Polish Women in Britain

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of Material Culture
Managing, Learning and Sending : The Material Lives and Journeys of Polish
Women in Britain
Kathy Burrell
Journal of Material Culture 2008 13: 63
DOI: 10.1177/1359183507086219
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M A N AG I N G , L E A R N I N G A N D
SENDING
The Material Lives and Journeys of Polish Women in Britain
K AT H Y B U R R E L L
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Abstract
This article investigates the material lives and journeys of eight women who
migrated to Britain from Poland during the time of the socialist regime.
Although the state created obstructions to emigration, it was viable for
women with family overseas to travel to the West as visitors, sometimes
turning temporary stays into permanent settlements through marriage. For
others, westward travel was made possible by professional employment
opportunities. These journeys of migration not only crossed political divides,
but also forced a fundamental shift in the material lives of the migrants,
transporting them from a shortage economy supported by black market
activities to a relatively affluent consumer society. Based on in-depth interviews, this article considers three aspects of the telling of this change in
these womens material lives: how they related their material experiences
of socialist Poland; how they framed their encounters with their new
consumer environment; and how they reconfigured their material relationships with those left behind.
Key Words Britain consumer skills exchange migration Poland
INTRODUCTION
Amidst the current interest in EastWest migration patterns from postsocialist eastern Europe it has almost been forgotten there were significant movements of eastern Europeans migrating westwards before 1989.
Emigration from socialist Poland, for example, was not necessarily either
easy or officially sanctioned, but was nevertheless extensive, particularly
Journal of Material Culture Vol. 13(1): 6383
Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore)
[DOI: 10.1177/1359183507086219]www.sagepublications.com
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J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 3 ( 1 )
from the south-western mountains region to the USA. Emigration movements intensified in the later stages of the regime: according to Iglicka
(2001: 24), during the 1980s over 2 million people left Poland either as
short term migrants, usually to Germany, or further afield to the USA in
particular, as permanent settlers. Despite political and bureaucratic
barriers, leaving the country was made possible through legal family
invitations in the West and professional opportunities, alongside illegal
routes. The journeys undertaken by these migrants, of course, not only
traversed the political divide of the Cold War but also bridged the
material gulf between the socialist world and the modern world of the
West. Focusing on how female Polish migrants in Britain discuss their
material lives, this article will investigate how emigrating from East to
West before 1989 fundamentally altered womens relationships with
objects and consumption patterns, effectively turning them from confident arrangers to uncertain consumers, and from receivers and sharers
to senders in material interactions.
BACKGROUND TO RESEARCH: MIGRATION AND
MATERIAL BIOGRAPHIES
This article is based on research undertaken for a broader project on

Polish migration to Britain since the 1950s, including post 2004 movements, based on in-depth interviews;1 the focus here however is specifically on women who left Poland at a relatively young age during the
socialist era, before 1989. Although Britain cannot be seen as a significant receiving country for Polish migration during this period, the
substantial refugee population which settled after the war (Burrell, 2006)
ensured that considerable transnational contact was maintained between
those in Britain and their families and friends left behind in Poland
(Burrell, 2003a). Young women were therefore able to leave Poland and
travel to Britain to visit family members, often making their stays permanent by marrying second-generation British/Polish males. In fact, as Keith
Sword has demonstrated, the vast majority of migration from Poland to
Britain before the 1980s was undertaken by women making use of family
networks (Sword, 1996: 2045; see also Stola, in preparation). It is impossible to quantify these movements accurately and official figures of
between 100 and 500 people migrating from Poland annually are undoubtedly an underestimation (Stola, in preparation). Sword, for example,
notes that a significant relaxation in travel restrictions after the economic
and political turmoil of 1956 when widespread strikes eventually
resulted in a new regime leader led to 10,868 Polish casual visitors
and tourists entering Britain in 1957 alone (Sword, 1996: 40). Post crisis,
these figures declined, but long-term migration from Poland to Britain
increased later in the period, particularly in the wake of martial law.
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Burrell: M A N A G I N G , L E A R N I N G A N D S E N D I N G
Although Britain did not officially receive a large number of Solidarity

refugees, opportunities increased for Polish professionals, usually doctors
and academics, to work temporarily, again often resulting in permanent
settlement. Figures for those entering in the 1980s suggest several thousand newcomers at least (Sword, 1996: 50).
Of the 30 people interviewed for the research, eight were women
who had emigrated to Britain before 1989 and all had settled in the
Midlands region (Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham), often but not
always joining the existing Polish communities in the cities. Sharing a
common journey from socialist Poland to the West, and all emigrating
after the 1957 relative enhancement of mobility, these women still left
in varying personal and political circumstances. Some left as very young
women, with relatively young parents and few duties and obligations in
Poland, excited about the prospect of a new life abroad. Others were in
their 30s when they migrated, having already become mothers and household managers in Poland, leaving behind more elderly relatives. Like all
migrants of course, these womens experiences of migration were inevitably coloured by their different life course positions (see Katz and Monk,
1993). Politically, some of the women left either directly as a result of
martial law or due to associated political uncertainty more generally,
while others saw their migration as something outside the realm of
politics, moving simply to live with family members. Through their migrations and subsequent transnational activities, however, all these women
found their everyday lives and family relationships reconfigured across
the political and material barriers of the Cold War.
Although all of the collected interviews took a similar form loosely
structured questions about life in Poland, the experience of migration,
and life in Britain these eight interviews stood out particularly for
the centrality of material goods and consumption to their narrative
content. This should not be surprising; the interrelationship between lifehistories, biography and material goods has been widely noted. Hoskins,
for example, found that she was unable to collect the life stories of people
and their possessions independently during her research into peoples
lives in Kodi (Hoskins, 1998: 2). The emotional connection between people
and things was so close in her collected interviews that she had to transgress the usual boundaries in research to show how certain possessions
could come to be understood as surrogate selves (Hoskins, 1998: 7).
Indeed, as Kopytoff (1986: 667) has argued, objects themselves are now
understood to be so potentially animate that they have their own biographies, their own journeys through time and their own life-cycles, with
their uses, meanings and values changing in line with the people and
places around them.
When considering migration, it is the potential spatial and temporal
disruption associated with movement that works to entwine human and
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material biography still further; as Parkin (1999) has observed of forced

