When I ask my mother how she experienced Women’s Day as a young girl in Poland, she starts singing. “Women’s Day, Women’s Day! Let everyone know that today is a girls’ holiday. Smiles are for them, fun and dancing, a song is streaming from the radio…” – this is roughly how the text could be translated from Polish. My mother no longer knows the lyrics to the song and instead giggles with amusement as she remembers having to sing the piece at school. It is a children’s song that the classes practiced to sing to the teachers on March 8th. Sometimes they also recited poems. The boys wore white shirts, the girls wore black or blue skirts and had bows tied in their hair. My mother remembers how Grandma often washed the clothes the evening before March 8th because they had forgotten that “Dzień Kobiet”, Women’s Day, was coming up.
Later, my mother was the one the children sang to. As a teacher in the 1980s, her employer gave her carnations and a packet of coffee or chocolates, and sometimes a pair of tights. She was particularly happy about this, after all nylon tights were a rare commodity in communist Poland. The school day was usually shorter on March 8th. After work, the staff went to a bar, ate cake, donuts and drank coffee, and the men generously poured alcohol, especially for themselves.
March 8th is a big celebration in Poland. It’s just that its meaning has shifted significantly over the years. The day became particularly popular during the time of the People’s Republic of Poland to celebrate the “equality of working women as an achievement of socialism” and had the character of a national holiday. This was not, as it seemed, about real emancipation. Rather, it was about demonstrating “happy socialism” and wooing the workers who were needed in factories or weaving mills.
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Today they still exist, the big celebrations, the flowers and the chocolate. But March 8th has also become a symbolic date for feminist protests in Poland. Especially in recent years, when the national conservative PiS has increasingly restricted women’s rights, the day has gained political significance for many Polish women. This year it will be used as an opportunity to remind the new, more liberal government of what it promised women before the election in October 2023. A planned protest by the all-Poland women’s strike is supposed to lead to parliament, where the activists want to pay a visit to the new Marshal of the Sejm, Szymon Hołownia. He recently announced that he would postpone the first reading on “abortion projects” by a month. This is once again fueling resentment among feminists, who always emphasize that they helped the new government win.
It is the first March 8th after eight years in which the PiS has made abortions practically impossible in Poland, made access to the morning-after pill more difficult or called into question the Istanbul Convention to combat violence against women. The new government is committed to doing better. The expectations of those who still believe in politics are high. And so it is the first time that I talk to my mother and grandmother about Women’s Day in Poland.
For them, March 8th was nothing more and nothing less than a reason to celebrate; sometimes they were happy about it, sometimes, as my mother tells it, she was also bored by the process with the dressed-up children, the same old songs and the men’s empty phrases. What neither she nor my grandmother questioned at the time was how Women’s Day was used for propaganda purposes by the dictatorial Polish United Workers’ Party, and how anti-emancipatory it actually was.
Women’s Day, as it was celebrated in Poland during the era of socialism, has deep patriarchal roots. As the Polish professor Lucyna Kopciewicz writes in the specialist journal Gender, the celebration of Women’s Day in Poland is based on the knightly veneration discourse. According to this understanding of the role, the man worships and protects his wife, who in turn should prove herself worthy of this and support him. So real socialism merely reinterpreted this narrative, and the Catholic Church supported it. Although the Polish woman was highly respected in society, she had to be modest and selfless, sacrifice herself and accept her fate.
The Polish newsreel, which was shown in all cinemas nationwide during the communist era, gives an insight into how this situation was lived in socialist Poland. The newsreel presented women as leaders of labor and emphasized that they were no worse off in “men’s jobs” and that they took part in the fight for the “welfare of the fatherland” together with them. In their contributions, the filmmakers showed Polish women at work, shopping, taking the children to school and kindergarten or handling pots and pans in the kitchen.
Women’s expectations of the new government are high
At the same time, the films caricatured Women’s Day in a bizarre way. For example, the directors developed a housewife dressed as a robot who was put in cardboard armor and equipped with kitchen utensils: That was the “Ewa” robot. The filmmakers of the newsreel liked to use the name Ewa universally for the Polish woman. In the short film, the robot served the husband his holiday meal for Women’s Day, and as a thank you, “Ewa” gets a carnation stuck in the whisk.
With carnations, tights and feigned respect, Poles celebrated Women’s Day until the system was overthrown by the Solidarity movement in 1989. Only then did feminists begin to publicly question the discourse of veneration. My mother didn’t see how March 8th gained feminist significance after the revolution because she emigrated to Germany shortly afterwards. “I thought it was a shame that Women’s Day wasn’t celebrated so big in Germany,” she remembers. And she was a little surprised that her German husband didn’t have a bouquet of tulips, roses or carnations ready on Women’s Day. My mother soon told him about the tradition. I remember at some point every March 8th there were two roses on our kitchen table. One for my mother, one for me.
Today we actually have to talk about two events in Poland: “Women’s Day”, which is about showing appreciation for women in private – and which for some still has a bland communist aftertaste. And from March 8th, around which the traditional demonstrations under the name “Manifa” take place. “For us, March 8th has become a day when we remember the problems we have in society regarding women’s rights,” Manifa activist Marzeń tells me on the phone. “It’s not enough to give a flower and a kiss on the hand.” It’s about the housing situation of women and minorities, about the disadvantages in the job market – and, since 2016, when the big protests against the abortion law broke out, about the right to abortion. However, many people misunderstand the “Manifa” demonstrations, says Marzeń, and associate them exclusively with protests for the right to abortion. That’s just not what they are.
Women and minorities in Poland in particular are counting on something to change with the new government under the liberal-conservative Prime Minister Donald Tusk and that women’s rights will really be made an issue. “In last year’s parliamentary elections, we as Polish women mobilized and helped the democratic opposition win. Now it is time for them to respond to our needs,” wrote organizers of a “Manifa” in Warsaw on March 9th this year . They demand legal and free abortions, but also fair wages and affordable housing for everyone.
The government has already taken the first small steps to improve the situation for women. According to a new draft law, the morning-after pill will now be available without a prescription, and Tusk’s government has promised not to question the Istanbul Convention any more. However, the government coalition is divided on the question of abortion. President Andrzej Duda, who is close to the PiS, has also announced that he will veto the morning-after pill law. The activist Marzeń doesn’t have much hope that the new government will really change anything for the benefit of women.
However, it would be wrong to believe that Women’s Day now has such great political significance for all Poles. When I ask younger Polish women like my 23-year-old niece, she says that for her the day represents “girl power” and that they can achieve a lot if they stick together. However, it is normal for her to receive at least flowers from her boyfriend, her stepfather or her roommate on March 8th, and she even expects some form of affection. When I tell her about the customs in communist Poland, she says: “I wouldn’t be offended if I received a pair of tights as a gift!”
Tights are rarely given as gifts these days – and yet it seems as if the smell of cloves and coffee has not yet completely disappeared, as if it still wafts through part of Polish society.
My grandmother has been attending a Women’s Day celebration for many years this year and she is also hoping for a bouquet of tulips. The mayor has personally invited all the women in their village and there will be coffee, cake and doughnuts.