Melanie Vámbéry, then president of the Hungarian Association of Feminists (Feministák Egyesülete, FE), summoned an eclectic group of characters – who could easily form the cast of an Agatha Christie novel – to a public forum in Budapest on women’s employment rights on 11 December 1934. By organising this event, Vámbéry created a crucial platform to discuss some of the most pressing issues of the time, including gender and the economic crisis. Her masterfully curated group of speakers included Hungary’s most prominent social democratic female politician, a legitimist duchess, a Jewish psychologist with legal expertise, as well as a liberal parliamentarian and his mother – representing both the old and new circles of the FE. The forum, or as it was called in Hungarian, ankét,Footnote 1 was framed as a question, namely ‘Should Women Starve to Death?’ and centred on women’s labour rights and economic emancipation, offering a rich dialogue across a range of political languages. This hitherto vaguely researched debate is special not only due to the broad coalition of speakers. First, it is a condensed source revealing how an inter-war feminist language highlights the class aspect of the curbing of women’s economic rights. Second, it manages to thematise the crisis of masculinity in the inter-war period and its interconnectedness with anti-modernism. These discussions took place under the threat of fascism, and in that way provided a base to exchange ideas on gender, class, and race on a broad feminist–socialist–liberal platform. Moreover, the format of the public forum became a new genre and venue for the production of feminist political thought. Instead of the writings of one leading intellectual, feminist thought was now created in dialogue between many speakers, guided by the curating and organising work of Vámbéry, and the support of other women in the FE, such as Eugénia Miskolczy-Meller. The 1934 ankét has a wealth of documentation behind it, logging respondents from the broadest spectrum of thought, but it was not without precedent. Just a few years earlier, the FE, with Vámbéry and Miskolczy-Meller at the forefront, initiated the movement against the death penalty, mobilising mostly civic radical, social democratic, and communist allies. The texts (speeches and articles) reveal a different type of feminist thought in 1930s Hungary, with general human values and social justice as core concepts, marginalising the still important yet narrower gender equality topics. In other terms, the ankét shows the importance of non-traditional sources for histories of feminist intellectual history and political thought.Footnote 2
This body of sources, partly preserved in the archives of the FE and partly documented by the press,Footnote 3 has not completely been ignored by scholarly literature.Footnote 4 Nevertheless, there has not been an exploration of its potential for intellectual historical analysis. Nor has there been an analysis of the FE’s efforts through the ankét as a left-liberal alternative to the right-wing umbrella organising and even to popular front politics (in the making exactly around this time) so far. To that end, I read the debates at the ankét and the FE’s inter-war activity in general – discussed briefly below – as more of a liberal democratic alternative to Comintern-style anti-fascism. I also argue that the nuance in these arguments is a strong counterpoint to the conservative women’s rights discourse, which served as a constitutive element of the antimodernist backlash of the Horthy-era. Moreover, recovering and analysing the 1934 discussion offers an opportunity to foreground the political thought of educated women who made fascinating contributions to the intellectual landscape of the era. The intellectual achievements of these women are rarely discussed, and their work is scarcely documented; they are either barely mentioned in historiography, such as Dr Lilla Wagner,Footnote 5 or are mostly remembered as politicians and not thinkers, such as Anna Kéthly, or as members of the aristocracy, such as Klára Andrássy. Also, the event can be viewed as an alternative to what Barbara Papp and Balázs Sipos qualify as an exceptional case of ‘consensus-building’ by conservative women on the right-wing of the political spectrum.Footnote 6
The discussion at the forum ‘Should Women Starve to Death?’ concentrated multiple layers of the multifaceted challenges facing women’s labour rights in the aftermath of the Great Depression. One of the most significant gendered aspects of the economic crisis was the effort to reduce women’s participation in middle-class and intellectual professions. As scholars have also noted, this era was characterised by ‘anti-Semitic, anti-leftist, and anti-woman rhetoric’.Footnote 7 In this paper, I argue that attacks on women’s rights, which were often supported by liberal politics and increasingly engaged with women’s social and economic rights, were part of the anti-modernist political languages that emerged during the inter-war period. What was new in this discourse was the advancement of women’s rights from the fin-de-siècle to the wake of the First World War, which led to the intermingling of anti-modernism and anti-feminism.