migration, for refugees, salvaged objects embody important continuities
with life before migration, aiding the maintenance of personal memories
long after physical movement has taken place. Constructions of home
after migration, therefore, rely heavily on significant objects to make them
emotionally fulfilling (Hecht, 2001). Objects can act as a soothing balm
for the pain of displacement, or even, as Attan (2006) has demonstrated,
as dangerous reminders of turbulent experiences which are consciously
hidden away and forgotten. What these Polish interviews demonstrated,
however, was not the importance of accompanying, or even missing or
hidden objects in migration journeys, but a more fundamental insight
into the relationship between migration and individual material worlds.
Rather than focusing on material continuities in the form of significant
objects, the women spoke of the difficulties in travelling to an entirely
new material world, in facing new consumer norms, rules and values.
Their depictions of their material lives before and after migration were
starkly different; migration had turned their material certainties, and
with them their daily routines, and even perhaps their sense of themselves, upside down.
Female migration from Poland to Britain before 1989, therefore, effectively illustrates the cultural specificity of material goods, how things
circulate in specific cultural and historical milieus (Appadurai, 1986: 4;
see also Kopytoff, 1986: 68). And, seeing as the commodity has emerged
as a particularly effective vehicle for exploring reciprocal relations
between the cultural and the economic (Bridge and Smith, 2003: 258),
through their material focus, narratives of migrations such as these highlight how female economic and cultural experiences generally are indeed
highly specific to their geographical and historical contexts, so much so
that leaving these contexts is disorientating, requiring the absorption of
a new set of economic and cultural skills. As Lofgren observed of Swedish
consumer life-histories, when people narrate their lives as consumers
there is often a focus on processes of learning and unlearning certain
consumer skills (Lofgren, 1998: 115). This article, therefore, charts this
learning of new skills, following how eight womens material relationships are remembered and renegotiated around the axis of EastWest
migration.
MANAGING: LIVING AND CONSUMING IN
SOCIALIST POLAND
If life stories are usually told in fragments (Portelli, 1998: 24), communicated through chosen episodes representing those elements of the life
history which are felt to be the most significant, it is important to note that
the collected interviews placed great emphasis on narrating pre-migration
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experiences. The accounts were all rich in descriptions of what it was

like to live in socialist Poland, and in particular, what it was like to be a
consumer in a shortage economy. The volatile nature of the Polish economy, especially during the 1970s and 1980s when consumer expectations
had risen, has been well documented. In terms of food shortages and
rationing 1974 and 1976 were very difficult years, resulting in widespread protests and strikes, and by the mid 1980s there had been a real
decline in the standard of living, with heavy inflation and empty shops
characterizing consumer life (see Lukowski and Zawadzki, 2001: 2689,
2755; Prazmowska, 2004: 204). As Drakulic observed while visiting a
friend in Warsaw, in Poland during the 1970s and 1980s the concepts of
choice and liking something were utterly divorced from the reality of
living with food shortages, with shop displays that often featured only
onions, garlic or vinegar (Drakulic, 1992: 13). It was therefore natural that,
as Veenis research on living in the GDR also shows (Veenis, 1999: 94),
food shortages and consumer frustration were at the heart of historical
narratives of the regime.
The difficulty of being a consumer came through very strongly in
Majas account. Having left Poland in 1985 at the age of 24, the greyness
and hopelessness of life in Poland, a familiar western perspective of life
under socialism, coloured her entire interview:
At the time I left, 85, it still wasnt like it is at the moment, the shops were
still pretty empty . . . It was pretty poor, like a sad country. Everybody was
just trying to survive . . . Everything, every shop was empty, it was not only
the food, clothes, everything was grey. There was no prospect for a better
life. Even if you wanted to work hard and do something, you just couldnt
. . . I was living with my parents, of course I wasnt paying a penny towards
the housekeeping because I didnt have enough money. I was working as a
teacher in a kindergarten, I was working with five and six year old children.
I was earning pennies, absolutely pennies. And I was only spending the
money which I earned for, not even food, only clothes and going out, and that
was it. I never had a car, I was never able to save anything, I even remember
I had to save the money from my two salaries to buy a pair of trousers.2
Majas key motivation for leaving Poland was to escape this greyness
while she was still young. Having arrived on a short-term visa to visit
her aunt, she ended up marrying a distant cousin within months, settling
in the Birmingham area. In her interview she did not say explicitly that
love was not the primary reason for marrying so quickly, but she
certainly hinted that she had married so that she would be able to stay.
The significant trope common to all the interviews, however, was
not the shortages in themselves, but how shortages and housekeeping
struggles were overcome. Generally the women spoke about triumphs
in provisioning, rather than experiences of shopping, a distinction
noted in a different context by Miller (1998: 11), who, from researching
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ordinary families shopping habits in north London, has asserted the

