Unawareness and expertise. Acquiring knowledge about sexuality in postwar Poland

Abstract

Through contest memoirs and oral history interviews, we examine narratives of formal and informal sex education by two generations of Poles: the first coming to age in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the second roughly the generation of their children. As our material shows, the older generation experienced unawareness (nieuświadomienie) as young adults, while a process of expertization created possibilities for the younger generation to acquire better quality knowledge earlier in life. During the 1950s and 1960s, as the circulation of expert advice through a state-sponsored family planning campaign expanded, knowledge about the sexual body came to be viewed as valuable and symptomatic of modernity, as well as necessary for personal and familial happiness. Formal sex education began to predominate as a reliable source of sexual knowledge for Polish women and men during late state-socialism, but informal sources of knowledge about sex, particularly parents and peers, persisted. As did the gendered nature of knowledge transmission, with a tradition of mother-daughter communication, and the greater popularity of peer conversations about sex among boys. Knowledge transmission from parents to children was habitually limited to conversations about the emotional side of sexuality, with “technical” details systematically delegated to experts. This delegation testified to the persisting notions of shame, taboo, and sin surrounding sexual knowledge transmission, practiced—and reproduced—by Polish parents across social classes, geographical backgrounds, and generations.