszcze Polka nie zginęła, póki my żyjemy]. ⁴³

Bratkowska’s text is both a radical feminist manifesto and a clever satire on Polish patriotic rhetoric. It is also an act of defiance, an exhortation, a call to arms, and a provocation. The author is aware of the potential ambivalence of the image itself, once it entered the public sphere as a symbol. The text is an effort at disambiguation, an act of symbolic damage control. It addresses those who have mistakenly taken the image in question for a patriotic symbol.

The controversy over the 2013 “Independent Polish Woman” graphic would be of little interest today, had it ended then and there. The Manifa collective is a relatively small group, known for its uncompromising radicalism; its annual demonstrations have never exceeded 3000 participants, while the Women’s Strike, which also took up this image, attracted between 98 and 140 thousand participants nationally. ⁴⁴ The new and improved sign used by protesters in 2016 had a new name: “Polka Walcząca” (Fighting Polish Woman) and a simpler, catchier design that made it easy to reproduce: two dots placed in the anchor’s arches, a braid attached at the top. Black Protesters used this new “Polka” sign endlessly: as a sticker, a handmade banner, a Facebook profile, and as graffiti on city walls (often made by adding nipples and a braid to already existing “anchor” sprayed by right-wing activists). When asked why they wore “Polka” pins and stickers, most women claimed they “simply” liked it or stated that they identified with it because they thought of themselves as Women Fighters or Women Warriors. Arguably, what they liked was the way the sign identified their struggle for reproductive rights with the national struggle, suggesting continuity rather than rivalry between the two causes. Many Black Protest women thought of their activism as taking place in dialogue with the national tradition.

While some view the Black Protest as a true feminist awakening, others emphasize that it was part of a larger social mobilization against the Law and Justice government. It also marks a generational shift in the Polish women’s movement, the ascendance of a new cohort of radical women. The key factor that made Black Monday distinct from earlier activism was the young age of participants, ⁴⁵ most of whom had no prior activist experience. Social movement scholar Elżbieta Korolczuk explains the phenomenon by employing the category of connective (as opposed to collective) action. ⁴⁶ Connective action is “based on the use of flexible, easily personalized action frames, which were also well-embedded in cultural narratives referencing the fight for Poland’s independence and resisting the oppressive state.” Mobilization occurred online, in social media, with hashtags, personal profiles, and memes playing a key role. The huge scale and largely improvised character of these protests made it impossible for any structured group or groups to maintain control over the cultural meanings of the symbols used. The symbols became polyvalent, their meaning unstable because there was no structure and no desire to bring one about. The Black Protest—especially the mass demonstrations held on 3 October 2016—correspond to Turner’s concept of communitas, the liminal stage of social drama, marked by enthusiasm, egalitarianism, and symbolic ambiguity. Another useful explanatory frame here might be David Kertzer’s argument that “far from always creating solidarity by reinforcing shared values, one of the crucial functions of ritual is to produce solidarity in the absence of any commonality or beliefs.” ⁴⁷ The protests were aimed against a total ban on abortion, but participants were unable and unwilling to articulate a common political agenda: It was never made clear what kind of law they would support (legal abortion or maintaining the existing restrictions). The symbolic intensity masked enormous differences among participants, both to the media and to the protesters themselves.

While most observers were struck by the young age of participants and by the movement’s effective use of social media, what might be even more important is the lack of top–down coordination. Symbols served as recruitment tools in a structureless context. The protesters needed to communicate rapidly and the effect of this need was intense symbolic activity, which included references to and appropriations of national symbols, but also jokes, drawings, as well as citations from popular culture, literature, and film. The grassroots movement grew exponentially, while disseminating images through Internet channels (mostly Facebook and Instagram). Specific meanings attached to all these images became increasingly mixed, contradictory, and uncontrollable. Feminist appropriations of patriotic imagery attracted much public attention and were subjects of debate, sometimes censure, both among feminists and among outside observers. ⁴⁸