relationship-orientated nature of shopping how goods are usually bought
with other people (close or distant) in mind. Talking about the process of
shopping then, as much as about the goods procured themselves, the
Polish interviewees cast themselves as doers, as managers in both
senses getting by and organizing, as arrangers and barterers, experts
in the art of zaatwic sprawny to informally acquire goods or services
(see Wedel, 1986: 41; Burrell, 2003b; Crowley, 2003: 132). Just as in the
USSR (Humphrey, 1995: 47; Ledeneva, 1998) and the GDR (Merkel,
1998: 284; Veenis, 1999: 93), these Polish women stood in long queues,
embraced the alternative opportunities of the black market, utilized
srodowisko mutually supportive social networks of material and information exchange constructed from friends, family and acquaintances
(Pawlik, 1992: 82) improvised and invented, and generally honed their
skills in deciphering the changing messages encoded in their consumer
environments. It was through these activities that they were able to
provide for their families during difficult times and proudly fulfil their
roles of wives, mothers and guardians of the household economy, caring
for those around them with their innovative shopping strategies. As
Hoffman has observed, for Polish women there is no stigma to being
considered capable in the domestic arena, or viewed as household
managers. Despite strong patriarchal traditions, Poland has a long history
of valuing strong women in both public and private spaces (Hoffman,
1999: 712; see also Tarkowska, 2002: 431), a good example being the
highly visible role women played during the 19th century as cultural
resistors under Russian partition (see Pietrow-Ennker, 1992: 31).
It was these provisioning activities and strategies that dominated
narrations of life in Poland. Just as Farquhar has found that Chinese
women value discussing how they coped with food shortages in Beijing
in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (Farquhar, 2006: 153), several of the Polish
women chose to talk at length about how they had navigated shortages
in Poland. Halina, a teacher who emigrated in 1983 aged 38 in order to
join her doctor husband, was keen to explain how provisioning worked:
Everything had to be organized, you didnt just go to a shop and pay
and buy.3 For Barbara, who joined her academic husband in Britain in
1988 at the age of 35, it was important to show that shortages could be
overcome through a combination of clever buying and home preparation. Even in a shortage economy people could manage to achieve a
certain level of material richness:
But eventually Polish people they had everything. There was nothing in the
shops but when you went to friends, when you went anywhere, everybody
had everything. Because somehow they could buy, not necessarily from a
shop, but as I remember, I was buying meat from a farm, young people were
coming from the farm. Farmers were coming to town bringing meat. I think
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it was forbidden. I dont know, probably it was, but nobody really bothered,
simply. I remember buying one quarter of a calf and then preparing everything myself, so I didnt starve at all, absolutely not.4
For Halina, it was important to stress that with creativity and innovation
having good food and nice clothes was not completely out of reach:
I suppose most people were, people wanted to dress nicely, people wanted
to look nice, people wanted to eat well. So it was all very superficial, because
obviously it wasnt a consumer society thats for sure, because everything
was recycled. Your children would wear outfits from their older cousins. I
used to make everything myself, I used to make dresses, especially for my
children, even for myself, I used to knit. It had to look special to look nice,
so we were quite creative in that sense.
As Halinas comments about recycling clothes demonstrate, the practice of exchange was at the heart of the acquisition of goods. It was also
central to patterns of buying. Just as Merkel has found in GDR narratives, Polish consumers were actually continually hunting and gathering,
always ready to make a purchase whether it was immediately useful or
not, considering instead its potential value as a bartering tool (Merkel,
1998: 293). According to Maja, you were queuing for something even if
you didnt want to have it, because you could exchange the product for
one which you needed. Exchange could take a variety of forms, sometimes goods for goods, sometimes goods for services/services for goods,
often confusing the demarcation of legal and illegal activities (see Wedel,
1986: 61). Teresa, a doctor who left Poland in 1989 at the age of 49, spoke
of how she used her access to medicines and prescriptions to arrange
sufficient exchange networks to enable her to avoid queuing for goods
completely.5 Relative affluence also allowed for different types of
exchange, this time the employment of a queuer (see Hraba, 1985: 398).
This was something that Halina took advantage of when her husband
returned from a temporary position in Britain, their income buoyed by
the earning of a western currency:
I hired somebody to queue. You could hire somebody who would be retired
perhaps. She was making some money out of it. I hired somebody to do it
for me. And they would queue sometimes at night, to wait for something that
was delivered in the morning. That was actually crazy, but once we reached
a certain financial situation, especially after my husband came back from
England, we could afford to pay for stupid services like somebody queuing
for you. It was much easier to have somebody to help you perhaps look after
the children when I had to go to work.
Of course, these stories of provisioning and exchange are also stories

