Photo: Lenora Chu.
Ewa Łętowska, the elder stateswoman who helped build the legal framework of democratic Poland after communism, sits in her Warsaw flat last February.
Never underestimate the power of a woman. It may be under the radar, but woe to those who think they can always manipulate the quiet ones.
Lenora Chu of the Christian Science Monitor recalls, “It was late fall of 1987 in Poland, and the economic and social forces here were fueling tremors that would eventually fell communism across the Soviet bloc.
“Among a group of influential men – law professors – at a dinner party one evening was a Communist Party member brainstorming how to throw a bone to pro-democracy activists. The group was tasked with floating a name for a human rights ombudsman; that of legal scholar Ewa Łętowska kept surfacing. A devoted academic who had pumped out two decades of legal research on topics as benign as consumer protections and contract law, she was a respectable but safe choice.
“ ‘They said, “We want a woman, because women might be easier to manipulate,” ‘ Ms. Łętowska says in an interview in her Warsaw flat, lined floor to ceiling with books and opera records. She laughs at this memory that she possesses only because her lawyer husband was among the men feasting on schnitzel at that monthly table for regulars.
“If it was a wallflower they wanted, it turned out to be a miscalculation of historic proportion: They launched a stateswoman.
“Her trajectory as Poland’s top human rights thinker, she says, started ‘loudly, and with a bang’ when she was named the country’s human rights ombudsman soon after the dinner party, pioneering the balance between the state and the individual in the waning days of communism.
“She was an accidental influencer who, four decades later, now in her 80s, is a sought-after talking head, issuing viral social media posts about democracy. And when voters sent their right-wing government packing last October, a coalition of progressives turned to the wisdom and experience of Ms. Łętowska and her contemporaries.
“They’re looking for help to fix Poland’s institutions after the populists turned the country away from the European Union, rolled back civil rights such as abortion, took over the media and judiciary, and questioned the country’s humanitarian aid duties.
” ‘Ms. Łętowska’s value to Polish society cannot be overstated, says Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, a sociologist and assistant professor at Koźmiński University. ‘She’s a living legend, and she has the authority of this wise, powerful woman who set the institutions right in the beginning. She worked on this at a time it was the hardest – the intermediary stage between communism and democracy. And she still has much to say.’
“In 1980, the world saw burly Solidarity unionist Lech Wałęsa leading a revolt against communist authorities for worker rights – and eventually winning a Nobel Prize for it. But it was the progressive technocrats quietly blooming in that politically fertile time who did the less spectacular but essential work of building a democratic legal framework.
“Until then, Ms. Łętowska had forged her career as an impartial civil law professor, neither courting the communist regime nor joining the opposition. [She] now confidently says she … ‘was a state official to society, who brought more dialogue, more transparency. At the same time, I didn’t want a political future.’
“In an era when one didn’t easily trust one’s neighbor, there was little subversive in her ‘good girl’ youth to suggest she would emerge a strong voice for human rights and democracy. … On rare study trips abroad — few Polish scholars were trusted to leave the country — she might use German colleagues’ photocopiers to reproduce expensive legal tomes, like handbooks and casebooks on human rights law. …
“After law school in the 1960s, she published articles about civic law issues, rising through the ranks as a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Law Studies.
“A trip to the West – Hamburg, Germany – in the early 1980s was a turning point. She happened upon a demonstration by feminists. … From the other side of the street, she could see citizens hurling insults at the women.
“ ‘And in between you could see a line of police, with stone faces making sure no one gets hurt, being completely indifferent, and providing this space for demonstrating,’ says Ms. Łętowska. ‘It was the first time in my life I saw police not beating demonstrators – but rather protecting them. This is how I finally understood how things should be.’
‘The people of Hamburg would never know how much credit they should take, quite by accident, in my education,’ she says.
“Half a decade after that trip, she was named Poland’s first human rights official, judging the conduct of the state toward its citizens. … Should political parties have to register with the state? No, she famously wrote in 1988, when Poland was still under communist rule: ‘The constitution stated clearly: if parties want to form, let them form. Registration is required only for associations.’ …
“After the communist regime fell in 1989, she found herself among the legal scholars helping to modernize the Polish Constitution.”
More at the Monitor, here. Piotr Żakowiecki contributed to this report.
Photo: Chloe Aftel for the New York Times
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