Representations of unremembering. Women’s memoirs from the “Rural Poland 1939–1948” in the context of archival records

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of archival manuscripts written by peasant women, submitted for the Description of "My Village" from 1948 competition, and the published summaries based on those manuscripts in the four volumes of the post-competition monographs Rural Poland 1939–1948 (1967–1971). The study examines the editorial strategies adopted by the compilers of the submitted notes, namely Krystyna Kersten and Tomasz Szarota. Differences in narrative construction and the recognition of the significance of the writings authored by rural women in the manuscripts and published texts highlight the systemic bias in memory politics, resulting in the misguided perception of women’s testimonies as less reliable.
The process of editing and censoring a significant majority of the peasant women’s notes submitted for the first post-war memoir competition is seen as an example of “epistemic injustice” (A. Reading) in the collective processes of memory construction. It also serves as evidence of the existence of parallel social heritage resources: a masculinized (official) memory and a female memory (classified as private memory, not recognized as historical facts).