From Mother‐Patriot to Sister‐Lover: Changing Visions of Womanhood in Nineteenth‐Century Poland.

This article provides an analysis of different approaches to gender and the Polish women's question in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly focusing on the Romantic era (roughly 1820–63), when the Polish question dominated political and cultural life. The ideal of an elite woman as a primarily home‐bound mother and educator of the next generation of Poles gained traction among nation‐builders during the brief Enlightenment reform period at the end of the eighteenth century. After the dissolution of the Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795), such ideas continued to remain in public circulation until the massive November Uprising of 1830–31, when some aristocratic women pushed the bounds of womanhood into a public, nationalised space by aiding and participating in the war effort. This article explores different ideas about gender and the nation using official statutes, women's life writing and Romantic literature. It will show changes in attitudes and actions before and after the November Uprising and pay particular attention to Narcyza Żmichowska and the Enthusiast women's movement of the 1840s which offered another way of being a woman than subordinate companionship to menfolk and their idea of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]