Nikolaienko, O. (2015). Polski zhinky Naddniprianskoi Ukrainy v druhii polovyni XIX – na pochatku XX st.: hromadske i pryvatne zhyttia [Polish women of Dnieper Ukraine in the second half of the 19th – early 20th century: Public and private life]. NTMT Publishing.
Annotation: This book offers a comprehensive study of Polish women in Dnieper Ukraine in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on an extensive documentary base and applying a gender approach, it identifies the distinctive features of women’s public and private lives. The study examines the demographic situation and women’s educational attainment, their participation in the labor force and civic movements, and the characteristic features of family life and women’s place in the private sphere. The investigation of Polish women’s private lives centers on several key questions: the particularities of family life and women’s social functions within the family, motherhood as women’s central social role, and women’s influence on the politics of history and the organization of domestic space. The Polish family constituted a complex social phenomenon shaped by many factors, yet it is clear that the modernizing transformations of society reshaped both internal family relations and women’s role within them. Women’s entry into economic life, their earning of income, and their contribution to family finances strengthened their standing within the family, as did the attainment of a certain age. The Polish family embodied a microcosm that took on the functions of a subjugated society in resistance to the dominant state, with the task of preserving national consciousness falling above all to the family. This domestic mission shaped women’s roles: they not only maintained the household, cared for children, organized domestic space, and carried out the everyday tasks of family life, but also served as the primary agents of national upbringing.
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