What began as a spontaneous job action in one yard quickly evolved into something much larger – in large part because Walentynowicz herself urged the movement to broaden its scope. On that first day, the dismissed crane operator slipped back into the shipyard (to which she now technically had no access) and was met by cheering crowds of workers. When the factory’s Party secretary tried to placate the men by denigrating Walentynowicz’s record, the workers shouted him down, reminding him that Anna had toiled there since 1950 and even been decorated multiple times as a model worker encyclopedia.com . The strikers’ resolve only grew. Lech Wałęsa, the electrician and dissident whom Walentynowicz knew from WZZ meetings, scaled the yard’s wall and joined the protest, soon emerging as one of its spokesmen encyclopedia.com . Many workers felt that Walentynowicz, as the aggrieved person and a respected veteran of the yard, should lead the strike committee. Characteristically, she declined the chairmanship, quipping that “We have equality of the sexes and all that, but the leader has got to be a man” encyclopedia.com . It was not lack of courage – Walentynowicz had courage in abundance – but a shrewd calculation. She knew the predominantly male workforce might rally more easily behind a man as figurehead, and she was content to play an influential supporting role rather than seek the limelight.
Over the next two weeks, the protest at the Gdańsk Shipyard snowballed into a nationwide strike movement. As hardship and repression had mounted, Poland’s working class was ready to explode – and Walentynowicz’s firing was the spark in the tinder. Within days, other factories in Gdańsk and the surrounding region declared solidarity strikes, and a list of broader demands began to take shape, taped to the shipyard gates. These included not only the rehiring of Walentynowicz but also the right to form free trade unions, wage increases, the freeing of political prisoners, and an end to censorship encyclopedia.com . The Gdańsk strikers, guided by an “Inter-Factory Strike Committee,” formulated 21 demands that encapsulated the hopes of an oppressed nation encyclopedia.com encyclopedia.com . Walentynowicz’s plight thus catalyzed a historic push for systemic change. Western journalists flocked to Gdańsk to cover the uprising (the communist regime, in a rare concession, allowed some foreign press in), and many early reports highlighted Walentynowicz – the fired woman whose cause had lit the flame – even before they mentioned Wałęsa en.wikipedia.org . As she stood at the shipyard each day, a humble figure in a simple dress and glasses, rallying her comrades, Walentynowicz symbolized the moral authority of the workers’ cause.
By the strike’s second week, the communist government – alarmed by the scale of the unrest – sent a delegation to negotiate in Gdańsk. They made rapid concessions: the authorities agreed to reinstate Walentynowicz and Wałęsa to their jobs, granted raises, and even consented to build a memorial for the workers killed in 1970 encyclopedia.com encyclopedia.com . These partial victories led Wałęsa and some others to consider ending the strike on August 16, thinking they had won enough. But Walentynowicz and several militant colleagues (notably another woman activist, Alina Pienkowska) were not ready to stop en.wikipedia.org . They knew many of the boldest demands – free unions, free speech, releasing prisoners – were still unmet and that other factories were counting on Gdańsk to hold the line. As Wałęsa prepared to announce the strike’s end, Walentynowicz and Pienkowska famously intervened to keep the strike going en.wikipedia.org . According to numerous eyewitnesses, it was these women who shut the shipyard gates to prevent workers from dispersing and passionately argued that they could not abandon fellow strikers across Poland en.wikipedia.org . Walentynowicz implored the wavering men to think of the jailed activists and repressed citizens who had no voice. “Our aim should not be just a slightly thicker slice of bread for ourselves,” she had earlier told her co-workers. “We must consider the needs of others… Your problems are my problems” en.wikipedia.org .