The concept of ‘backlash’ is useful for analysing anti-modernism and anti-feminism in inter-war Hungary. ‘Backlash’ is a broad term used in scholarship since the 1960s,Footnote 8 which became popular in women’s and gender history, particularly since the publication of Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women in the 1990s.Footnote 9 At its core is reaction to change, as ‘a preemptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line’, per Faludi in her interview with Sally J. Kenney.Footnote 10 Aligning the concept even more tightly with the concept of anti-modernism, Michelle V. Rowley suggests that backlash is ‘a condition of modernity [which] moves through the complicity and antipathy of the everyday and the eruptive spectacle of anger, the latter narrated as necessary for social order’.Footnote 11 Neither inter-war anti-modernism nor the 1990s backlash could entirely negate the achievements of feminist and women’s rights movements, as they inevitably incorporated and were constrained by those very advancements. As Sorin Antohi and Balázs Trencsényi observe, ‘anti-modernism negates while modernism affirms, but their respective messages share the same discursive space, their practices share the same world of meaning, and frequently their actors. . . . [I]t is mistaken to construe them as the opposite terms of a dualism’.Footnote 12
Efforts to undermine women’s hard-won political and economic rights in inter-war Hungary often exploited the economic crisis to justify their arguments. However, these arguments failed to address the hypocrisy of their class dimensions, as well as the broader crisis of masculinity following the First World War, which had resulted in irreversible societal changes.Footnote 13 In contrast, the ankét provided a rare opportunity for dialogue across a broad political spectrum, with many speakers offering class-sensitive perspectives. This forum revealed that women’s rights are not only essential to a just society but also a powerful tool for anti-democratic political actors seeking to extend repression across the social and political landscape.Footnote 14 The discussion represented a multilayered tableau of the competing political languages of the time, where all participants opposed restrictions on women’s labour rights but conceptualised women’s emancipation, womanhood, family roles and the protection of women’s rights in drastically different ways. While in the mid-1930s, women’s movements in other countries were engaged in popular front anti-fascist alliances,Footnote 15 the Hungarian anti-fascist scene appeared more fragmented. Nevertheless, the FE’s public forum demonstrated that, while the women on the right had formed their own coalitions, women centre and left of centre on the political spectrum also strove to build alliances, despite the fragmentation and diversification of the domestic political left in interwar Hungary and much of the communist, social democratic, and civic radical intellectual elite residing in exile. This effort for dialogue even allowed a younger generation of feminists, associated with the Journal of Working Women (Dolgozó Asszonyok Lapja), to critique what they saw as the stale discussions of the ‘old guard’. This paper highlights the politics of this younger generation, which has been less researched than the founding figures of FE, and which held different political views.
The Association of Feminists, Right-Wing Women, Anti-Modernism, and Backlash
In Hungary, the Great Depression not only occurred against the backdrop of profound changes in gender relations after the First World War but was also intertwined with the political and discursive processes of coming to terms with the Treaty of Trianon (1920). The long-negotiated treaty, a result of the Paris Peace Conference, officially ended the war between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Entente and resulted in the loss of two-thirds of Hungary’s pre-war territory and a dramatic reduction in its total population. This territorial loss fuelled a nationalist discourse of demographic crisis, which the nationalist-conservative Horthy regime (1920–44) used to emphasise the celebration of motherhood, often in contrast to education and work for women. Yet, by the 1930s, the heritage of feminist movements and feminist ideas could not be discarded in Hungary. The collapse of the world economy facilitated the further amplification of backlash discourses and politics, and the financial crisis in this case served as a ‘legitimation device’Footnote 16 for the backlash against women’s access to the labour force. However, attempts to curb women’s right to work and access to education was met with resistance, and triggered new alliances where the FE could yet again take the lead.