of love and loved ones, testimonies to the effort expended focusing on
other people and providing for their needs (see Miller, 1998: 34, 12, 18).
Ewa, who migrated to Birmingham in 1984 at the age of 35 to join her
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academic husband, could not discuss the provisioning strategies she used
in Poland without also speaking about friendship:
It is really difficult to explain, but we all managed, we were all friends
thinking about other friends. Because there were shortages we always used
to buy what we needed, but as much as was allowed. So of course with this
quite often you had surpluses of certain things, and shortages in other. So
we used to swap between friends. It is a tiny thing but my husband really
thinks that a life without cheese is not a life, so all our friends knew that
whatever they could find or buy in the shop, cheese, they always bought it
because they knew he would want it. I never needed much sugar, for
example, but I had a friend who had an allotment and needed more sugar,
so we simply, well really commerce was done in the houses as well as in
the shops.6
Halina also spoke of how people helped each other, creating a special
camaraderie which kept us going among her friends and acquaintances.
Similarly, Barbara affirmed her role as a mother by speaking about the
food she provided for her daughters communion:
I remember one thing, my daughter had a first communion and I invited
many people for a party . . . and that was a time of food shortages . . . I had
a table full of food there, there was no place to put anything more. And I
was alone because my husband was in England at that time, so I could
manage somehow.
However, if responsibility for family provisioning was a demonstration of love, it was also simultaneously a burden, with women servicing
household relationships based on expectations, obligations and duties too.
Women in socialist regimes generally had to cope with the second shift
of laborious household management in addition to paid employment
(Wolfe Jancar, 1978: 46), and had far less free time than men (Tarkowska,
2002: 429). For Ewa, the shortages not only shaped her experience of
pregnancy and early motherhood, but also reinforced the imbalance of
accepted gender divisions in domestic labour, in her view juxtaposing
female capability and resourcefulness with male hopelessness and ego:
So what I am saying is really for women it was much harder than for men.
Because they had to think what to make for dinner and things like this, every
day, not once a month, or for womens day, but everyday life. Shortages were
really tiresome. There were times when I had my first child, almost had my
first child, there were no nappies available. It was the eighth month, the
ninth is approaching, you might have the child any day, and no nappies. I
am not talking about disposable, the flannel ones. You simply, it was really
a question of, not begging, but making acquaintance with the shop assistant
so she might tell you what day will there be a delivery. And I remember that
all I got was quite a few yards of fabric, and I made them myself . . . We were
joking that men really notice only one thing, toilet paper. If it was somewhere
in the shop they would show their masculinity by standing in the queue.
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It is interesting to note here how popular discourses on gender have

developed after socialism, in Poland but also in Russia, with womens
roles as providers and strategists being publicly diminished, and mens
supposed crisis of masculinity anxiously analysed (Bridger et al., 1996;
Kay, 2006). With hindsight it is possible to argue that the burden of
household provisioning under socialism carried with it a perhaps unrecognized social status for women, with the sheer practicality of the
economic situation assuring them an exhaustive presence in public
spaces and widespread social networks.
As this last point also suggests, if these are stories of love, family and
gender dynamics, then potentially they are also stories of political resistance. Of these eight women, only two spoke of being directly involved
in political enterprises to any significant degree; while one discussed her
distribution of Solidarity leaflets, the others husband was imprisoned
for high level Solidarity activities that she too had connections with. By
providing for their families through mechanisms of barter and exchange,
however, all the women were moving between public and private spaces
which were beyond the reach of the state, constantly challenging the
hegemony of the regime and pushing the boundaries of what was
achievable and what was considered to be acceptable behaviour. In their
accounts, then, not only did they present themselves as strong women
using their skills to make their families materially secure, they also
implicitly fashioned themselves as strong women individually and collectively standing up to an unwanted political regime, a system that was
feared and scorned at the same time again, echoing the partition era.
To repeat Barbaras tale of buying meat from visiting farmers, I think
it was forbidden. I dont know, probably it was, but nobody really
bothered, simply.
LEARNING: MIGRATING TO A NEW MATERIAL WORLD
In the same way that material concerns dominated accounts of socialist

Poland, narration of migration to Britain took a similarly material turn.
For two respondents in particular, moving to a western country was
presented as a chance to enjoy all the consumer possibilities that they
felt had been denied them in Poland. The western ideal was made
tangible through new consumer experiences. Stanisawa migrated in
1973 at the age of 23 to marry a second generation Polish/British man
she had met while he was visiting relatives in her city. As a keen follower
of fashion, her arrival and settlement in Nottingham was told in part
through the wider access to fabrics and dress patterns that she encountered in the shops there:
I made my own wedding dress, I made my own dresses, I was even making
suits for myself and everything . . . but we never had patterns, I never knew
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you could get a pattern like in England. When I came over I was really happy
because you could buy a pattern and do whatever you want, but in Poland
I had to go to ask someone to cut it for me.7
It is possible that this aspect of her life in Poland has been misremembered some womens magazines did carry patterns and German publications were also available or that she simply did not come across any
patterns herself, despite other people managing to. The significant part
of her testimony, however, is the juxtaposition she narrates between living
as a fashion-conscious young woman in Poland and Britain. Iwonas interview illustrated a similar situation. Leaving Poland at just 18 in 1961,
she came to Britain initially on a temporary visa to visit family, soon
marrying a man she met through the Leicester Polish community. Having
grown up on a farm she found her confrontations with western consumerism, the promise of which had motivated her to leave, exciting but overwhelming:
Straightaway I went to the shops, in town, to the shops, and in Poland at
that time, communism, you couldnt buy anything, you couldnt open your
mouth, because they were so nasty in the shops, so nasty, you couldnt ask
if you wanted to buy something, if you asked them to show you something.
But here, I remember I went to buy some shoes and she brought me about
10 pairs, try whatever. I didnt speak English, tears in my eyes, she went
yes love, yes love, and she was so helpful. I bought the shoes, went outside
and started to cry.8
This broader material difference between Britain and Poland was

