Turning the pages back... May 30, 1872 (05/25/97)

Turning the pages back...

May 30, 1872

Konstantyna Malytska was among the turn-of-the-century Galician women who set the mold for a type of activist that has been present on virtually all levels of Ukrainian community life for a century - she was a pedagogue with a yen for meetings and organizations; a woman who worked to level the playing field with men, yet shied away from true feminism, and instead created a separate zone of action to further the "national ideal."

Born in Kropyvnyk, a village near Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk) on May 30, 1872, Malytska studied at the State Teachers' Seminary in Lviv, then taught in elementary schools in Halych and Luzhany and at the Shevchenko Girls School in Lviv.

At a rally in Stanislaviv in 1902, Malytska delivered a prototypical speech disputing Natalia Kobrynska's insistence that feminism be a guiding principle for women. "We are not trying to lead women along separate paths," Malytska said, "but we are going along new roads in order to make it easier for everyone to walk. We understand emancipation to be the community work of women and men, the joint spiritual life of both sexes of our national organism."

In 1903 Malytska became the first woman to edit a Ukrainian children's magazine in Galicia. She was editor of Dzvinok until 1909.

She was active in the Lviv-based Kruzhok Ukrainok (Circle of Ukrainian Women) since its inception in 1905, and was an active proponent of its integration with the Ruthenian Women's Club to form the Women's Community (Zhinocha Hromada) in 1909. In 1913 she was one of the founders of the Fund for Ukraine's Needs, which provided aid to the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. During the Russian occupation of Galicia in 1915, Malytska was arrested and deported to Siberia, and could not return until 1920.

In December 1921 she took part in the inaugural congress of the Union of Ukrainian Women (Soyuz Ukrainok) held in Lviv. In 1923-1924 she served as Soyuz Ukrainok president, and was a member of its executive until 1928.

In 1930 Malytska joined the editorial board of the Nova Khata magazine, to which she also contributed articles. In 1941 she helped establish the relief organization Women's Service to Ukraine.

One of the few leading Soyuz Ukrainok activists to remain in western Ukraine after the Red Army's re-occupation of the territory in 1944, Malytska worked at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences' Lviv Scientific Library. She died in Lviv on March 17, 1947.

Sources: "Malytska, Konstantyna," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, "Feminists Despite Themselves" (Edmonton: CIUS Press, 1988).

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