What was it like to be a woman in the philosophy department in the 1920s? Probably not very different from being a woman in any academic environment at that time. I have no account from Janina herself of what it was like to be a young female philosopher in the 1920s Warsaw. A glimpse of the situation can be found in what some of her friends wrote.

Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski were another two young philosophers from the student association which prepared the volume I wrote about earlier. Maria was fully devoted to her academic work and to the idea of bettering herself through intellectual labor, which was the sole purpose of her life. When she and Stanisław were about to become engaged, she made sure that he understood that traditional family life would never be an option with her, because it would interfere too much with her goals. They stayed true to this commitment throughout their long lives, always putting thinking, writing, and teaching, first.

Maria and Stanisław survived the war, and so did their belongings, including their diaries and letters from the first half of the century. Maria destroyed her own diary before she died, but what we do have to this day – also in book form – is a collection of letters that she and Stanisław exchanged between 1918 and 1963. The correspondence provides a unique glimpse into the thoughts and feelings of young academics, as they mature both in their relationship and as intellectuals.

In 1927 Maria wrote the following in a letter to her husband:

Today I had a conversation at Ajdukiewicz’s which put me off him a little. Once again this unfortunate “female issue” – it turns out that professor Ajdukiewicz is even more narrow-minded about it than Kotarbiński. “Women are suited to almost nothing” – professor Ajdukiewicz was saying. “They are bad teachers, etc., etc.” Interesting that Mr. Jerzy has a different opinion on that already. Also about partnership in marriage, which we also talked about. I have a strong conviction that if Mrs. Ajdukiewicz was making money teaching Greek or Latin, she would have been treated differently. It’s not about seeking profit or wanting money. But her own sense of power would have grown (the power that Witwicki talks about), the sense of independence, and professor Ajdukiewicz would have to respect that. Actually, I stopped caring about these discussions. One cannot argue. One has to wait for the new generations, raised in different conditions, to be different.

(Translated from the Polish original by me. The original text in this book. I don’t know yet who “Mr. Jerzy” is.)

This excerpt gives us a concise overview of the attitudes of the senior Warsaw philosophers towards women working in academic fields, or, apparently, in all fields. Kotarbiński – according to Maria, “even more narrow-minded” than what she describes here – was the PhD supervisor of both Maria and Janina. Interestingly enough, he was known for his progressive attitudes on other matters, as an active atheist and a very outspoken opponent of anti-semitism at the university. The man Maria had the conversation with, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, was another philosophy professor, educated in Lvov under Kazimierz Twardowski, the founding father of the Lvov-Warsaw School.

At the time of this conversation, Maria was already working as a senior assistant at the philosophy department, teaching and doing research – a job she would not have even been able to get, presumably, without Kotarbiński’s support of her candidacy. And yet, here we have one of her co-workers, one of the big shots, telling her that women were bad teachers and basically good for no intellectual work. Her stoic attitude – just wait it out, the times will change – proved her rather correct. And, in a different world which emerged from the ashes of the one they knew back in 1927, she did become a professor and a chair of one of the departments in Warsaw.