The struggle for the political rights of Polish activists in the columns of the Polish political women’s press (end of the XIX – first half of the XX century)

Abstract

The article analyzes the retrospective of the «women’s question» in Polish society and the struggle of Polish women for their political rights. Relevance of the topic: gender topics, in particular the history of women’s movements, are of great interest among historians, journalists and public figures. A powerful source of the history of the development of the gender movement is the press, which is a documentary evidence of important historical events.
Lviv is a city where the Ukrainian and Polish women’s movements actively developed, and, along with them, their printed organs - a Polish political periodical that was distributed in the cities of Galicia and Poland. It is important to single out the periodization of Polish women’s movements, outline the activities of famous Polish activists, and study women’s periodicals that fought for women’s rights in their columns.
The purpose of the article is to investigate the peculiarities of the Polish women’s movement, the activity of Polish women and their articles in women’s periodicals (late 19 th - 1st half of the 20th century).
Research methods. The article uses a complex of special methods, in particular: systemic analysis, which allowed to consider the reasons for the emergence of the Polish women’s political movement; synthesis in the study of women’s movements in Western Europe; retrospective analysis in the study of the causes and main periods of the Polish political women’s movement, comparative analysis comparing different women’s publications. The article uses the chronological principle, as well as scientific techniques − classification and periodization.
Results and conclusions. The Polish women’s movement appeared on the territory of Lviv and was connected with the fact that Polish women actively fought for their political, economic rights, rights to education and rights to work. Until 1918, a Polish woman actively fought for the freedom and independence of her own people. The image of a patriot woman is the main semantic model in the Polish women’s political press. In its columns, a new image of a mother, a wife, a housewife is formed, who not only limits her activities to raising children and managing the economy, but is also interested in public, political and national affairs.