Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Class in Monica Krawczyk’s Short Stories

According to various researchers, Monica Krawczyk (1887-1954) was the first Polish-American writer whose stories about Polish-American immigrants were published in well-known American magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, and later, in 1950, in a collection entitled If the Branch Blossoms and Other Stories. Most of the short stories revolve around the daily life of Polish-American immigrants in Minnesota. This essay proposes a close reading of two short stories in the collection, “After His Own” and “Wedding in the City,” with a view to illustrating how gender, ethnicity, and social class intersect in the ethnic and American spaces navigated by Krawczyk’s characters, and the ways in which they impact the female protagonists’ identities as women, wives, and mothers.