Feminism Is Winning The Battle for The Political Centre. The Time of Fundamentalists Is Over, They Will Leave Together with This Government

“In liberal or centrist circles, it is no longer appropriate to say that abortion is a controversial topic that is meant to distract the public from other issues. The political mainstream has taken over the language typically used by Marta Lempart or the Abortion Dream Team”, says sociologist Magdalena Grabowska

Magdalea Grabowska, PhD — sociologist specialising in female movements, researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, co-author of the research on sexual violence in Poland led by the Foundation for Equality and Emancipation STER, author of the book: Zerwana genealogia. Działalność społeczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 roku a współczesny polski ruch kobiecy [eng.: Broken genealogy. The social and political activity of women after 1945 and the contemporary Polish women’s movement].

Anton Ambroziak, OKO.press: The protests, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of people across Poland taking to the streets, did not stop the draconian anti-abortion law. However, they led to an unprecedented mobilisation of the society. What is the greatest value of this movement?

Magdalena Grabowska: If we want to look at it in terms of gains and where the feminist movement is today, I would certainly stress its massive character, as well as the intersectionality and the diversity characteristic of this outstanding mobilisation. In other words, not only has an unprecedented number of people taken to the streets, but the protest is also focused on multiple identities and multiple goals.

In October, people were united by strong emotions: anger, rage, resistance. Now, we wonder what will drive the movement in the future. Perhaps it will not focus on traditional feminist values, such as equality and freedom, but on solidarity and empathy?

Undoubtedly, one of the protests’ great merits consists of having shifted the public debate on feminist issues. Abortion is the best example of this shift. We must be aware that something unprecedented has happened. Basically overnight, voices — until then considered radical — entered the mainstream. The political mainstream took over the language typically used by Marta Lempart or the Abortion Dream Team.

To what extent has the mainstream actually taken over this language?

On a superficial level, of course, but this is an achievement in itself, because this language is now present and heard, and thus reaches a wider group of women.

Mainstream politics adopted this language, assuming that — as Donald Tusk once said — “we must give women a right”. This is also the language used by the whole Civic Platform: talking about women in the third person, evoking the need to take care of them, provide them with something”.

At least, female MPs are present at press conferences about abortion.

But they speak as if they were not talking about themselves. It is not yet a language that treats them as subjects. Their story is always about some other women who must acquire some rights, who have difficult decisions to make.

Therefore, we cannot say that the feminist language has been entirely normalised. However, we are certainly experiencing a big shift. In liberal or centrist circles, it is no longer possible to say things that until recently were still acceptable.

It is no longer appropriate to say that abortion is a controversial topic that is meant to distract the public from other issues. One cannot talk about abortion without mentioning women. It occurs less often that experts explain to marginalised people what their situation is.

I think this shift in the language can be observed in another dimension, from the abstract wondering about “what I think” to evoking real experiences.

This happens more within the movement, partly in the media as well, but in mainstream politics, there is a tendency to describe a mythologised experience of a sick woman, a sick child, and their suffering. It is still a fantasy rather than a real experience.

The undoubted success of the movement is that the largest opposition party has rejected the discourse about compromise and proposed a new social contract that de facto expands the catalogue of grounds for abortion.

For sure. I would call it an indirect success of the movement. The Civic Platform has reacted to the social change accelerated by the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal, as well as by the protests. You could say that the Civic Platform needed an extra push to recognise what was happening among their male and female voters.

Why did you mention solidarity as one of the new values driving the protests?

In 2016, during the Black Protest, feminism tested a patriotic discourse that today isn’t really present. Back then, it was all about Polish women, not to mention the fact that the protests used symbols and slogans close to the political right: “Independent Polish woman”, “Fighting Polish woman” [editor’s note: reference to the “Fighting Poland” anchor symbol used by the Resistance movement during WWII]. I think that references to solidarity, which today are on the slogans, are an alternative to the failed attempt to align with the conservative mainstream.

Also, let’s not forget that the slogan: “You’ll never walk alone”, which today appears at the protests, does not originate from feminism, but from the LGBT+ movement, by some feminists still considered marginal. It is of course interesting that feminism builds on what it sometimes underestimates. But that is a different debate.

Today, I see two different ways of approaching this solidarity: the historical one, which wants to compare the new solidarity to the “Solidarity” of the 1980s. And it seems to me that this is an inaccurate comparison. The old solidarity integrated different social classes, but it consistently referred to Poland. The new solidarity goes beyond this, it is inclusive, it crosses various classical divisions and identities, including national ones.

