Empowering Women through Love and Letters: Narcyza Zmichowska and the Enthusiasts of 19th Century Poland

The time period between Poland's two great uprising's (in 1830 and 1863) was marked by continued repression of Polish cultural and political life. Yet it was also a period in which Polish intellectual circles both inside and outside of Poland flourished, albeit clandestinely. Narcyza Zmichowska, led a group of self-aware female writers and thinkers known as the "Enthusiasts," who were bonded together by their committment to live as independent women in mid-nineteenth century Poland. At a time when women's aspirations and interactions were confined to the domestic sphere, the Enthusiasts talked freely among themselves, and somtimes within larger intellectual cicles, of women's educational and social needs. Many within Zmichowska's group, including Zmichowska herself, were sent to Siberia or kept in jail for years as punishment for acting within such groups deemed to be conspiratorial by the authorities. The Enthusiasts transgressed both gender and political norms which left them doubly maginalized during a dangerous period in Polish history. My research project will examine how they defined themselves and interacted with different social groups and intellectual ideas surrounding them. It draws from archival work in Russian, German, French and Polish and is based mostly on the many volumes of letters the Enthusiasts wrote to each other and others involved in political and social movements of the period. The group's self-described "sisterhood" and construction of a female communal identity provide an early example in Polish history of a concerned women's effort to redefine and challenge borders of state, gender and sexuality.