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Magdalena Sztandara
was an ideal ground for post-war socialism, which although ideologically introduced
gender eguality, in practice rather used the existing Silesian gender dichotomies
and substituted their cultural content. In other words, all the socialistic ideologist
had to do was to silence the hitherto religious morality and deploy a new one—the
civil duty of building a new state. The male and female distinctions, with all their
socio-cultural connotations, remained unchanged.
Therefore, looking at the photographs of ‘a woman from a newspaper’ and
analysing them in relations to media discourse allows us to discover models that
have produced specific messages, meanings and social attitudes. Such models may
therefore be perceived as patterns of ‘thinking’, ‘watching’ and ‘describing’ the so¬
ciety and have a strong linkage and associations with politics, aesthetics and the
mainstream ideologies of these times.
Silenced Voices: How Should One Read Newspapers?
When we say ‘a woman from a newspaper’ it might seem that we have a potentially
confusing topic that is rather open to a range of interpretation. Thus, we should
first ask what we will discuss when exploring both the widespread and prevail¬
ing imaginary representations as well as their contraries and alternatives. At first
glance, one may think about a wide spectrum of topics, starting from the banal
and commercialised popular images of women, and ending with the images that
make us, the viewers, more involved and engaged interpretation-wise. However,
the proposed analysis of the representations of femininity also reveals that the ‘fig¬
ure of woman’ has its own significance and role in the history of culture and social
practice. If we follow Catharine MacKinnon (1982) and assume that the term
‘a woman’ in a common-sense understandings and popular view means “content/
substance of women’s lives”, then the analysis of the aforementioned images gives
us the possibility to take a closer look at everyday life from the feminine perspec¬
tive. The ways of presenting ‘a woman’ in daily newspapers in times of socialism
resembled the staging scheme, the specific mise-en-scene transferred to the ‘public
theatre’—first, imagined and constructed, and only secondly given as truth.
Reading newspaper photographs poses interesting research inquires, such as:
What were the condition and circumstances of women’s lives during this period?
What were their social and cultural roles and how were they constructed, and how
were these roles given to, or perhaps even forced onto, women? What representa¬
tions of women were the most common and what was the relationship between
women’s roles and the ideological context of building a new socialistic society? Was
the initial promise of women’s emancipation in socialism even possible? And, last
but not least, what did the emancipation really mean for socialistic ideology?
When browsing the pages of 1950s newspapers, one can notice that many in¬
clude photographs of women depicted as workers, knitters, tractor drivers, intellec¬
tuals, shop assistants, or workers in stocking factories and as trade union delegates.
All of these press images attempt to faithfully render the thought of the time,