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‘A Woman from a Newspaper’: A New Face for Ideology and Old Habits
representational program. In this sense, almost all photographs are taken for the
same ‘gaze’ suggesting the objectified and authenticated record of reality, whereas
the subject of the photograph is just another piece of decoration.
The aforementioned interpretative trails, the ethnographicness and the the¬
atralisation of photographing, may be employed to deconstruct the visual image of
the women depicted in daily newspapers in the 1950s in the Polish region of Opole
Silesia’. Obviously, one cannot discuss the complex gender relations displayed on
an Opole Silesian ‘press-stage’ in the times of socialism without touching upon the
very specifics of the region. Its history was largely shaped by various socio-political
events and the significant context of separation from Polish territory. The region’s
long-lasting period of being situated outside the state borders resulted in “self¬
enclosedness”, an “instinctive tendency to defend internal socio-cultural values”
and the “self-preservation of national and class character” (Gérnikowska-Zwolak
2000: 83). Such circumstances, eventually, influenced the construction of specific
gender roles within the social community.
Interestingly enough, according to contemporary historians of the Silesia re¬
gion, the woman's socio-cultural position before the war is described as pivotal
and satisfactory. In such historical accounts, one can however notice a concealed
and problematic idea that there was no reason for a Silesian woman to change and
transform her living conditions since the circumstances and gender relations were
sufficient, if not better than in any other Polish region. Such conclusions are at
odds with ethnographic descriptions that depict women as subordinated to the ex¬
isting patriarchal patterns, with a main role of maintaining the continuity of indi¬
genous cultural heritage. The idea of the Silesian family was rather an authoritarian
and hierarchic one based on the system of economic distinctions, which attributed
to a woman solely the tasks of caring and nurturing (cf. Marek 1996). Moreover, it
was rather difficult for a woman to summon the will to change gender values and
relations, since they were strongly fortified by tenacious traditional convictions
preserved in aspic by male guardians. In other words, a woman's position was de¬
termined by such values as virtue, faithfulness, religiosity and righteousness, which
limited her roles to the figure of a wife and mother (see Ibid.: 15-19). Thereby, the
advocates of traditional patterns accepted the employment of women only reluc¬
tantly; after all, a working woman was endangering the existing dichotomy of the
public and private spheres (cf. Korfanty 1927).
Importantly, such social, cultural and moral positioning of women for a long
period of time restrained the emancipatory possibilities and progress in Silesia. It
' Tn this case the dailies and weeklies seem particularly interesting. I have analysed three newspapers regu¬
larly published in the 1950s: Trybuna Opolska (‘Opole Stand’), Kalendarz Ziemi Opolskiej (‘Opole Region
Calendar’) and Glos znad Odry (“The Voice of the Odra River’). In my opinion, the photographs published
in popular newspapers are of particular interest to researchers who are tracking the stories of mundane
life. It is precisely in such images that one may find both dependencies and contradictions between official
state ideologies and the assumed social and cultural roles of the woman in the post-war Polish society.
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