distinctly unsettling for many of the respondents. Katarzyna was just 19
when she joined family in Britain in 1988, and her first months are
recounted as a visitor in an alien world, confronted with a different
language and different architecture:
You feel everything around you is different, and you cant speak the language,
you cant watch TV. I couldnt go out because everything was the same, all
the houses on the roads, I could get lost just walking out 100 metres away.9
For a long time she lived within a much smaller material world: English
language media was indecipherable and public spaces were disorientating. Maja voiced a similar experience. At first she was confused with
what she found; while part of the western ideal seemed to be real, the
financial reality underpinning participation in a consumer society was a
shock:
I think for the first month or two I was in a dream. I couldnt concentrate,
I couldnt put all my thoughts together, because you saw the country which
was so rich and had everything, you go to the shop and you are not waiting
in a queue, everything is big, everything is well organized, youve got clean
roads, everybodys got a house, and everybody looks so happy. For me, I
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was so nave, I thought the money lies on the pavements, I would be able
to just pick it up and become rich! Well, because I, you watch telly and you
see some western things, but it is different in reality. You have to be in the
country to find out what it is like.
Discussions of living in the West certainly changed shape in the interviews held with those who migrated at a young age, moving from initial
accounts of adventure and awe to stories of hard work and sacrifice, all
accompanied by references to the material security which has now been
achieved, a typical trope of economic migration (see Burrell, 2006: 568).
Material success in Britain was found to be attainable by following a
different path, achievable through earning money and working hard,
rather than through networks and commodity exchanges.
Ewa especially spoke of the fundamental change in her daily life that
emigration had brought. Having already begun to raise her family and
run a household in Poland, the difference between provisioning skills in
Poland and Britain seemed extreme. She could no longer use her expertise in keeping places in several queues at once, exchanging finds with
friends, or befriending shop assistants to glean information about potential deliveries. Instead, lack of language proficiency, a bewildering array
of choice and completely different food products left her bereft of the
necessary consumer skills to provide for her family:
Well it was as difficult as in Poland. As time consuming as in Poland because
of the language problem . . . I noticed the possibilities of choice. In Poland
really you had one thing, either you bought it or not. Here the choice made
me wondering the same amount of time, which one? At the beginning
really the time spent on shopping was the same as spent in Poland, in Poland
trying to get anything, in England trying to choose. I had a real problem
seeing which one is better, things like coloured peas, I couldnt believe it, I
bought frozen or tinned, I cant remember if it was tinned peas, such strange
colours, whats this? Reading the labels. We had food, it was difficult to get,
but it was food. Here I came and realized that I am buying something which
they call food but which is not food. Oh again, the shock of the additives,
preservatives, flavours, things like this, in the beginning was really quite
difficult. So after a while I knew that I had to look for certain things not
others, but it took a bit of time to adjust.
No longer participating in widespread reciprocal exchange networks,

Ewa, like Katarzyna, found herself staying at home more and more, her
social contact greatly reduced. And even when a friendly neighbour
taught her how to shop, this help, while welcome, could neither be easily
repaid, nor carried the equality and resolution of the familiar barter
system (see Humphrey and Hugh-Jones, 1992: 11). Halina seemed to be
less daunted by her migration, having already lived abroad before. She
was nevertheless proud of the new consumer skills she developed after
arriving in Britain, this time the art of finding bargains rather than
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elusive goods: I was very clever at finding all the bargains, and found
all the cheap shops and I was very careful not to go anywhere expensive.
But of course everything was available.
It is easy to see parallels between this transition of migration from
East to West with post-socialist transition itself. Transition, like migration,
involved an uncertain and unsteady movement between past and future,
taking some aspects of the past forward, and leaving others behind (see
Burawoy and Verdery, 1999: 14). The disorientation felt by these women
foreshadowed some of the difficulties of transition in Poland and in eastern
Europe and the USSR generally in the early 1990s. Veenis has observed
the discrepancy between expectation and reality in transitioning GDR,
something the younger migrants especially had to confront (Veenis, 1999).
With transition the certainties of the material world also crumbled, with
the focus changing from availability and shortage to the desperate search
for cheap goods, often negotiated through a new order of fraud and Mafia
activity (Humphrey, 1995: 60), with all of these changes hitting women,
as managers of the household, disproportionately hard (Tarkowska, 2002).
These eight women experienced their transition early, but unlike their
friends and families left behind, they had to mourn the loss of their
previous capabilities and learn their new consumer rules in a different
social context, without their fellow navigators of socialism and the
material and social networks they had embodied.
SENDING: GATEKEEPERS OF MATERIAL WEALTH
Although the experience of migrating to Britain from Poland can be