As scholars of the first feminist organisations in Hungary argue, the FE began to lose both its legal footing and its relevance after 1918.Footnote 17 The organisation was founded in 1904 with the goal of ‘liberating women in all spheres of life’ and, in the spirit of the era, identified universal active suffrage as the most important means to that end. The FE’s existence was preceded by the National Association of Female Clerks (Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete, NOE, 1896–1919) and both organisations were spearheaded by the charismatic Rosika Schwimmer (1877–1948) and Vilma Glücklich (1872–1927). The FE, as a member organisation of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA, founded in 1904 in Berlin; after 1926, the International Alliance of Women, IWA), had a broad international network. They joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1916, further enhancing their international network as well as consolidating their anti-war politics in which they joined forces with Hungary’s parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition led by Mihály Károlyi.Footnote 18
Whilst the FE is often described in the literature as ‘bourgeois’, I would argue along with Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner that their social sensitivity places them closer to the left of the ideological spectrum.Footnote 19 This despite their failure to build strong alliances with either the women workers’ movement or a strong network of rural women.Footnote 20 One cannot ignore the abyss between feminists and the social democrats created by the FE’s support for a parliamentary proposal from 1912 extending suffrage to women with limitations according to educational and property criteria, either.Footnote 21 Yet, even the legendary founder and leader of the socialist women’s movement, Mariska Gárdos, acknowledged the work of Glücklich and Schwimmer.Footnote 22 It is especially important to understand the FE’s place within labour debates in light of the main topic of the public forum of 1934 women’s labour.
The FE was the most important officially recognised women’s organisation until 1919, when it was first banned during the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The charismatic Rosika Schwimmer left Hungary in 1920, but the FE did manage to re-establish itself and refocus its agenda in opposition to the conservative nationalist Horthy regime. The space around the FE was gradually shrinking, though. In the newly established regime, the FE – together with communists, social democrats, pacifists, and especially Jews – was blamed for Hungary’s military loss in the First World War and its territorial losses after the Paris Peace Conference. The official discourse ensured that the democratic Aster Revolution in late 1918 and the Károlyi regime were conflated with the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ and the Red Terror.Footnote 23 After 1919, the FE soon became outmanouvered financially and in terms of their sphere of influence by the newly founded National Association of Hungarian Women (Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége, MANSZ), a Christian religious and nationalist (in its own definition, ‘patriotic’) women’s organisation founded by the irredentist and outspokenly antisemitic Cécile Tormay (1875–1937).Footnote 24 The MANSZ viewed the politics of the FE and feminists in general as ‘anti-Hungarian’, and Tormay’s explicit goal was to ‘regain’ Christian Hungarian women for her Christian-Nationalist cause.Footnote 25 The MANSZ was the first women’s organisation where one had to show proof of their Christian (that is, not Jewish) ‘origin’Footnote 26 – a stark contrast to the large Jewish membership of the FE.
The conservative, mostly nationalist women’s organisations, with many openly antisemitic women in their leadership, have received increased scholarly attention in the past two decades. However, Judith Szapor emphasises the exclusionary as well as inherently conservative nature of their politics, including their vision of femininity.Footnote 27 Women’s right to education, a topic closely intertwined with the topic of women’s right to work, was the topic where the MANSZ could appear as a defender of progressive women’s rights. Together with the Association of University Educated Women (Egyetemet és Főiskolát Végzett Nők Egyesülete), founded in 1925, the MANSZ argued for women’s right to education in a language ‘written in the code, couched in the dominant anti-Semitic, nationalistic rhetoric of the period, that allowed contemporaries to instantly identify their political and ideological stance’.Footnote 28 This allowed them to ignore the dual numerus clausus legislation, against Jews and women, as recently shown by Anna Borgos.Footnote 29
Sharp, Renko, Ronan, and Szapor also emphasise that in the Horthy-era, political visibility with limited political influence ‘ostensibly representing Hungarian women’ was ‘reserved for a few high-profile conservative women intellectuals, who were allowed to demand the restoration of women’s previous access to higher education, as long as they limited this right to women of the Christian middle class’.Footnote 30 What may be read as a conflict between the visions of the Horthy regime and of conservative women’s rights activists is rather a coherent and inherent part of inter-war anti-modernism and its conservative backlash.
