Helena Tarczyńska (1850-1935) - a teacher, community worker and the late "enthusiast"

Abstract

The life and work of Helena Tarczyńska represent the lot of many women of the late 19th and early 20th century who chose to work as home teachers. A spinster from a modest intelligentsia family cultivating the patriotic tradition, she treated her profession as a mission; her unrivalled models were the “Enthusiasts” (Narcyza Żmichowska, Izabela Zbiegniewska and Wanda Umińska). Born on the 11th of February 1850 in Płock, a daughter of Kazimierz Tarczyński and Agnieszka née Wachulska, she had many siblings. Their father, a piano maker by profession and an antiquarian by interest, tried to give all of them education. Helena graduated from Izabela Zbiegniewska’s boarding school for girls in Włocławek, which implemented Narcyza Żmichowska’s progressive ideas of the curriculum, becoming a certifi ed home teacher in 1870. Until 1878 she taught in nearby country estates, then in Włocławek. In 1886 she moved to Warsaw, where she made many friends taking part in clandestine pedagogical courses and seminars. Professionally, these were her best years, when she was able to find fulfilment in teaching, especially as regarded her favourite subjects: Polish history and Polish literature.She made the acquaintance of many outstanding women: education activists, journalists, authors of textbooks, directors of clandestine schools (I. Moszczeńska, S. Sempołowska, A. Chlebowska, A. Szycówna, W. Morzkowska and others). Her life choices were greatly influenced by Wanda Umińska née Wolska (a participant of the January Uprising, a well-known activist and community worker), with whom she was close friends; some of their prolifi c correspondence has survived. After 1896 Tarczyńska moved to the country again; she taught near Łowicz and then in the Świętokrzyskie Mountains. In 1902 she started to work as a teacher in a state-owned orphanage in Mokotów; she lost this job having got under police surveillance. For several years she taught in a childcare centre in Sierocin near Pruszków. She spent the last years of her active working life in Milanówek and Warsaw (she worked, among others, in the Public Library at Koszykowa St in Warsaw). She died on the 12th of April 1935 in Łowicz and was buried there. Helena Tarczyńska came from a family that treated the programme of “work at the grass roots” very seriously, as was also evident from the activities of her brothers Franciszek, Hipolit and Władysław. This “quiet worker”, as she was called by her friend Wanda Umińska, in the period of particularly intensive Russification, taught several generations of girls to love Polish literature and Polish history, subjects that were banned from official curricula.