Abstract:
The article purports to offer a preliminary analysis of the visibility of women in the names of streets in selected Polish cities. The very idea of gender parity in urban naming is novel in Poland and the present article is probably one of the first such attempts in Polish scholarly literature. The study comprised twelve Polish cities with the highest number of hodonyms: Warsaw [Warszawa], Cracow [Kraków], Poznań, Łódź, Wrocław, Szczecin, Gdańsk, Bydgoszcz, Lublin, Katowice, Częstochowa and Białystok. With different historical circumstances, diverse foreign influences and population characteritics (e.g. autochthonous vs. immigrant), the selection renders the analysis representative. The total number of analysed names of streets, roads, city squares and bridges in those cities was about 25,500, of which those named for individual people (historical or fictitious) varied from one fourth to over 40 percent from city to city. Only individual namesakes have been analysed, since in the case of plural ones it was often unclear whether to treat them as masculine or feminine. The examination of a total of over 7,700 streets named for individual people revealed a heavy bias towards male characters, who constituted on average 89 percent of individual commemorations. Interestingly, this tendency was visible not only with regard to historical figures, but also to fictitious characters (mythological or literary). The differences between cities in the ratio of male namesakes were not huge, and they were hardly traceable directly to the historical characteristics of particular cities. From the tendencies in urban naming an unexpected female pantheon emerges.