Private empowerment and public isolation: power in the stories of migrant ‘Mother-Poles’

ABSTRACT

While the lives of migrant women are predominantly portrayed as inherently problematic, limited attention has been given to their experiences of empowerment and disempowerment. The maternal power framework is used in this article to study Polish migrant mothers and their children. Bringing together two studies to showcase an intergenerational perspective of the realms of migrant motherhood, the authors present evidence from (1) the stories of women representing a ‘Mother-Pole’ parenting (an iconically Polish self-sacrificing practice of subjecting women’s needs to those of her family), and (2) the data collected through interviewing adult children of Polish migrant mothers. The findings indicate a twofold conceptualization of power, challenging the universal ascription of ‘powerlessness’ characteristic to motherhood, yet contending that Mother-Poles are prone to marginalization. Ultimately, the article comments on the possibility of transformative maternal power among the Poles abroad and contributes to the current debates on the intersection of gender, ethnicity and power.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• motherhood
• migration
• Poland
• identities

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The PhD study was funded by the 125th Research Anniversary Scholarship awarded by Bangor University for the 2010–2013 period. Supplementary fieldwork funding was obtained from the DAAD grant (2011).

2. All study participants were female, married, between the ages of 23 and 64 (avg. = 37.9), having arrived in their destination countries between 1980 and 2010 (with an average length of stay just below 9 years) and residing outside of the metropolitan urban centres in villages, small towns and suburbs. The women mostly led middle-class lives but represented an array of educational and professional backgrounds.

3. The PhD was supported by funding from the Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University (grant no K/ZBW/000748) and the EU Project ‘Society–Environment–Technology’ (SET).

4. Besides the Mother-Pole model, Pustułka’s study identified other ideal types of migrant parenting as intensive motherhood (integration/host-society oriented) and a hybrid New Migrant Motherhood type, which links Mother-Pole’s and intensive motherhood’s traits. A marginal model of Feminist Mothering has been also found. Detailed discussion of similarities and differences between the models can be found in, e.g. Pustułka (Pustulka 2014; Pustułka 2016).

5. The socialist state and the communist heritage are used as reference to social surroundings and the political climate during the 1944–1989 period of Polish history, when the then Polish People’s Republic was regarded as a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

6. Participants’ names are anonymized. S1 marker refers to Pustułka’s study, while S2 denotes the interview conducted for Trąbka’s project.

7. Bonding social capital refers to that built within co-ethnic networks, while bridging entails relations with local majority and/or international community (Goulbourne et al. 2010: 16–35).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bangor University, the German Academic Exchange Service London, Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie: [K/ZBW/000748)].