broadly compared to transition, the act of moving did create one material
experience that was specific to the emigrants the construction of new
material relationships with those left behind. Migration to the West
seemed to carry as many expectations of material success by friends and
family as it did for the migrants themselves, and while these dreams
were readily adjusted once in Britain, in Poland the association of the
West with material wealth remained. The West generally, and western
products specifically, enjoyed high status in socialist Poland, as in the
GDR, where prized western goods were often exhibited in living rooms
rather than consumed (see Veenis, 1999: 96; Blum, 2006: 132). As the
state-owned Pewex shops were beyond the means of most people, requiring dollars in exchange for imported products, western goods usually
found their way to Poland through parcels sent by friends and family
abroad, again like the GDR (Veenis, 1997: 156). These parcels were
always eagerly anticipated and generally gratefully received, but carried
with them a reminder of the sort of life the sender was enjoying in the
West (see Veenis, 1997: 163). For Ewa, receiving a parcel in Poland from
friends abroad was a rare but incredibly significant event:
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A few times, to our surprise, we received parcels from them. Flour, sugar,
small cheese triangles, the spread ones, chocolate, this really was something
unexpected for us, and always welcome. Not only from the food value, but
because of the wrapping. At this time in Poland everything was unwrapped,
or wrapped up in such greyish, brownish colours. And suddenly to see
bright colours.
Through this limited access to western products it would have been easy
to form an unrealistic vision of life in the West. As McCracken has argued,
certain things can hold evocative power in certain situations, if treated
as bridges to a distant and idealized version of life (McCracken, 1988:
110). Western goods in Poland were able to symbolize the aspiration of
a better material life, offering solid proof that this did exist elsewhere
and hope that this may reach Poland in the future.
Understanding this importance of western things, on reaching Britain
the migrants found themselves in a fundamentally changed material
position, now repositioned as the senders of these parcels, rather than the
recipients. Family relationships and friendships therefore took on a new
material dimension with a new sort of provisioning enlisted gathering
clothes and foodstuffs which were in short supply in Poland, but affordable in Britain, to send back. Love had to be packaged up and posted,
rather than enacted on a daily basis, a practice Petridou notes Greek
mothers embrace when they send elaborate food parcels to their children
studying abroad (Petridou, 2001: 91). Negotiating loving relationships from
abroad, however, has not necessarily been straightforward. Wrapped up
in the parcels was often a strong feeling of guilt for leaving parents behind
in particular. For daughters, the unease at not being able to care for
elderly parents is a recognized consequence of migration a similar situation has been found among Japanese women in Britain having to reconfigure a whole culture of generational roles and duties with their families
in Japan (see Izuhara and Shibata, 2002: 162). In fact, the difficulty of
negotiating transnational care-giving duties among female migrants is
now receiving considerable academic attention (see Salith, 2001: 665);
focusing on AustralianItalian familial links, Baldassar especially challenges the assumption that care-giving relationships all require physical
proximity (Baldassar, 2007: 276). Ewa seemed to send goods to her family
in Poland as a substitute for her presence there, picking out things to aid
her fathers deteriorating health and thus becoming a carer by proxy:
I used to send parcels. Not the ordinary, everyday food, what I used to call
everyday food, but something like coffee, chocolate, sultanas, things like
this. And for my father I used to send, because he was diabetic, I used to
look for those things. And later on we bought quite a few things in the British
Red Cross for my father as well, wheelchair, things which improved his
possibilities, things like this.
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Given the choice, Ewas father may have preferred to have his daughter
closer to home. Ewas activities here, however, demonstrate how powerfully her emotional ties and familial obligations have underpinned her
parcel sending.
Other family relationships were also affected by the material divide
that migration created. The following passage is from the interview
carried out with Maja. At the time of the meeting, Majas much younger
sister Aggie, who had remained in Poland, was staying with her, trying
to find a way to settle in Britain herself. Aggie joined the interview half
way through and soon their reminiscing about western parcels revealed
an interesting family dynamic:
Maja: Well you were lucky, you were always sent nice clothes.
Aggie: Yes, I was lucky, I wasnt suffering that much.
Q:
Did you send things back?
Maja: I always was sending things back. Second hand clothes, buying
from Oxfam, this was what I could afford as well because I had
my own family, little presents. Oh, always something, which really
helped because at that time it was an exchanging market so she
could exchange something for something that she wanted.
Q:
Did you look forward to getting these parcels?
Aggie: Yes. Oh yes, of course.

