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Paper short abstract

My paper examines the tension between women’s fundamental role in creating ethnology in Poland and their marginal position within its institutions. I trace the dynamics of this tension over time until the period, when female professors of anthropology played an important role in Polish academia.

Paper long abstract

As the historian of Polish ethnology Zbigniew Jasiewicz observed, in the nineteenth century “the emerging Polish ethnology, on the one hand created obstacles to women’s scholarly activity, while on the other hand enabled them to participate more broadly and revealed a number of active women unimaginable in any other field.”

This paper examines the tension between women’s significant involvement in laying the foundations of ethnology in Poland and their marginal position within its institutions. Women’s participation was shaped by a gender-based division of labour that existed within the discipline from its very beginnings. Natural candidates for ethnographic work were women living in rural noble manors, who maintained daily contact with peasant women. Many of them took part in the largest ethnographic enterprise of the era – the monographic folklore-collecting project led by Oskar Kolberg (1814–1890).

Despite this extensive engagement, the first Polish professional woman ethnographer, Stefania Ulanowska (1839–ca. 1912), who conducted long-term, stationary field research among rural communities in Latvia, was denied admission to the Academy of Learning, an exclusively male institution. Only a few decades later, however, Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay-Ehrenkreutz (1885–1967) became the first female professor in Poland (1927) and went on to head departments of ethnology at the universities of Vilnius and Warsaw.

The shift of women ethnographers from the margins to the center of the discipline became fully visible after World War II, when numerous outstanding female professors of anthropology played a central role in Polish academic life.