As Trencsényi argues, the inter-war crisis was marked by a significant change in the role of Western modernity in East Central Europe; conservative women’s rights activists were part of this trend.Footnote 31 The specifically anti-modernist rather than reactionary political mindset of the conservative women’s organisations is best exemplified in their nativist, spiritual celebration of the sanctity of motherhood, which was to be preserved through the protection of women’s (sexual) morality. These discourses were often framed in spiritual terms and fed into the palingenetic post-Versailles political language of the time,Footnote 32 which differentiated the conservative women’s rights activists even more strongly from the ‘militancy’ and ‘liberalism’ of the feminists and social democrats. This engagement with multiple forms of spirituality was especially evident in the oeuvre of Cécile Tormay, who was also an outstanding example of the new, emancipated intellectual woman. When analysing the language of a parliamentary debate about women’s work, Zsombor Bódy shows that despite the acknowledgement that it was a necessity for a woman of the age to seek employment, motherhood was still seen as women’s ‘natural profession and dedication’, and their ‘natural role’ was that of the wife. Employment was rather a necessary evil.Footnote 33 Their distinction from the regime’s mainstream can be characterised well with the differentiation between conservative and reactionary backlash; namely that conservative women ‘do not oppose gender equality in principle but instead believe that gender equality has gone far enough’, while reactionary backlash rather ‘rejects gender equality and the feminist project in toto’.Footnote 34 Still, through a combination of their extreme spiritual (Christian) nationalism, antisemitism and explicit anti-feminism, the conservative women’s organisations under the Horthy regime made a major contribution to the anti-modern gender project of the time. By ameliorating some of the attacks on women’s rights, they made these policies more palatable, which in turn allowed contemporary illiberal politics to position these conservative women and their organisations as ‘good’ examples of ‘conservative’ and ‘national feminism’.
It was in this anti-feminist, anti-liberal and antisemitic political context that the FE continued its work, with a new leadership after Schwimmer’s emigration in 1920 and Vilma Glücklich’s death in 1927. The new leadership in 1922 included Mrs Oszkár Szirmai, Eugénia Miskolczy-Meller (often referred to as Mrs Meller) and Melanie Vámbéry. The FE was eventually banned in 1942, ostensibely for its anti-war stance, but it continued to meet secretly until its re-establishment in 1945 and its final dissolution by the communist regime in 1949.Footnote 35 Melanie Vámbéry (approx. 1880–1944),Footnote 36 through personal and family ties, was well networked across not only civic radical, but also socialist and liberal intellectual circles. Her uncle, Rusztem Vámbéry, was the editor of the civic radical reviewFootnote 37 Századunk (Our Century), and her husband, Zsigmond Kunfi–whom she divorced in 1913, soon after the birth of their daughter Nóra–was a leading social democratic politician, who emigrated to Vienna after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. The communist party was banned afterwards, and the social democrats who held office in the Béla Kun government were persecuted, exiled, and imprisoned, with many killed in the White Terror. During the Horthy era, the only possibility for the Social Democratic Party of Hungary (Magyarországi Szociáldemokrata Párt, MSzDP) to function was the denial of their former members and of any ties to and continuity with the Béla Kun era. The defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic meant that communism as a movement and as an idea was banned in Hungary abruptly and before it was banned elsewhere in Central Europe. The initially secret agreement made between MSzDP president Károly Peyer and Prime Minister István Bethlen, in December 1921, enabled social democracy to be present in national parliamentary politics, on the one hand whilst limiting its political and discursive space on the other. Still, despite the differences between Communists and Social Democrats, many Social Democrats supported those persecuted and in exile after 1919. The Communist Party was briefly re-founded as the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyarországi Szocialista Munkáspárt) in 1925, which was banned again in 1928, followed by the persecution and imprisonment of its members.
