Abstract

The article looks at the state of women’s and gender history at Polish universities, taking the international context—especially the case of the United States, France, Great Britain, and Germany—as a point of departure for analyzing the specificities of the Polish situation. It is argued that the weak position of women’s history and virtual nonexistence of gender history are caused by the following reasons: the dominance of political history, resistance to theory, a general lack of interdisciplinary approaches, reluctance to feminism, structural inflexibility and hierarchy that characterize Polish universities. At the same time, the integration of gender history approaches into research is claimed to be a chance for the development and more widespread acceptance of women’s history, as well as for greater inclusion of theory into Polish historical research.