Page 203 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

September 1935, members of the Krzemieniec branch even embarked upon their first trip around the

137
province as part of what became known as the “flying clinic for mother and child.” In two-and-a-

half months, they visited 30 villages, hamlets, and settlements, examining a total of almost 600

children.

The narrative spun about these women in a newspaper article published in Volhynia that

December replicated broader assumptions that the local, mainly non-Polish populations were the

grateful recipients of the state’s goodwill—and that there was nothing coercive in the women’s

actions. When the Union’s members arrived in villages, it was reported, the majority of local women

were “distrustful” and “demonstrated a certain resistance,” while rural localities lacked suitable

rooms in which villagers could be examined. 138 After a few hours in a given village, however, two or

three peasant women allegedly arrived with their children in order to attend lectures or to be

instructed on how to wash their offspring, and cases were even reported in which initially hostile

peasants ran to the women who came to their villages, carrying their ill children in their arms for

several hundred meters as they cried and asked for help. 139 While one wonders how widespread such

incidents were, as well as how liberally journalists used poetic license when they depicted the

enthusiasm and gratefulness of the locals, such stories allowed women to carve out a space for

themselves within the Sanacja’s political project—as women, as modern citizens, and as Poles. For

Józewski, members of the Union in Volhynia constituted nothing less than “an outpost representing

Polish culture in the kresy in its best expression.” 140

***

137 “W pracy nad podniesieniem zdrowotności wsi wołyńskiej,” Wołyń, December 25, 1935, 7.
138 Ibid., 7.
139 Ibid., 7.
140 “Wołyń–Czerwiec 1937,” BUW Manuscript Collection MS 1549 [no page numbers].

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