Page 199 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

man, and a boy engaged in activities that took the best aspects of modern life, while simultaneously

maintaining local traditions. On the one hand, the figures were decked out in traditional peasant

garb—the women wearing headscarves and sewing clothes by hand—and Orthodox icons hung on

the walls behind them. But the image also indicated the positive ways in which modern life might

transform the village: the man and boy read a book together, a reference to both the spread of literacy

and the newly found affection between parent and child. A second image (Figure 5.4b), which

illustrated two different ways of keeping clean, also reinforced the gender roles of the civilized

household that KOP wanted to encourage. As the headscarf-wearing woman cleaned the windows to

the house (which she left open to ensure better ventilation), a shirtless man washed himself over a

bowl of water outside. For KOP’s leaders, this was modernization, properly managed.

[INSERT FIGURE 5.4a and b]

Figure 5.4a and b: Images from the 1938 KOP guide, depicting model peasant behavior. Source:
Ludwik Gocel, O czym mówić z sąsiadami: Wskazówki dla żołnierzy K.O.P. (Warsaw, 1938).

CIVILIZING SITES (III): FEMALE SPACES

Controlling the sites of modernization in the Volhynian countryside—whether rural schools, military

settlements, or KOP outposts—formed a critical part of the state’s civilizing mission. But while these

physical spaces were often controlled by male-centric organizations, the Volhynian borderlands also

provided an arena in which Polish women, who were excluded in more formal political contexts at

the geographical, cultural, and national center, could make claims about their own indispensable

value for the state’s project. During the 1920s and 1930s, high politics in Poland was certainly a

man’s world. If Polish women, like the various national minorities, gained formal citizenship and

participated at the ballot box, they were not (again, like the national minorities) considered to be the

political equals of Polish men. Taking the interwar period as a whole, a mere 2-4 percent of

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