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vacation in “appropriately healthy conditions” and allow them to gain more knowledge about the far-

flung eastern borderlands through direct experiences. 133 In short, scouting work in the kresy would

forge good citizens from both local people and the incoming scouts themselves.

Under this institutional umbrella, female scouts staked out their claims as citizens, according

to middle-class gender norms. While boys engaged in physical labor and sporting exercises, girls

completed work in the domestic sphere—they washed, cared for, and played with local children, and

they instructed mothers about how to improve levels of hygiene within the family. 134 In their post-

camp report, girl scouts who participated in a camp near the Volhynian settlement of Hoszcza in July

1932 explained that scouts interacted with local people in ways that promoted a modern vision of

rural domesticity, while also celebrating the traditional roles that women played in such

communities. They took embroidery patterns to village women, sang scouting and folk songs around

a campfire on the river Horyń, danced Silesian dances in regional costumes, and educated Volhynian

populations about local traditions that were practiced in other areas of the state. 135

Elite Polish women, including the wives of state officials and military settlers, similarly

became increasingly involved in the state’s plans to improve living conditions for women across

rural Volhynia. In particular, the state-funded Union of Women’s Citizenship Work (Związek Pracy

Obywatelskiej Kobiet), which boasted between 30,000 and 40,000 members in the whole of Poland

by 1930, provided opportunities for women to play a key role in the moral rejuvenation of the nation

without giving them official positions within the state’s political-administrative structure. 136

Volhynian branches of the organization focused on providing health care in a province where, even

by the mid-1930s, most villagers still lived some 20 to 30 kilometers from the nearest doctor. In

133 “Organizacja Obozów Harcerskich na terenie KOP w 1927r.” AAN ZHP 1650.
134 “Sprawozdanie naczelnej rady harcerskiej za rok 1928,” AAN ZHP 381/8.
135 “Raport powakacyjny” (Warsaw, October 6, 1932), AAN ZHP 2134/287.
136 As Eva Plach has argued, “the sanacja provided an elite group of women with an opportunity to claim limited
spaces in otherwise restrictive political discourses.” Plach, Clash of Moral Nations, 117.

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