The possibilities – and mostly limitations – of the public sphere at the time are crucial to understand of the ideological and intellectual positioning of the FE as a whole, of Melanie Vámbéry herself, as well as of the set of characters at the FE’s forum. Vámbéry fought multiple fronts for women’s rights, as well as for peace, and against antisemitism. Her written work, which comprised interviews, public talks (archived or summarised in the press) and literary writings, documents all three aspects and shows her sharp awareness of the multiple crises threatening the issues at the core of her work. In an interview a few months before the 1934 ankét, she refused the combatant argument of right to work being women’s right to ‘individualistic self-realisation’, pointing out that it was more of a necessity than anything else for families to survive.Footnote 38 The feminists, from the early stage of the movement around the fin-de-siècle, had been outspoken about women’s right to work as the key to their economic, social and sexual emancipation. One of their cardinal points on prostitution was that it is caused by women’s poverty, which is the same argument Vámbéry reiterates in the interview: if a woman cannot ‘sell her labour, she will have no choice but to sell herself’.Footnote 39
Social historical research on inter-war Hungary has shown that women’s employment (in not only low paid agricultural and factory jobs but also middle-class positions) increased drastically from the First World War through the 1920s but was put to a halt after 1930,Footnote 40this due in large part to the government’s further shift to the right.Footnote 41 Bódy argues that until the 1930s, women’s employment was rapidly growing despite the conservative backlash discourse that targeted the earlier developments.Footnote 42 Women’s political rights and their (middle class) educational possibilities were, however, regressing. Women’s suffrage was curbed compared to the 1918–19 legislation, which was never followed by elections.Footnote 43 Although women were granted access to all university faculties in December 1918 by the revolutionary government, their access to higher education became increasingly limited in the counter-revolutionary period. For example, individual faculties, such as the Medical Faculty of the University of Budapest, suspended the admission of all women, supported by a ministerial decree in December 1919. Women’s explicit ban from the Medical Faculty remained in effect until 1927. Although this ban was lifted as part of other progressive educational policies under the ministership of Count Kuno von Klebersberg in 1926 and 1927, as Judith Szapor shows, this was still ‘based on a conservative, nationalistic ideology’.Footnote 44 At the same time, the restoration and (at the middle-school level) expansion of educational rights for women further complicates the overall assessment of the status of women’s rights in inter-war Hungary.
For a country that lost two-thirds of its territory in 1920 upon concluding the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary still maintained its rate economic growth compared to the pre-war period within the Habsburg Empire.Footnote 45 Yet, it was not exempt from the effects of the Great Depression.Footnote 46 This, in turn, allowed space for a ‘crisis discourse’ justifying a new wave of backlash against women’s employment, at least on a discursive level. The shrinking labour market for young men coincided with a crisis of masculinity in the aftermath of the First World War; scapegoating women for men’s lack of access to jobs was an easy outlet for such frustration. The FE’s forum offers a glimpse into these processes, which started after the end of the First World War, accelerated with the initial economic crisis in 1929 and, as Claudia Papp’s research shows, continued until the debate on the draft law on the dismissal of married civil servants in 1938–9.Footnote 47
Feminist Thought in Inter-War Hungary and the Alliance against the Death Penalty
The feminist texts expressing the most important ideas on democracy, social organisation, the priority of women’s social, political, and sexual rights,Footnote 48 as well as anti-fascism and anti-racism (mostly framed in their struggle against antisemitism) were scattered across open letters in newspapers for the right to education, reports on speeches, and even police reports on other illegal (mostly communist and socialist) activities. The feminist discourse of the time appears to be less relevant in comparison to its early twentieth-century trajectories, and it is clearly overshadowed by the conservative women’s lobbying about education rights in the mid-1920s. This, as Szapor is right to point out, ‘was one of the very few, perhaps the only episode of female activism in the interwar period that played out in public, and specifically in the highbrow journals serving as the mouthpieces of the conservative political and intellectual elite’.Footnote 49 Miskolczy-Meller and Melanie Vámbéry, similarly to Schwimmer and Glücklich, however, were well networked across the liberal and leftist wings of Hungary’s intellectual-political spectrum.
