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History Social History

The Politics of Love

Gender and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Poland

by (author) Natalie Cornett

Publisher
Cornell University Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2024
Category
Social History, Women, Poland
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781501776649
    Publish Date
    Sep 2024
    List Price
    $68.95

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Description

The Politics of Love describes the history of Polish intellectual and cultural life, which covertly flourished at home and abroad despite imperial repression between Poland's two great uprisings in 1830–1831 and 1863. Natalie Cornett focuses her study on a group of educated women known as the "Enthusiasts" (Entuzjastki), who were united by their commitment to live as independent women despite the intense nationalism that put the nation above all?including class and gender.

The Enthusiasts, led by Narcyza “michowska, emphasized sororal love and homosocial bonding in their program to contest both an oppressive imperial regime and constrictive gender roles. Their affective relationships with each other and their decision to remain unmarried, childless, or divorced violated accepted conventions and the patriotic emphasis on the Polish family. By drawing on a large corpus of their letters, diaries, police files, and published works, Cornett describes the Enthusiast movement from its emergence in the 1840s to the death of Narcyza “michowska, in 1876.

The Politics of Love describes how the Polish intelligentsia was so monomaniacally focused on the struggle for independence that discussion of other social questions was dismissed as "unpatriotic." Its dismissal of the Enthusiasts as socially deviant, despite the Enthusiasts' support for the national cause, reveals the limitations of nationalism as a binding agent and demonstrates how Polish women appropriated and contributed ideas about women's emancipation, nationalism, and religion in a globalizing era of increasing literacy and transnational exchange.

About the author

Contributor Notes

Natalie Cornett is a historian of modern East Central Europe who specializes in women's and gender history in the long nineteenth century. She received her PhD from Brandeis University and is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University.