Obituary
Anna Zarnowska (1931-2007)
Polish historical science has recently suffered a big loss as Anna Zarnowska
unexpectedly passed away on June 9th. This is also a big loss for the International
Conference of Labour and Social History/ITH. Anna Zarnowska had appreciated
and animated ITH by her activities for almost forty years.
Anna Zarnowska began to participate in annual conferences of ITH in the
mid 1960ies as a representative of the Institute of History at Warsaw University,
where she started her academic career at the end of the 1950ies. At that
time she belonged to the youngest post-war generation of Polish historians
dealing with a relatively new and very prominent current in Polish post-war
historical research – social history. Anna Zarnowska focussed her
historical research on social and cultural transformations occuring during
the early phases of industrialization in Poland. During almost fifty years
of her historical research she presented works on such issues as social
mobility and structural transformations, the emergence of new social classes
at the turn of the 19th century. Anna Zarnowska proposed a quite new approach,
enriching the historian`s methods by an anthropologist`s gaze. Her studies
on the culture and everyday life of early Polish workers in Warsaw broke
new ground for Polish historical science.
At the end of the 1980ies Anna Zarnowska animated, and organized a research
group working on an absolutely new topic in Polish historical sciences:
the transformation of the social and cultural status of women in Poland
in the 19th and 20th centuries in a comparative approach. These history
based gender studies were quite unique in Poland at this moment.
However busy Anna Zarnowska was, one annual event was a constant one: the
September meeting in Linz. Being a member of the Executive Committee for
long years, she was an important stimulator of its scientific activity.
Her appearences during the sessions always gathered attention, like her
paper on the gender issue in Poland in 19th and the beginning of 20th century,
or the national aspects of the Polish labour movement. And last but not
least: Anna Zarnowska always remembered to introduce her younger colleagues
and followers from Poland to the ITH community. Without doubt they are going
to continue this cooperation between Polish historians and the ITH.
Grazyna Szelagowska
University of Warsaw
(July 2007)