Aktywizacja społeczno-polityczna kobiet na Wołyniu od końca XIX do lat dwudziestych XX wieku
Women’s socio-political involvement in Volhynia from the late 19th century to the 1920s

Summary/Abstract: At the turn of the 19th century, the situation in Volhynia was not conducive to Volhynian Ukrainian women’s political engagement or, in fact, to their presence in the public sphere as such. Tsarist Russia’s anachronic and repressive policies left Volhynia underdeveloped in civilisational terms and its population almost stripped of any national awareness and largely illiterate, with the illiteracy rate among women topping 80%. Besides, the fact that there was no tradition of women’s organising there and that the dominant cultural models reduced women’s vocation in life to the role of wife and mother was an additional obstacle to Volhynian women’s political and social involvement. Nevertheless, there were notable exceptions: outstanding women whose artistic and public work was an important contribution to Ukrainian life. This group included, for example, Lesya Ukrainka, her mother Olena Pchilka, who sought to transplant the ideas of the emergent women’s movement into Volhynia in the 1880s, Helena Levchanovska, who was a senator during the first term of the Parliament of the Second Polish Republic, and the leaders of the Union of Ukrainian Women in Volhynia.

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