Q:
Did things from the West have a certain status as well?
Aggie: Yes, in the past, yes. It was very visible, I had some clothes from
a western country, from England, all different things, my friends
were asking me. They knew that I had a sister in England.
Maja: Her life was pretty easy.
I am sure that Aggie was not able to speak frankly about how her sisters
departure had affected their family in front of her. Maja, for her part,
seemed to display pride in being able to send covetable clothes to her
younger sister, but also resentment that she had struggled to do this while
raising her own family provisioning on two fronts simultaneously.
This example highlights the central difficulty with parcel sending,
from the point of view of the migrants. While the exchanges they were
involved with in Poland were just that, reciprocal exchanges, the material
relationship with friends and family had now been curtailed to gift giving,
a completely different practice resting on asymmetrical obligation rather
than mutual benefit (see Mauss, 1970; Humphrey and Hugh-Jones, 1992:
11). The material flow had become one-way, with gifts seeming almost
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like remittances; only Ewa spoke of receiving parcels from Poland. It is

possible to argue that the migrants had become objectified as bridges to
western material wealth themselves, such was the pressure felt to deliver
the western ideal. In addition, the disparity in economic experience
between Poland and Britain gradually eroded the common structure of
economic values and understandings which had underpinned relationships before (see Appadurai, 1986: 14). This situation, of course, is hardly
unique to Polish migration; high material expectations of family members
who have gone west are common to most economic migration movements. Stephenson, for example, highlights the obligation felt by Caribbean migrants to demonstrate and share their perceived wealth with
family back home, although he does also note that some level of reciprocity is attained through the enthusiastic hospitality offered to returnvisit migrants (Stephenson: 2002, 4135). According to Riak Akuei, the
situation is more extreme for Sudanese refugees in the USA who are faced
with extensive requests for money from relatives, fearful of bringing
shame on their family if they do not send enough, but also trying to build
new lives for themselves at the same time (Riak Akuei, 2005: 10).
This new material asymmetry experienced between family and
friends in Poland and Britain weighed very heavily on Iwona, who
returned to this topic several times in her interview:
Iwona: They still think England is, the streets were paved with gold. But
its not . . . Oh I used to send them a lot of things. Clothes,
anything. When martial law was imposed in 81, we sent everything, even food, anything. Coffee, tea.
Q:
Did they send you things, things you couldnt get here?
Iwona: No. No, maybe once. I had something once maybe, but no. I
dont know. The people in Poland, family, especially family,
think that when you are living here you should help them . . .
And even here, when I came here, they were expecting me to
send the parcels all the time, but I couldnt afford it. I couldnt
afford to send enough to buy them a house or a car or whatever.
That was a problem. But I couldnt because I had my life here,
my family, and I had to work to keep my family.
Unlike the experiences of some of Stephensons Caribbean respondents,
the imbalance in this material relationship was also obvious during
Iwonas visits home:
When I went back, from England, when I went back on holiday, I did stand
in the queue. Sugar, they used to sell only a kilo of sugar for one person, so
one for my mum, and I was next to my mum to get another kilo. And
whatever, salt, whatever. Not for myself, because I knew I was coming back,
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but for them . . . Coffee, tea, sweets, chocolate. Even clothes, cardigans,
jumpers, quite a lot of clothes. Soups in the packets. I used to take whatever
was light to carry, because how much could you take with you. When we
used to go in the car, the car was packed, packed, with food and everything
. . . But there wasnt much to bring back. We found that there wasnt much
to bring back . . . And came back with empty suitcase, thats OK. Empty
suitcase, never had anything from my family, never. Even now, my parents
died, I havent got a ring or something, something to remind me, this one is
from my mother. Something to remember, but absolutely nothing, nothing
at all. Nothing. After my dad died I got a little comb, so I dont ever wash
that. From my mum, a rosary, thats all.
The difficulties and resentment associated with western gifts were undoubtedly not felt by the migrants alone. Rausing has researched the
material links between relatives in Sweden and Estonia and found that
while those in Sweden had a similar perspective, many in Estonia felt
humiliation at being perceived as needy, and resentful at being sent
second-hand goods (Rausing, 1998: 205). Had Aggie had the opportunity
to speak freely, she might have voiced something similar. Certainly in
the interviews more generally, during the discussions of living in Poland
western presents were depicted as luxurious extras, not something they
depended on.
As with exchange and barter within the socialist regime, the eastward movement of western goods reflected a wider political situation.
Western things were not able to move unfettered to the east; stories of
parcel sending were also narratives of the political barrier separating the
different families. Just as home visits required visas and tense border
confrontations, parcel sending was subject to censorship and interference.
Innovation was again required in material endeavours, this time to ensure
the successful sending of certain things:
Iwona: Parcels were always opened. Quite a lot of things used to disappear.
Q:
So you couldnt send money?
Iwona: Oh no, no. But, if you wanted to send money, sometimes old
clothes, I used to sew the money in the hem, or under the collar
inside. And just wrote, gently press the collar or wherever, you
know. It tells them, and they find the money.
As Iwona continued, bringing goods into Poland for friends and family
was even more unnerving and necessitated an understanding of how best
to befriend the border guards:
On the border with Germany, soldiers were standing there ready to shoot.
It was scary because we carried more than we were allowed to, and you
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carried more, for the family, for friends, clothes for you if you are going for
two weeks. There was a limit on what you could take . . . The border was
scary. But there again, if you give them a bottle of vodka, or Scotch whisky,
or a fiver, they would let you go. But if you were stubborn and didnt want
to give anything, no chance. So I remember when we used to go over the
border, the car was packed, the car was packed, everything, in the boot, so
