Narcyza Żmichowska, one of the precursors of feminism in Poland, wrote:
I have a multitude of wise and serious books. Polish history by Rulhier, French history by Ségur, Napoleon’s life by Tissot occupy me in succession. Besides that, I still read a lot in Italian, in English. And it seems to me that if it lasts much longer, I shall turn myself into a savante; it would be funny indeed….
The national spirit shaped in boarding schools survived the partitions of Poland. Zuzanna Rabska, the main initiator of the Society of Polish Bibliophiles, who made her literary debut as a sixteen-year-old, noted in her diary that during the Kingdom of Poland secret schools for girls became ‘one of the lively forms of protest against Apukhtin’s educational management’. There were over a dozen of them in Warsaw:
Our mistresses took care of the selection of teachers, the patriotic atmosphere and were not afraid of the enormity of hardships and even the loss of freedom in order to protect the youth from the Russian poison that was spreading in government schools. […] We supposedly learned needlework, tailoring, embroidery, drawing, clay modelling, but in fact we listened to lectures by first-class teachers devoted to the educational cause.
If in the times of the Enlightenment anyone had doubts whether to send girls to schools, in the Kingdom of Poland the education of women was already obvious – at least at the lowest level of education. As for higher education, ladies had to arm themselves with ‘wings’ (classes at the secret – dubbed ‘Flying’ – university were held in various private apartments), money (to be able to study abroad as Maria Skłodowska-Curie did) and patience (at the end of the 19th century, Polish women would be able to participate in lectures at the Jagiellonian University, but initially only as auditors, with the ability to enjoy full rights as students at other universities only after the regaining of independence by Poland).
Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar
Sources include, among others:
Kufer Kasyldy, czyli wspomnienia z lat dziewczęcych, ed. D. Stępniewska and B. Walczyna, Warsaw 1974
K. Dormus, A. Włoch and J. Wojniak, Edukacja kobiet. Kobiety w edukacji: Szkice historyczno-pedagogiczne, Kraków 2017
M. Janicka, Edukacja kobiet na ziemiach polskich na przełomie XVIII i XIX wieku, Warsaw 2017
Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, New York 2019.