Obraz kobiety w pismach Zygmunta Glogera: wzory, przemiany, niepokoje

Abstract

The article gives a comprehensive analysis of the depiction of women in Zygmunt Gloger’s writings. Brought up in a traditional family of Polish gentry, the writer was in favor of a traditional family model in terms of the role of a woman, fatherhood, family hierarchy, and the status of children. He saw the ideal of such a patriarchal order in the culture of old Poland. At the same time, Gloger was aware of the contemporary social and economic changes around him, and he supported the cause of the disadvantaged: female peasants, proletariat women, maids, Jewish and Romani women. According to Gloger, solutions for the problems could be provided by education and civilizational progress, which would lead to the equality between genders and classes within the social order of the post-Jagiellonian Polish nation. The revolution of 1905 crushed his naïve ideas, when the lower classes, women included, brutally demanded their rights. That was the end of Gloger’s dream about reforming and modernizing the landowners’ vision of the world, the ideal picture of which was represented in his favorite book, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834).