A reportage at the end of the century. European economic journeys of Countess Cecylia Plater-Zyberk in the light of the „Kronika Rodzinna” (1899)

Abstract

The article was prepared on the basis of the „Kronika Rodzinna”, a biweekly published from 1867 in Warsaw. It was addressed to the gentry and intelligentsia, had a literary-social, as well as diary-travel character and often described the so-called feminine issues. During its existence there were program changes. After ideological disputes of the eighties of the 19th century, editors focused on matters related to the household and education. As they followed a moderate mainstream movement of women, the professional education and activity of the latter were promoted by them. In 1899, Countess Cecylia Plater-Zyberk became the chief editor and the publisher of the magazine. She assimilated landowners’, conservative ideals with an intelligent model of an open Catholicism. During an almost one-year of her cadency, the „Kronika Rodzinna” was transformed into a popular „Czasopismo dla Rodzin Katolickich”. The editor herself inaugurated and ended her functions in a series of travel reports. Using such a modern form of journalistic report, she entered the hard-to-reach for women world of media, professional work, as well as of independent fast travels. While bringing to the common denominator the search for female economic schools in Europe, she was reporting on their civilizational condition. In the descriptions saturated with religious axiology, she presented the readers with her own reflections and social contexts of women’s emancipation. In a travel reportage she returned to the Polish ground with an idea of a social solidarity; a reconciliation of women’s aspirations with religion. The social bond was to join in a special way women from the landowners’ elites and peasant villages, while economic schools were to open to them fields of different activities and work. According to the rules of a press reportage, the story of Plater-Zyberk revealed the European reality of the late 19th century in her subjective images seen from the perspective of an aristocrat and the chief-editor of the Catholic „Kronika Rodzinna”.