Solidarity's secret : the women who defeated Communism in Poland

"This important book explores one of the most pivotal periods in Polish history and deals with a topic nearly everyone else overlooked. Shana Penn's study begins with a simple question I wish I had thought more about myself: once the leadership of Solidarity had been arrested during the 1981 military coup, who kept the movement alive over the following months and years? The answer will surprise you, as Penn delves into the lives of seven Polish women activists who rose to the call, set about saving an entire political movement, and in time turned themselves into some of the most powerful women in Poland today."---Lech Walesa, former President of Poland and winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace PrizeSolidarity's Secret is the first book to record the crucial yet little-known role women played in the rise of an independent press in Poland and in the fall of that country's communist government.Shana Penn pieces together a decade of interviews with the women behind the Polish pro-democracy movement-women whose massive contributions were obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts. Penn reveals the story of how these brave women ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, Tygodnik Mazowsze, while prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years. The same women then went on to play influential roles in post-communist Poland.Solidarity's Secret gives us a richly detailed story-within-a-story-unheard of not only in the West, but until recently even within Poland itself-from one of the most important eras in modern history.

Drawing on a decade of interviews, Penn (Union Theological Center in Berkeley, California) pieces together the huge, largely unstudied contributions of the Polish women whose pro-democracy work was obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts. While prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years, it was women who worked behind the scenes to keep Walesa's face visible and Solidarity's name alive; they ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, and they organized Poles at the grass roots—an area of civic activity that the Western press considered only marginally newsworthy. Penn's history uncovers what one of the women called Poland's "national secret." Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Kirkus Reviews

A scholarly account of the work of hitherto-unacknowledged women in the labor and civil rights movement that eventually unseated Communism in Poland. "Solidarity produced perhaps as many heroines as it did heroes," maintains Penn (Women's Leadership Institute/Mills), though for various reasons few students of the movement have gotten around to documenting the specifics. Just so, when the secret police of the Jaruzelski regime arrested the male leadership of Solidarity in 1982, they were quite mystified to discover that the movement's newspaper went right on publishing. "Blinded by sexism," Penn writes, "the secret police hunted diligently for the men they assumed to be behind the newspaper-Solidarity men in hiding whose names had appeared in bylines." Instead, seven women directed the newspaper and the thousands of activists who published and distributed it, and they did a superb job of spreading the values and agenda of the movement throughout the country. Most of the seven, Penn notes, had a long history of activism themselves; many had been involved in the antigovernment student protests of 1968 and had moved to the printing press just at about the time Solidarity emerged as an opposition force in the late 1970s. Civil society in Poland, Penn observes, was largely built through the medium of the underground press, which found much to comment on-not least the disparity between the officially ordained equality of the sexes and the realities of economic life, for Polish women actually worked far more hours and were paid far less for their labor. (One of the seven, Helena Luczywo, is now one of the wealthiest women in Poland, having put her time and energy into "building publishing skillsthat produced incredible profits under the new market economy.") So, with all these women's efforts, why was Lech Walesa's the single face of Solidarity? Because, Penn was told, if the "weaker sex" were shown to be strong in the movement, some activists might have suspected that the whole thing was a government front. Welcome homage to the founding mothers of the new Poland.

"This important book explores one of the most pivotal periods in Polish history and deals with a topic nearly everyone else overlooked. Shana Penn's study begins with a simple question I wish I had thought more about once the leadership of Solidarity had been arrested during the 1981 military coup, who kept the movement alive over the following months and years? The answer will surprise you, as Penn delves into the lives of seven Polish women activists who rose to the call, set about saving an entire political movement, and in time turned themselves into some of the most powerful women in Poland today." ---Lech Walesa, former President of Poland and winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize Solidarity's Secret is the first book to record the crucial yet little-known role women played in the rise of an independent press in Poland and in the fall of that country's communist government. Shana Penn pieces together a decade of interviews with the women behind the Polish pro-democracy movement-women whose massive contributions were obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts. Penn reveals the story of how these brave women ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, Tygodnik Mazowsze , while prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years. The same women then went on to play influential roles in post-communist Poland. Solidarity's Secret gives us a richly detailed story-within-a-story-unheard of not only in the West, but until recently even within Poland itself-from one of the most important eras in modern history.