Studia Maritima

Since the beginning of the 19th century the evolution of economic relations and complicated political factors on the Polish territories forced – and at the same time – enabled part of the female landowners to engage in business activities. Actually, even in ancient times female landowners happened to run country estates (the so called female farmsteads), but at the turn of the 19th a nd 20th centuries, together with industrial and civilisational changes, the role of women in running country farms acquired a new quality. Female landowners became official administrators of country estates responsible for their financial situation. The author deals with questions concerning the participation and contribution of female landowners both in the development of their own estates and the economic life of the Kingdom of Poland as a whole at the turn of the centuries. The questions asked in the text of the article, among other things, about the agricultural branches – not only the traditional ones but the less typical ones as well – preferred by female landowners permit noticing the rise in aspirations of women who started expressing their opinions in the press and professional journals on economic matters; on the other hand, their struggle with the market was not always successful. Female landowners – representatives of the Polish elites – looked for inspiration in the European models. The knowledge and skills they acquired they implemented into their own economic activities, and at the same time they shared their experience with others in social forums. Female landowners more and more frequently appeared arm in arm with men as their economic partners who had equal rights and who undertook attempts – based on their financial independence – of self-reliant economic activities that sometimes failed and sometimes succeeded. Their financial independence resulted from slow changes in the mentality typical of the social group they came from.