The women of Lipce resist forced road-building labor

The women of Lipce resist forced road-building labor in a village stripped of much of its male workforce by imprisonment. When officials demand twenty carts and people to repair a forest road, the women refuse to provide either horses or carts and demand that the imprisoned men be freed first. Their stand makes a seemingly practical summons—road repairs for an expected notable’s passage—an open dispute over coercion, representation, and who must bear the cost of the authorities’ demands.

The summons and the women’s refusal

The confrontation gathers in the farmyard before the Soltys’s cottage, across the pond. Rocho hears disputatious voices carried on the wind and approaches to discover a crowd of women with others among them. Seeing gendarmes and the Voyt nearby, he first moves cautiously through the orchards rather than drawing the authorities’ attention. By the time he enters the group, the women are already angry: fists are clenched, sticks and a flax break are in hand, and the officials are backing away toward the pond and then the mill.

Płoszkowa explains the immediate cause. The demand is for twenty carts and people, at once, to repair the road in the forest because a notable is expected to travel that way. The women answer with a refusal that is concrete and collective: they will not supply horses or carts. When asked who could go, they name the men’s imprisonment as the decisive obstacle: “Let them first free our men, then they can go fix the road.” One woman proposes that the squire be harnessed instead; others insist that officials should do the work themselves rather than enter people’s houses to requisition them.

Their refusal does not rest on a claim that road repair is unnecessary. It contests the authorities’ right to call up village resources as though the household burden and the absence of the men did not matter. The women also accuse the Voyt of knowing the village’s situation and failing to explain it at the magistracy. Their anger turns toward his fitness to represent them: Płoszkowa declares that peasants chose him and can remove him. The argument over carts therefore becomes an argument over public responsibility and local authority.

Imprisonment, labor, and accumulated grievance

The demand arrives amid a wider spring crisis. After the forest conflict, the working men are in gaol, leaving women to manage farm and household labor just as the fields require ploughing, manuring, draining, and planting. Spring brings additional work with calving cows, hatching fowl, farrowing sows, tending livestock, preparing potatoes, and caring for children. The earth is ready for cultivation, but the village lacks the hands needed to meet the season’s demands. Against this background, a compulsory road-work order is not an isolated inconvenience: it asks for carts and labor from households already stretched by the loss of their men.

The women connect the summons to other burdens imposed by the authorities. They complain that the village pays taxes, supplies recruits, and obeys orders, yet the men have been taken and the demands continue. They recall earlier injuries, including a dog shot in the fields and a young man beaten after throwing a stone. Their protest is thus shaped by accumulated grievance as well as the immediate request. They reject the expectation that official power can repeatedly take from the village without answering for what it has already taken.

Hanka Borynowa’s account of village poverty elsewhere in this period gives the refusal a further social context. She describes a family with no potatoes, a quilt already sold, and food obtainable only by begging or seeking credit; elsewhere, a sick mother has given birth without money, help, or enough milk to feed her child. She also condemns farmers who protect their own meals and lending profits while leaving the poor to divine care. These accounts do not form part of the women’s exchange with Rocho, but they illuminate the conditions in which compulsory labor falls: depleted households have little reserve to absorb another demand.

Rocho’s intervention and the encounter’s limits

Rocho tries to quiet the crowd, warning the women that they could be charged with contempt. Their answer is defiant rather than conciliatory: they say they are willing to face the authorities and speak plainly about the wrongs done to them. Płoszkowa challenges the Voyt directly, while another woman tells Rocho to go to him and explain the women’s position. Their hostility makes clear that the village head’s authority is no longer accepted simply because he holds office.

Rocho agrees to speak to the Voyt, but asks the women to disperse, reminding them that each has work at home and fearing the gendarmes’ return. When the church bell rings for noon, the group gradually breaks up, still talking as its members pause outside the cottages. The encounter ends without any reported concession from the officials or release of the imprisoned men. Its immediate result is therefore limited: Rocho becomes the women’s emissary, and the crowd disperses, but the underlying demand remains unresolved.

Collective action within Lipce’s wider resistance

The episode belongs to a broader pattern of collective resistance in Lipce, but its form differs from the earlier mobilization against the manor’s felling of the forest. At that gathering, people waited for Boryna because farmers regarded him as the person who should lead them; he addressed the crowd, named the manor’s refusal to employ local men and its felling of the forest as injustices, and urged the whole village to go together. The crowd then prepared sleighs, horses, carts, and weapons and set out for the forest. In the road-work confrontation, by contrast, women speak from the immediate pressures of household labor and the men’s absence, and their first tactic is refusal to furnish the means of compliance.

Later public confrontations show that such resistance is not confined to this one farmyard. During the school-tax debate, villagers ignore the notary’s demand that one of them run an errand to the manor, refusing to resume the subordinate service expected of them. In another confrontation, peasants close around the gendarmes and then surge after them in front of the prefect, voicing the injustice of being ordered to use another language. Those later scenes differ in their immediate stakes, but, like the women’s refusal, they make collective presence itself a political fact. Here, twenty carts become the measure of what the authorities expect Lipce to provide—and the point at which the women insist that compliance cannot be separated from the fate of the men already taken.