Denying Worthiness, Unity, Commitment and Numbers. Criticism of the Polish Women’s Protests in 2020

In 2020, Poland witnessed a large series of demonstrations organised and co-organised by the women’s movement and pro-choice organisations. Those protests were triggered by the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal restricting access to termination of pregnancy, even though Poland’s prior regulations had been among the strictest in Europe. The demonstrations took place in multiple localities all over Poland, some of them were very large, while others involved only one or two people expressing their objection to the change of the law on termination of pregnancy. The protests reflected significant mobilisation of citizens against the then ruling rightist government. Even though the protests did not succeed in changing the legal provisions, they contributed to the mobilisation in the later parliamentary elections in 2023. However, during the wave of demonstrations, a countermobilisation was clearly visible among pro-life activists, rightists politicians and celebrities, as well as citizens opposing the women’s movement. The paper analyses how the women’s protests were presented and degraded by their opponents. The analysed material includes publications in online media (both social media and news outlets) collected in a specifically developed database within a project funded by the University of Wrocław based on key words: protection of women’s rights, protection of men’s rights, All-Polish Women’s Strike. To enable qualitative content analysis, five days were randomly drawn and out of all items published on those days, those displaying negative approach to the protests were included. The objective of the analysis was to verify whether the anti-movement comments could be associated to Charles Tilly’s concept of displays of WUNC (worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment). The findings show that in all those four areas, there were counterdisplays by the movement’s opponents, denying especially the women’s protests’ worthiness, but also unity, numbers and commitment. The identified patterns of counterdisplays are referred to stereotypes about feminism and women’s movement in the context of the cultural backlash.