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392 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 society 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 prevailing 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 ‘figure 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 perspective. 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 representations 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 include photographs of women depicted as workers, knitters, tractor drivers, intellectuals, 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,
