In October 2016, thousands of women and men took to the streets of Poland to demonstrate against a proposal to restrict the already limited right to legal abortion. As the so-called #blackprotest swept away the right-wing government’s plans — in the only public protest thus far able to stop the Law and Justice Party’s plans to change the existing law — scholars and activists interpreted these events as momentous for the formation of a modern mass women’s movement in Poland.

The narratives of excitement and new hope formulated in the aftermath of the black protests highlighted the uniqueness of these recent upheavals, without precedent in Polish history. When looking for historical references helping to explain the #blackprotest phenomenon, some feminists did reach out to patriotic and national symbols of resistance. They argued that when used subversively, these, too, could become a useful strategy for gaining visibility and relevance among wider female audiences — a tool for facilitating “connective action.” Yet others, including sociologist Anna Zawadzka, warned against turning to such narratives, insisting that utilizing national symbols might be just another way by which feminisms are appropriated by the very structures of power and oppression that they have tried to destroy.

Largely overlooked in the discussion about what meaning the black protests had for the formation of feminist subjectivities in Poland was the specific history of Poland’s state-socialist period, and the importance that women’s activism in this era had for the history of the struggle for emancipation. Yet research into the legacies of emancipation post-1945 — and its reception since the fall of state socialism in 1989 — casts this problem in a different light.