Starting again at fifty-one

Starting again at fifty-one: Work after emigration

In Sweden, Modrzewska had to reconstruct an academic career she had already established in Poland, eventually earning a second doctorate and returning to scientific research. Her experience of academic recognition also became intertwined with her increasingly explicit understanding of her gender identity.

In 1970, Modrzewska was 51. In Poland, before the antisemitic campaign, she had headed the Department of Anthropology at UMCS. In Sweden, she began again from a position far below her previous professional standing.

In 1971, she began working at the Institute of Clinical Genetics at Uppsala University. She gradually returned to scientific research, including research into the genetic factors associated with schizophrenia. In 1980, she received a doctorate in medical sciences, and in the following year she became a docent. She retired in 1985.

This required her to re-enter academia, this time in another language and another country. Her second doctorate had a significance beyond the formal acquisition of another academic degree. In Na krawędzi chaosu (On the Edge of Chaos), she returned to the question of why she had sought another doctorate when she had already received one in 1948.

Modrzewska also wrote about the university ceremony at which doctors were formally awarded their degrees and about the academic cap placed on the head of the person being honoured. This detail had a deeply personal significance connected to her experience of gender. She wrote that, for a “transvestite”, wearing the cap publicly as part of the ceremony meant more than an academic ritual: she described it as a “triumph” of her most personal truth.

This passage is particularly significant because it shows how her return to an academic career in Sweden became intertwined with a later, increasingly conscious articulation of her gender identity. It was not only about regaining professional status. The doctorate also offered an opportunity to publicly experience something that had remained concealed for much of her earlier life.

Emigration did not end her career. It forced her to once again undertake a difficult journey that she had already made before.