my husband used to put five pounds, and as they opened the border, thank
you, and you can go.
Sending anything out of Poland was deemed to be so unreliable, so vulnerable to the corruption of the system, that Ewa and her mother eventually
decided to stop trying:
My mother used to send me Polish magazines, quite a lot, especially one
which I liked over there. For quite a few years it worked well, but later on
someone started to steal them. I rather suspect it was someone from the
Polish side, not here. So in the end I decided that really I didnt need it.
Once again, the political reality of the socialist regime and the Cold War
rift in Europe had bestowed extra meanings on material journeys and
exchanges.
CONCLUSIONS
This article has analysed how eight women spoke about their material
lives and journeys during an interview situation. The stories they related
therefore can only illustrate the lives they thought they were living, and
the parts of their lives they were happy to share. Their past journeys were
communicated through the kaleidoscope of their present realities, helping
them find comfort in their lives now. With this in mind, it is not surprising that life during the socialist regime was recounted with something
approaching nostalgia by some of the women, with the daily struggles
framed in a wider context of capability and action. Having experienced
a loss of confidence in their household skills, they were most comfortable
talking about a time when they felt most at ease with themselves.
Learning to live in a consumer society and renegotiating relationships
with those back home, as more recent difficulties, are yet to be completely
resolved and so were more difficult to recount.
However, despite, or perhaps because of, the subjectivity of these
narratives, these interviews have pointed to some observations that can
be made more generally about relationships between the material world,
gender and migration, and the EastWest divide of the Cold War. First,
as has been widely acknowledged already, gender is hugely important to
material experiences, particularly in the realm of household provisioning
(see Miller, 1998: 22). For this project interviews were also carried out
with male respondents generally the women talked far more about
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their lives as consumers and provisioners than the men, taking pride in
the peculiarity of their interactions with the material world. It was the
women who talked about learning new consumer skills and the women
who spoke about sending parcels back to Poland. While they may just
have been more inclined to discuss these topics, it seems likely that this
was because they were simply more involved in these activities than the
male interviewees. In terms of migration, it was the women who felt the
material changes of moving from East to West more keenly.
Secondly, the interviews have shown, if only implicitly, the political
resonance of material activities. Talking about material exchanges and
the difficulties in sending parcels to a different political regime inherently involved the discussion of political resistance and political barriers.
Moving outside the realm of the state economically and socially also
meant moving outside the accepted political structure of the regime.
Bribing border guards in a bid to carry goods into Poland was also an act
of political subterfuge, undermining the political fixity of an EastWest
border and the broader Cold War divide. Material goods, therefore, speak
of social, cultural and economic specificities, but they are also at the heart
of political ones.
Finally, the interviews have demonstrated the extent to which migration can fundamentally change the material worlds of migrants. Moving
from one type of society/economy/political system to another especially
highlights just how embedded people are in their material contexts. The
impact of migration on material experiences reaches much further than
attachments to objects from home it can change peoples perceptions
of themselves, entirely restructure their patterns of social interaction,
and perhaps even more significantly, can irrevocably alter the balance of
relationships sustained with those left behind.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
For this research I carried out all of the interviews in English. As somebody
with no personal connection with Poland I faced the various dilemmas of
researching as an outsider; lack of language proficiency to interview in
Polish, but a removed position that perhaps encouraged the respondents to
speak more openly, confident in their anonymity. All names used here are
pseudonyms.
Interview with Maja, 14 November 2005.
Interview with Halina, 28 February 2006.
Interview with Barbara, 8 February 2006.
Interview with Teresa, 24 September 2002.
Interview with Ewa, 1 March 2006.
Interview with Stanisawa, 17 February 2006.
Interview with Iwona, 26 June 2006.
Interview with Katarzyna, 3 February 2006.
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K AT H Y B U R R E L L is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at De Montfort
University. She is currently researching Polish migration movements to Britain
from the 1950s to the present. Her recent publications include Moving Lives:
Narratives of Nation and Migration among Europeans in Post-War Britain (Ashgate,
2006) and, jointly edited with Panikos Panayi, Histories and Memories: Migrants
and their History in Britain (I.B. Tauris, 2006). Address: School of English, Performance and Historical Studies, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester,
LE1 9BH, UK. [email: kburrell@dmu.ac.uk]
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De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

This article is based on research undertaken for a broader project on

Although Britain did not officially receive a large number of Solidarity

material biography still further; as Parkin (1999) has observed of forced

experiences. The accounts were all rich in descriptions of what it was

ordinary families shopping habits in north London, has asserted the

Of course, these stories of provisioning and exchange are also stories

It is interesting to note here how popular discourses on gender have

In the same way that material concerns dominated accounts of socialist

This broader material difference between Britain and Poland was

No longer participating in widespread reciprocal exchange networks,

Although the experience of migrating to Britain from Poland can be

Did you send things back?

Did you look forward to getting these parcels?

Aggie: Yes. Oh yes, of course.

Did things from the West have a certain status as well?

like remittances; only Ewa spoke of receiving parcels from Poland. It is

So you couldnt send money?

Iglicka, Krystyna (2001) Polands Postwar Dynamic of Migration. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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