Page 201 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

conditions and transforming the everyday mores of other women. In the 1920s, health inspectors had

already argued that Orthodox women—in their eyes, a doubly uncivilized group—constituted a

major cause of ongoing rural degeneracy. Shunning the services of qualified midwives, for instance,

this group continued to allow older women to deliver their babies, leading the author of a 1927 report

from Zdołbunów county to state that “witch doctors and old ladies rule the Volhynian

countryside.” 129 While the regional assembly organized a course to import basic hygiene practices

(such as the washing of hands), it turned out that certificates issued to nurses validating their

qualifications meant little to a primarily Ukrainian-speaking population that “did not understand

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Polish.” Almost a decade later, state officials remained frustrated with the slow progress that was

being made. As late as 1936, Volhynia’s county doctors were still claiming that “hundreds of babies

in the village die simply as a result of the obliviousness of mothers and their incapacity to care for

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their children.”

The work of female scouts provides one example of how women wrote themselves into a

state-led civilizing mission in the borderlands and staked out a political role far from the official

realm of party-politics. From the mid-1920s onward, female scouts from across Poland, like their

male colleagues, spent around a month camping at KOP outposts over the summer. In a description

of the role of KOP camps, scouting leaders declared that the kresy constituted the area of Poland with

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“the lowest levels of cultural development” and in which Polishness was most endangered. By

accepting their more civilized status as Poles, while avoiding behavior that would imply

condescension, Polish scouts aimed to convince local people that it made sense to cooperate with the

state. A 1927 statement claimed that the summer camps would provide school-aged youth with a

129 “Sprawozdanie Dr. W. Hryszkiewicza, Inspektora Państwowej Służby Zdrowia, z inspekcji władz
administracyjnych sanitarnych Województwa Wołyńskiego w dn. 22-26 lutego 1927r,” AAN MOS 825/7-9.
130 Ibid., 9.
131 Dr. L. Nerlich, “Drogi uzdrowotnienia wsi wołyńskiej,” Zdrowie 51, no. 5 (May 1936): 479.
132 Tadeusz Maresz, Letnie obozy i kolonie harcerskie (Warsaw, 1930), 28-29, 17.

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