# Poland: A Study of the Land People and Literature/Part 2/Chapter 1

I
THE POLISH WOMEN
It thus appears that Bismarck regards the Polish women as even more dangerous to the unity and safety of the German empire than the men. He has unintentionally borne testimony to their pride and worth. And they deserve it, for in all that relates to the contest for the preservation of the national spirit, they are the marrow of the land.
The women here referred to belong to the aristocracy. Among the common people there is only a religious national consciousness, and there is no middle class as in the Germanic and Latin countries.
Broadly speaking, we may say of these women of the higher and lower aristocracy that their qualities, virtues, and vices have nothing bourgeois about them. They are not domesticated, they are not small-minded. The best of them have a pride, which exalted and exceptional as it is, springs from their feeling of the strength and purity of the spiritual life. They are women who are born to rule, and who even in narrow and straitened circumstances preserve the grand self-esteem which runs in their blood. In women of this type the emotional life is wholly absorbed in the national cause. Several among them, indeed, are zealous children of the Catholic Church, but for the larger number and the more intelligent, Catholicism is precious only as the palladium of the nationality. Cherbuliez's characterisation of the Polish women as "Punch mixed with holy water" is now a trifle antiquated.
The Polish women are renowned for beauty, and deserve their reputation. It is a kind of dogma in Poland that the real Polish woman is blonde; it is considered most elegant to be so; still, although some women are to be found ​who not only approach the Swedes and Norwegians in the golden yellow of their hair, but who surpass any Northerner in the glistening whiteness of their skins, the dogma does not hold true. Brunettes are everywhere more numerous, and the colour of the hair of the larger number is a dark brown.
The perfect form of the hands and the smallness of the feet are remarkable in the Polish women. They even place the beauty of the hands above all other perfections. "I regard my hands, but not my face," said one, and one of them who otherwise thinks little about her appearance and is too cultivated to be vain, when her hands were frost-bitten in Paris, caused the most celebrated physician in the city to be sent for. Polish ladies maintain that when they visit the shoemakers' shops in Vienna and show their small feet with high insteps, the shoemakers exclaim: "Das kennen wir, das sind polnische Füsse!" (We know that those are Polish feet.) It is also said in Warsaw that in the Vienna shoe-shops they have a separate case of boots and shoes for these feet, and that its contents are widely different from that of the case designed for English ladies.
The prevailing view here, as in all other nationalities known to me, is, that the typical national woman lives for her home and children—perhaps more for the children than the husband, and that she rarely leads a life of love. Matrimony is not so paraded as in Germany, and is not so often the occasion of catastrophes as in France. The Polish women have hot heads, but their senses are under control.
Now and then a great irregularity happens: a lady leaves her husband and lives with her lover; a young girl marries her father's valet, and the like. They are the rare exceptions. When you meet an accomplished coquette in society, she is almost always of foreign descent. On the other hand, great examples of maternal sacrifice are by no means rare. Countess Rosa K., called the first lady in Poland on account of her family connections and fortune, has for years lived entirely alone in an unimportant mountain town in the Carpathian mountains, for the health of her feeble little son.
​There are still found in Poland remnants of that abstract worship of women, which, as long as the kingdom of Poland endured, found expression in the following description of the Madonna: Virgo Maria Regina Poloniæ. Although or perhaps because the economic emancipation of women has not been even mooted so far, gallantry towards the female sex is de rigueur. Men always rise in a tramway to give a lady a seat. And in any public place whatever, even at the most elegant receptions or balls, a chair is taken away from under one with the words, "For a lady."
In the upper ranks of society the life of the women at first sight seems to be purely idle. But in summer in the country, where patriarchal relations to a great extent still prevail, the mistress of the estate has much to do, and in Warsaw it is only apparently that she lives a life of mere amusement.
The lady of position rises between eleven and twelve o'clock in the forenoon, and goes to bed at four o'clock in the morning; she drives from one visit to another and from one party to another. But in reality she labours every day for public and national interests. Everything, the most innocent enterprises, the founding of a library, a hospital, a sewing school, no matter what it is, is made to strengthen the Polish cause. Four ladies do not meet on a charity committee without promoting the national cause under its cover.
It is forbidden to teach girls Polish in a school, but it is allowed to teach them to sew. They draw corsets on the slate in case the gendarmes should come; they have sewing materials on the table, and books under it.
Several ladies, eminent for their talents, have attempted to do more; thus the renowned authoress, Elise Orzeszkowa, even established a printing press to be carried on with a view to the education of the people. This enterprise came to an end when the government prohibited it, closed the printing office, and confined Madam Orzeszkowa for several years at Grodno. Her romances, which have attracted much attention—Meir Ezofowicz is especially worth reading—disclose a talent which is akin to that of George Sand; they are written with a melancholy patriotism inspired by an ​enthusiastic faith in freedom; her minor novels have a keener stamp of realism, and more decided artistic form, but the same patriotic, didactic tendency. A younger poetess, who has attained a very high rank in lyric poetry—Marja Konopnicka—while contending with the most difficult and oppressive conditions of life, has developed into the poetic representative of a life of freedom of thought and emotion which is still exceptional in Poland. The chord of the love of country also vibrates strongly in her poetry, as, for instance, in her ode to Matejko on the painting, The Battle at Grünwald.
The opposition between Poland and Russia is never out of the mind of the women. This is constantly noticeable in daily life. A young girl was deserted by her lover. It was always cited as a detail which made the perfidy and cruelty more bitter, that it was for the sake of a Russian dancer he left her. A young girl, not twenty years old, rebuked a group of half-grown Polish schoolboys in the Saxon Park because they were speaking Russian to each other. Such little traits teach every one who resides for any time in Russian Poland that it is the women who keep the national passion at white heat.
In other respects, like the women of other countries, of course they are of all sorts; gentle and quiet, or suspiciously sharp-sighted, virginal and combative, or with erotic tendencies, or vain, theatrical dispositions. There are some who, genuine Slavs, are wholly absorbed in intellectual enthusiasms, and there are individual commanding natures, typically Polish, with the determination and firmness of an exceptional man. There was one, whom her father, a general of artillery, who wished to cure his child of fear, had compelled from the time she was ten years old to stand at the side of the cannon when they were fired, and who now, at the age of twenty, was characterised as a woman who could stand fire.
Often common patriotic interests unite them to the men; sometimes they choose a man instinctively for the reason that he falls less short than others of their patriotic ideal. On the whole it may be said that they think rather lightly ​of men, and know their faults thoroughly. Courage in a man is not enough for them. "If they could not even fight, they ought to be buried," was the retort made—in answer to a speech which exalted this virtue in men—by a young girl of much character. As a rule it may be said of these women, that they demand much and give much in return.