Zofia Sokolnicka
Teacher, suffragette, emissary, master of ciphers, one of the first eight members of the Polish Sejm.
We must never forget that Poland is being built with a >>blade in one hand, and a trowel in the other<< and that the borders of the Polish state are being carved out by Polish culture – she repeated.
She was one of the mothers of renewed Polish independence. Without her and many other Polish women, there would have been no success of The Greater Poland Uprising – and no first female members of the Polish Parliament. She was born on 15 May 1878 in Krakow, in a family with a strong sense of patriotism and Polish traditions, in which memories of national uprisings were vivid. She graduated from the Anna and Anastasia Danysz Female College in Poznań, and also studied humanities at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
Strongly convinced of the need for a reform of Polish education, in 1894 she became involved in underground education, teaching history and the Polish language for the female “Warta” Society in the Prussian partition. Disregarding the risks, she ran reading rooms and a bookshop where she distributed Polish books and leaflets, while working on a new educational programme. In order to improve the quality of teaching, she organised courses for female teachers and, together with Maria Brownsfordówna, published a methodical handbook on “How to teach children to read and write in Polish”. In 1903 Zofia Sokolnicka was admitted to the underground National League, where she was in charge of secret youth associations that were preparing a new generation of Polish political activists. After the outbreak of the First World War, Sokolnicka became an emissary between Greater Poland – and the Central Polish Agency in Lausanne and the Polish National Committee in Paris. Carrying secret information for members of the National Democracy, she crossed national borders under the pretext of treating her eyesight, and thanks to her excellent memory she did not need any notes or documents.
She was also a cryptographer. She used a cipher in letters written to her family, in which she passed on information about the political situation to the International Civic Committee in Poznań. During Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s visit to Poznań in December 1918, she attended a meeting with the future Prime Minister at the Bazar Hotel, and when the Greater Poland Uprising broke out, she was involved in organising sanitary and medical assistance for the wounded. In the reborn Polish state, she belonged to the elite group of the first
female Member of Parliament, holding an uninterrupted parliamentary seat from 1919 to 1927. She actively campaigned for women’s rights, acting in the National Women’s Organisation, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Education Committee.
