The Gender Order and the Disassembling She-Protagonists: Polish Academic Culture in the First Half of the Twentieth Century as an Illustrative Example

Abstract

The article deals with Polish academic culture and the gender order prevalent therein in the former half of the twentieth century. The protagonists are a group of women who worked, in the circumstances of their time, on their postdoctoral (habilitation) theses. In my perception, this was the group that initiated the processes of change in the gender relations in the academic environment. The struggle for recognition in the world of science is exemplarily shown on the basis of the professional trajectories of Helena Polaczkówna and Helena Willmann-Grabowska.