But this does not mean that the divisions disappeared. The Women’s Strike, for example, talks about “legal abortion,” while the Abortion Dream Team prefers “abortion on demand”. Each dispute causes panic among the public and results in calls for unity.

There really is nothing to worry about here. The differences and divisions within a social movement, loud debates on the conflicts mean that the movement is in a good and interesting place. This is the difference between the feminist movement and the nationalist movement, where conflicts are concealed in the name of alleged unity.

The conflict you are referring to is, in my opinion, one between pragmatism and idealism. Ideally, abortion would be destigmatised and decriminalised. An ideal would be a situation where we don’t talk about what law should we have, what the grounds for abortion should be, but liberating abortion entirely. The famous blank page. It is a vision that is obviously attractive…

…but not necessarily feasible.

Of course, some of us get angry when we hear conservative politicians saying that today there is no real possibility to change the current law. Unfortunately, they are right: at this point, nothing will really change at the legislative level. That is why we are thinking about further proposals in the next three years.

We must be aware that various studies show that Polish society is ready to expand the catalogue of grounds for abortion with the two proposals from the Civic Platform: health defined more broadly as mental health, and a difficult life situation.

What do people think when they hear “difficult life situation”?

The first thing that comes to mind is often violence against women. And the sole fact that this topic exists so widely in social consciousness can also be considered another success of feminism.

People understand this term also as referring to a difficult economic, material, or social situation — a woman has other children, or her partner does not support her. Often it is also the age of the pregnant person.

Research also shows that we are at a stage where, for many people, abortion is not just a woman’s decision.

They believe that a more complex system of control is needed, some larger entity that decides about the abortion: society, the family, the couple.

This is linked to a deeply rooted mistrust of women, a belief that a woman is incapable of making decisions about her own body and life.

There is also another conflict: when talking about abortion, should we only refer to women, or should we also include transgender people’s perspectives? And what/who is actually being taken away from whom here?

I think that this conflict stems directly from the history of feminism in Poland and is connected to the need to present the movement as compact and internally coherent.

As early as in the 1990s, feminism was condemned to the position of a black sheep, a pariah of the public debate. It was attacked for being a liberal imposition from the West, a dangerous imported good. Today, all this is described as “gender ideology”.

It was also treated as a legacy of communism. Thus, from the beginning, feminism was a movement that had to define itself in opposition to these two dominant narratives.

And that’s why it sometimes censored itself?

I would rather say that it was very careful in the way it presented itself. In this context, it was important not to reveal too much of the complicated history of feminism and its diverse identities.

On a sociological-historical level, there was also the need for a linear history, a certain narrative of “progress” in the movement. We hear arguments that if we start talking about individuals, we will take away history from the women. But from a historical perspective, claiming that the LGBT+ movement is a branch of feminism is false. Just as black feminism did not develop from white feminism, lesbians did not suddenly appear in the feminist movement.

For the sake of a coherent narrative, we have created the myth of an expanding or budding movement, but it is simply not true.

If we realise this, we will quickly come to the conclusion that it is not the case that LGBT+ people suddenly came to feed on the feminist movement and are trying to take something away from us. They have been with us all along. Polish feminism is a perfect example: feminist activism has largely been carried out by lesbians and transgender people. This has been happening not just since the 1990s, but since the early 20th century.

On the other hand, such conflicts are also a matter of representation. In Poland, every now and then someone starts saying that they are just starting to practise real feminism. It happened in 2016, it happened in 2020, before that they were looking for the beginning of feminism in “Solidarity”. It’s a search for a founding myth.

LGBT+ people are also searching for such a myth. Every bloody event, repression, or violence to which a community responds with rebellion is supposed to be a “Polish Stonewall”. What for?

Unfortunately, we are still obsessed with the need to compare our progress to events in the West. We feel that we need to say that on a timeline we are where the West was 30 to 40 years ago. This is, of course, one big confusion, because our history is completely different, with its unique experiences of communism and transformation.

For many participants of the protests, history is happening today. And yet, most of them look for external points of reference. Maybe we are Americans because we have a strong, organised anti-choice movement? Or maybe we are Irish because we are fighting the domination of the Church? Or maybe more like Argentinians, because we are building a grassroots self-help network?

I think that we need to see what was going on with abortion in the People’s Republic of Poland, but also what is happening in other countries where the law has been changed. Our history did not begin in the 1990s or not even in the 1980s when the first deals with the Church were made.

In the 1950s, abortion functioned within two narratives. The right to abortion was presented as a social problem, in contrast to how Western liberal feminism had seen it, ie as a woman’s freedom to decide about her own body. Then, it was about fighting the pathology of the abortion underworld.

