Szkic do portretu Ślązaczki : refleksja feministyczna

Abstract

A Portrait of the Silesian Woman - a Preliminary Sketch should be treated as a feminist work since it is essentially concerned with female experience. Its subject matter embraces the past — childhood and adolescence of Silesian women bom at the beginning of the 20th centuiy, and modem times — their eveiyday life, personal consciousness and knowledge, which were shaped by their participation in the social life of the region. What was analysed was the old model of a miner’s family, which was predominant in Silesia. The aim of the undertaken research was to understand the deplorable situation of women in their families and, indirectly, develop some ways of improving their situation. The author separates her research from the works in which the Silesian community was described from the male perspective. The book comprises four chapters. The first one should be perceived as a kind of an introduction, which is necessary for understanding of the whole work. The author presents her feminist point of view on the socially conditioned ways in which knowledge about women is constructed. In the second chapter, she characterises her own research, justifying the usefulness and necessity of applying the feminist approach for the interpretation of the analysed material. In the third chapter, the author gives an overview of the changes, which triggered by shifting social and economic surrounding, occulted in the Silesian family from the 1930s till the 1990s. But what seems to be the most important part of this work is the fourth chapter, which includes authentic statements given by elderly Silesian women. The author allows these women, who all belong to the silent part of the Silesian community, to present their own lives and publically speak for themselves. The afterword to this book comprises a commentary on the research material. The author’s usage of a feminist interpretation makes it possible for the existential experience to embrace some new insight possibilities, which seem to be lacking in other similar researches.