The “Polka” sign was viewed as offensive not just by right wing radicals, whom it was aimed to provoke, but also by some of the Black Protest participants. The author of an enthusiastic account of the Łódź protest, a male journalist, tells of his encounter with two women who wore “Polka” stickers. He scolded them: the Fighting Poland sign is sacred, he explained, so it pains him to see people using it for political purposes. The women took off the stickers, saying they would do it for him. He thanked them, but said it had to be done for the sake of those who fought for our freedom and dignity in the Home Army. ⁴⁹ The author of this didactic tale clearly considers himself a supporter of the protest; in fact, he is one of them. Yet he strongly disapproves of feminist use of patriotic symbols. To him, “Polka” is a lapse of judgment, a mistake to be corrected, forgiven, and forgotten. Right-wing critics were less generous. The woman who wrote about the Black Protest for Fronda, a far-right news portal, had no doubt that feminists were in fact enemies of the nation, aiming to smear Polishness rather than to liberate Polish women. Interestingly, her article also suggests that the real intention behind the protests was rivalry with the Independence March of 11 November. ⁵⁰

It is not likely that protesters equipped with “Polka” stickers and banners knew the legal risks involved. In fact, until the protests, few people were aware that the “Fighting Poland” sign was protected by law. Passed in June 2014, in anticipation of the seventieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, the bill was a response to increasing commercialization of the symbol and its use by right-wing extremists (e.g., as a tattoo pattern, as decoration of baseball bats). By 2016, political winds had changed and the law became a weapon in the hands of the extreme right, a formation that now enjoyed protection, if not full support, of the Law and Justice government. The legal conflict over the transformed Gary Cooper poster was resolved to the women’s advantage because the incriminated image was the remake of a remake of an internationally famous work of art. Hence, Solidarity’s copyright claim was invalid from the start. In the “Fighting Poland” case, however, symbolic appropriation could be legitimately prosecuted as an offense against patriotic decorum. According to the law, all citizens are obliged to “respect and honor” the symbol, which constitutes “common good” of the whole nation and is part of Poland’s “historical legacy.” ⁵¹ Taking advantage of the law’s existence, the ultranationalist organization ONR (Obóz Narodowo Radykalny; the Radical National Camp) appealed to the police to “secure the signs” as evidence of criminal activity, and proceeded to sue individual Women’s Strike participants in several cities. Media interest in this conflict was remarkable on both sides of the ideological divide. The outcome was uneven: in Szczecin, the court dismissed the case; in Kielce, the judge sentenced that city’s Black Protest organizer to a 2000 PLN fine, holding her personally responsible for the fact that participants used “Polka” stickers; and in February 2018, after an almost two-year dispute, the Warsaw court finally dismissed the case against three Green Party activists who used a slightly different version of the symbol.

The summer months of 2017 brought another wave of demonstrations—this time in support of autonomy of the courts—and another stage of the symbolic struggle involving the “Polka” image. On the night of 31 July, a radical feminist art group called Black Rags (Czarne Szmaty or CzSz on Facebook) plastered the route of an ONR march planned for the following day (the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising) with hundreds of black “Polka” posters (Figure 6). They posted photographs of the night’s work on Facebook along with a statement of intent: They had done it to counteract the appropriation of national symbols, which are part of the common good, by the extreme right; they oppose the unequal treatment by state organs of those who use patriotic symbols; they demand more “women’s narratives” concerning the Warsaw Uprising. ⁵² The statement testifies to feminists’ serious reflection on the previous stage of the symbolic and legal conflict. Not only are they familiar with the law and the lawsuits it made possible, but they also seem hyperaware of the way symbols circulate in culture, in dialogue and competition with one another. If Poland is in the midst of symbolic war, these women are remarkably self-reflexive symbolic warriors. Interestingly, the campaign avoided any explicit statements about the Uprising itself. The use of the hashtag #PolkiWalczace is noncommittal in regard to historical events referenced in the struggle. What matters is not assessment of history as such, but its present uses and abuses. The point is to challenge right-wing monopoly on patriotism, to honor women’s participation (as well as victimization) in the national struggle, and to draw a link between feminist activism and wartime anti-Nazi struggle.

