Feminist Mobilization, Abortion Law and Political Images of Womanhood: Feminists as “the Worst Minority”

The Constitutional Tribunal’s judgment of 2020 changed the abortion law in Poland, leading to a de facto prohibition of abortion in Poland. In the ensuing massive social protests, women’s organizations applied unprecedentedly strong language and radical rhetoric. The government politicians responded with a call to defend Christian and national values, and they attacked the feminist leaders at the helm of the protest, styling them as representatives of an aberrational womanhood. The chapter discusses the background of the 2020 events to show how the clash of political forces over abortion was fuelled by the politics of pushing women to the outsiders’ position by the Catholic conservative majority. The chapter focuses on the established strategy of identifying the feminist as the worst part of the outsider category of women. We show that the protesters’ transgressive contestation strategies are interpreted by the majority as an acknowledgement of their own status as “the worst”, the least self-constrained and the least manageable subset of women—a “subversive self-affirmation” of the movement rebelliously stressing its cohesion. The responses in the political discourses are the creation of what we call a “negative synecdoche of womanhood”, or the division between “the good majority” and the female protesters, and “the implied gender-neutral majoritarianism” mobilized against them.