6-1/8 x 9-1/4. 400 pgs. (2005) Cloth 978-0-472-11385-9 $34.95S  Available Add to Cart Paper 978-0-472-03196-2 $25.95S  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Look Inside Subjects European Studies--Eastern European Studies / Gender Studies--Women's Studies

Solidarity's Secret
The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland

Shana Penn

Winner: 2005 Heldt Book Prize for Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies given by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)

The first book to document women's crucial role in the fall of Poland's communist regime

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About the Book

Solidarity's Secret is the first book to record the crucial yet little-known role women played in the rise of an independent press in Poland and in the fall of that country's communist government.

Shana Penn pieces together a decade of interviews with the women behind the Polish pro-democracy movement—women whose massive contributions were obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts.

Penn reveals the story of how these brave women ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, Tygodnik Mazowsze, while prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years. The same women then went on to play influential roles in post-communist Poland.

Solidarity's Secret gives us a richly detailed story-within-a-story -- unheard of not only in the West, but until recently even within Poland itself -- from one of the most important eras in modern history.

Shana Penn is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She directs the Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland, a philanthropic program of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, based in San Francisco.