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Figure 6

“Polka” posters in Warsaw City Center on the night of 31 July 2017. Design: Czarne szmaty and Jacek Rudzki

Conclusion

During the past few years, activists and commentators associated with Poland’s New Left have argued that to engage with patriotic symbolism is to play a cynical and risky game in the hope of mobilizing the masses whose nationalism is taken for granted. ⁵³ These critics believe that the strategy will inevitably backfire by contributing to nationalism itself. Defenders of the strategy respond that the power of Solidarity’s symbolic legacy—as well as the legacy of the Home Army, which it partly incorporated—is such that present-day conflicts inevitably return to this tradition, as a reservoir of rebellious know-how and source of cultural legitimacy. In a cultural scenario where national symbols are omnipresent, to ignore them would be to place oneself outside the struggle for cultural relevance. Since the symbols are gendered, it seems inevitable that the collective struggle about gender issues would enter dialogue—and struggle—with national symbolism.

While there is no such thing as “nationalist feminism” in Poland, it is largely through their positioning toward nationalism that feminist subcultures have differentiated themselves from one another. Each of various strands of feminist interventions described in this article can be viewed as a form of cultural opposition that seeks to reinterpret and reconfigure both the meaning of the national (specifically, its gendering inherited from the nineteenth century) and the role of women in participatory politics and civic life. The national symbols that feminists have interfered with—the anchor, the Gary Cooper poster, Matka Polka, the idea that Poland is a woman, etc.—emerge as sites of “war” over those meanings. This article has argued that until 2016 it was, for the most part, possible to distinguish between two contrasting attitudes toward national symbols within the movement. One was ironic deconstruction signaling a given group’s distance from the national project; the other was appropriation of national imagery expressing the desire to be recognized as legitimate participants in the patriotic tradition. In the fall of 2016, this neat distinction lost its validity: the two attitudes met in the streets, embodied in a flood of images. During the Women’s Strike, feminist versions of patriotic symbols were omnipresent, but their original or intended meaning became undecipherable.

During the Black Protest, each of the three symbols examined in this article functioned in the public sphere with various meanings attached to it. Each was read by some as an expression of feminist patriotism and by others as antinationalistic provocation. The intentions of the signs’ original makers had little to do with their dynamically unfolding cultural significance. In 2009, Sanja Iveković appears to have wanted her female cowboy image to express bitter critique of the exclusion inherent in the national tradition. Yet, many of those who carried or saw the image in the Black Protest half a decade later read it as a pronouncement of their national belonging. Similarly, the “Polka” sign, though originally meant as provocation, has been criticized as an expression of feminist nationalism, and many of its users seem to understand it in that way. Most of those who used “Polka” in 2016 were unaware of the 2013 poster and the controversy surrounding it. When asked by the media about the sign’s significance, demonstrators explained they wanted to reclaim the sign of the Warsaw Uprising back from right-wing extremists. They also seemed to identify with the sign as protesters: They were Polish women, they were fighting for their rights; the “fighting Polish woman” signs matched this identity remarkably well.

One way to understand the multiplicity of meanings is to suggest that the Black Protests constituted an example of Turner’s communitas, the liminal state of social drama. The demonstrations involved symbolic activity on an unprecedented scale: Protesters produced and displayed thousands of signs, posters, songs, banners, and flags, many of them with references to patriotic heritage. The symbols were then reproduced as photographs and circulated in social media. While examining this frenetic activity, it would be tempting to stabilize the meaning of these symbols, to establish whether they express pathos or irony. Clearly, however, this cannot be done. Leaderless, explosive, profoundly emotional, the Black Protest mobilization was a breakthrough for Polish feminism, bringing joy, hope, and enthusiasm, but also chaos and unpredictability.