I found this gem in The Economist while waiting in a doctor’s office.
http://economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4221398
“There is a lot in Poland for an American feminist to get cross about. But Ms Penn struggles, and mostly fails, to make the imaginative leap necessary to see that her subjects’ preoccupations were different. Joanna Szczesna, a magnificent activist to whom Ms Penn devotes considerable space, has complained about the author’s dismay that the women did not gain their share of the political fruits of victory: “It happened that once in my life I put out lots of fires, but it was not because of gender discrimination that I didn’t become a fireperson. I didn’t become one because I didn’t want to be one.—
“However, the greatest problem is that although Ms Penn realises she is talking a different language, she cannot adapt. She writes plaintively that her subjects “had very different understandings of ‘internationalism’, ‘leftist politics’, ‘feminism’ and ‘collaboration’. For many of them, these words held immediate, negative associations with Communism, and when I used them they made people wince or fume…my choice of language sometimes made me appear either highly suspect or incredibly naive.†Quite so.”
