This article is about selected issues in women’s sports, and above all the modest participation of women in so-called leisure sports. Statistical data concerning Poland and other countries (particularlyWestern Europe) is presented. The fashion for jogging, which is currently being seen in Poland as well, is analyzed. The author’s own research, done in 2013 and involving 865 participants in the Łódź ‘I Care About My Health’ Marathon, documents the smallness of women’s interest in participating in marathon struggles.On the basis of the information collected in the study’s survey questionnaires, it was possible for the author to create a socio-demographic portrait of the female Polish long-distance runner. It was also possible to note the sociologically interesting and elucidating difference between men and women in the sphere of training and in their running careers/biographies.
This article deals with recent Polish herstory narrations, i.e. works of fiction that, while relying on distinctly literary techniques and devices, foreground the feminine experience of history, and moreover, may be associated with the so-called Herstory Turn in Polish humanities and cultural studies. This category of fictions includes also novels in which the herstory narration belongs to a female subject created by a male author, notably Jacek Dehnel’s Abbess Macryna (Matka Makryna), Ignacy Karpowicz’s Little Sonya (Sońka) and Jarosław Kamiński’s Just Lola (Tylko Lola). These three novels are analyzed with the aim of showing how their narrative strategy foregrounds the women narrators/main characters (acting as history’s true subjects), identifying the marks of authorial imitation of the feminine discourse, and, finally, asking the question about man’s status in an ostensibly feminine text. It seems that one way of answering it would be to point to the male author’s validating the feminine experience of history and ensuring that it can be heard.