Chłopki. Opowieść o naszych babkach

This book presents the history of rural women in twentieth-century Poland – the story of their arduous social advancement, spanning three generations, and of the changes introduced in the village setting by women themselves.

To be born female in the countryside in the first half of the twentieth century was to be born doubly disadvantaged: firstly, because the peasant class was the lowest in the Polish class hierarchy; secondly, because a woman ranked lower than a man.

Essentially, a woman stuck in this situation had, as the author shows, three options in life: stay in the village and accept her role; migrate to the city in search of a better life; or, finally, try to introduce changes to village life. All paths were equally difficult. Even in an urban factory or a bourgeois household, girls were faced with the same structure of feudal dependence that they had known in the villages: the urban “lords” who employed them believed they were also entitled to the female body. In this context, the examples of advance described by the author were first of an economic nature, then educational, but the whole process ended only when the relevant laws were entered into the constitution or legal codes.

Genre-wise, Peasants is a mixture of historical reportage based on period documents, a gender-based analysis of the old village setting, and in-depth interviews with the

“granddaughters”. This mixture enables the author to create a collective portrait, which has made the book a real hit, with over 300,000 copies sold. With this book, the author has connected separate social classes and distant generations, whose representatives, upon reading the book, have responded: “We too.”