COME ALONG for a FREE SCREENING of the DOCUMENTARY ‘Solidarity According to Women’ in the Drawing Room (3.10) at St Margaret’s House this Saturday.
Free event from 6.30pm with refreshments by donation.
They had the best years of their lives ahead of them. They were in their twenties and thirties and they chose to rebel instead of settling down and living fairly peaceful lives.
Those who they rebelled against tried to destroy their marriages. Threatened them with placing their children in orphanages or that something bad would happen to them if they did not agree to collaborate with the secret service. They were offered relocation to another country on the condition they refrained from activities injurious to the system. They did not refrain from anything.
On a Saturday in August 1980, when workers, happy with having been given a raise, ended the strike and wanted to leave the Gdańsk Shipyard, they closed the gates and thus began the strike in solidarity. If it had not been for the initiative of a few determined women, perhaps the Polish history of August ’80 would not have taken place at all.
During the Martial Law, when men were imprisoned, women stepped in their shoes. They would print the independent press, they launched and ran an underground radio station. They did not care about sitting on the board of the Union, they did not care about ranks. What mattered to them was work and its results. When the Solidarity Radio was broadcasting an illegal programme, lights would be blinking on and off all over the city as this way people showed that they were listening. The underground Tygodnik Mazowsze weekly had a print run of a few dozen thousand copies. Some people called them the “Female Operational Group”…
What kept them going was a belief that the revolution was meaningful, hope for a change, a feeling of togetherness. Their perspective was delivering Poland from the oppression of the Soviet Union. Their objective was freedom and democracy.
They were absent at the Round Table talks, however. They let themselves be forgotten when their male colleagues were assuming the most important positions in the public administration bodies after the first free elections. They thought politics was not for them.
They keep fighting till this day but in a different way than they did at the time.
Saturday 25 March 6.30pm – 8.30pm
DRAWING ROOM (3rd Floor) at St Margaret’s House