The second was the medical narrative, which claimed that abortion was a public health issue based on doctors’ knowledge and expertise.

Looking at this historical legacy, one can understand why it is so difficult to talk about the individual rights of women in Poland. Besides, research shows that Polish society is a collectivist society, which does not necessarily mean that it is automatically conservative. There are still many people who treat abortion as a social problem rather than as an individual woman’s right.

This does not mean that they will not support liberalising the law, but the slogan: “Abortion is ok” will not appeal to them.

Taking into account the history of abortion in the People’s Republic of Poland allows us to understand why we still cannot move past certain convictions.

On the other hand, it is good that we also look outwards. The example of the United States seems distant to me, but we can learn a lot from the history of Ireland and Argentina. Ireland followed the path of social consensus, ie basically a new social contract, which is proposed by the Civic Platform, except that it is written in a referendum, whereas Argentina went much further, much bolder …

So, taking into account the historical conditions and political possibilities, should we follow the path of social contract?

I do not know. It is certainly worth considering different scenarios because I think that it is hard to say now what can be achieved in a few years. There is certainly no point in trying to achieve a contracted unity regarding the strategy. For now, it is also important to maintain the topic of abortion as a key issue in the social debate.

You have said that the feminist movement is in a good place…

In a way, yes. There is a wide mobilisation, a catchy subject that unites us, there is a change in the discourse. On the other hand, activists who work in an institutionalised feminist movement are burned out. And it’s not surprising because even though we observe the social change, in the long run there are no tangible successes — there are a series of failures and limited financial resources.

There are new people, especially outside the big cities. Maybe this potential should be used?

We need to change our perspective. It’s not about managing those on the peripheries, it’s about cooperation between different centres. Besides, the events in the country did not occur suddenly. Changes have been taking place for a long time now, the regional Women’s Congresses were part of this process. But the Congress had a pedagogical approach to building a movement — an expert on feminism known from the TV would visit a local community to teach them how to do feminism.

Now, thanks to organisations like the Feminist Fund, this approach is changing. There is no need to teach anyone because the best diagnosis and strategy are provided by local actors. Instead, there is a need to finance activities, exchange ideas between different groups, and collaborate.

Young people have brought new aesthetics, sharp language, and an uncompromising attitude to the protests. What will they bring to the feminist movement?

People born in the 1990s, or later, have no memories of legal abortion. They live in a conservative country, and they are struggling with the climate crisis or the challenging economic situation. I think it’s a broad perspective that they will bring to the feminist movement: feminism is not just about women, nor is it just about women, men, and non-binary people. Feminism is about the environment, economics, politics. You can’t separate those things.

I think the other issue is responsibility. It’s ultimately their world that they can build themselves.

We succeeded with abortion, let’s try with the Istanbul Convention, the religious fundamentalists say, followed by right-wing politicians. How can feminism deal with them?

Some groups fight against disinformation and try to build political resistance. Federa’s report [editor’s note: Federation for Women and Family Planning] shows, for example, the strategies used by Ordo Iuris and their network of connections. This is very interesting.

However, I don’t know if feminism as a movement should focus on the right. I think it’s more important to take care of those who are already involved and to reach out to the undecided center.

Anyway, while fundamentalists have a large political power, their social momentum seems to be fading away. In other words, they will leave together with the current government. That will be their end.

“It’s not just about abortion”, the wise say. And indeed, a critical majority has been growing: people are fed up with the alliance between throne and altar, fed up with the politics of contempt. But is it actually about something different to what everyone thinks?

For me it is obvious, but not necessarily for my sociologist colleagues. They say that it is an anti-PiS, as well as a broad and anti-systemic, movement, aimed also against the pandemic or other crises. And it probably is a little bit about all of that, but the issue of abortion was the only one that was able to mobilise people so widely.

It is no longer possible to claim that it is accidental, that something sparked to life, because it is not the first time this has happened. This change is connected with putting the needs of marginalised groups first, for them to be treated as subjects, so far ignored by the ‘mainstream’ media and politics, at the core of the political debate. It is not only women, but also LGBT+ people, people with disabilities, and workers on zero-hour contracts.

These are all groups that for years have been treated as irrelevant, superfluous, and in the end, they were the only ones who were able to stir up this rigid system. They have forced the system to recognise that the issues related to social justice, reproductive justice, and the political empowerment of youth are important, even essential, in contemporary politics.

This article was originally published in OKO.press on 02/03/2021 and translated by Forum.eu.