When it came to topics such as peace and anti-violence, the FE was still a flagship organisation, and not only due to its place in the WILPF. As early as November 1931, the FE organised another ankét against the death penalty and its massive extension under martial law to all types of crimes. At this event, Dr Margit Ungár, the first female lawyer in Hungary and a regular speaker for the FE, and Rusztem Vámbéry emphasised the inhumane aspect of the death penalty during deep economic depression when it is often poverty that ‘chases the poor into committing crime’.Footnote 50 The journalist in Népszava, the daily newspaper of the MSzDP, emphasised that the feminist arguments about the death penalty were the same as the socialist ones, centring on society’s responsibility towards the poor and powerless. The first petition against the death penalty was published by the FE on 19 November 1931.Footnote 51 Eventually, in July 1932, together with the members of the Miklós Bartha Society,Footnote 52 the FE was the founder of the Alliance against the Death Penalty (Halálbüntetés Ellenes Szövetség).Footnote 53 The Alliance, presided over by Rusztem Vámbéry and later joined by other organisations,Footnote 54 was established as a broad protest against the death sentences issued by summary courts (under martial law as a result of the declaration of a state of exception in the country), which under the Horthy regime was also instrumentalised to target communists.Footnote 55 The repression reached its nadir with the arrest of Imre Sallai and Sándor Fürst, leaders of the underground communists who were accused – based on falsified evidence – of involvement in the bombing of a railway viaduct in the town of Biatorbágy. The attack, which resulted in the death of twenty-two people, was in fact carried out by an individual with no connection to the KMP. Fürst, who joined the communist movement in 1926, and Sallai, who returned from Moscow to support the work of the underground communist cells, were executed despite the Alliance’s petition and, more importantly, despite their innocence. Before their execution, the Alliance issued a petition authored by the poets Attila József and Gyula Illyés and the Lutheran pastor and historian Lajos Szimonidesz, which was signed by over 10,000 people. Its official publisher was Eugénia Miskolczy-Meller from the FE, and she was the one who presented it to the Minister of Justice Tibor Zsitvay.Footnote 56
The story of the Alliance against the Death Penalty demonstrates well the embeddedness of the FE in the emergent Hungarian anti-fascist platform and the FE’s sympathies to the political left. Many of those involved in this platform came from a (mainly assimilated) Jewish background, which of course was a fact abused by the antisemitic nationalist-conservative side. Even more importantly, this is highly relevant for our understanding of inter-war coalitions. The Alliance is also an obvious point of convergence for the FE’s feminist and anti-violence agenda, expanded to pacifism through the FE’s participation in the WILPF and Rosika Schwimmer’s peace activism. The broad left–liberal–Jewish–feminist platform was repeated and expanded in the case of the 1934 ankét. However, quite importantly, what was on the agenda here was an openly feminist topic as a discussion starter; other topics, from the rising fascism and antisemitism to the wider implications of the Great Depression, entered the conversation through the topic of women’s labour rights. It is this feminist agenda that made the 1934 FE ankét special, together with its wide range of participants and the press coverage, which offers a tableau of political languages to analyse in dialogue with each other. The 1934 event followed a lecture series in 1933 with a similarly provocative title: ‘Have We Indeed Achieved Women’s Equality?’,Footnote 57 reflecting on the backlash that had utilised the long feminist struggle and its partial successes to supress women’s rights.
The Ankét and Feminist Alliances
The debate about women and labour was a continuation of these earlier discussions. The occasion that ignited the public debate in the first place was an open call for proposals by the popular tabloid-like weekly Reggeli Újság (The Morning News), searching for suggestions about how to remedy the socio-economic situation of young people in the aftermath of the Great Depression.Footnote 58 Many respondents suggested that reducing women’s access to paid work would be a solution, which prompted the FE to organise an event in direct response to the newspaper’s call and in indirect response to the public discourse about ‘B-listing’ women (i.e., adding them to the list of those to be first dismissed, which mostly targeted leftists and then Jews during the Horthy era).
At the same time, the year in which the ankét took place coincided with the preparations for the Comintern’s 7th World Congress, where the popular front strategy would be presented and endorsed.Footnote 59 Although an officially organised popular front would not emerge in Hungary until 1944, and although the FE’s ankét differed in terms of its hierarchy, administrative structure and relationship to communism, it nevertheless functioned as a strong anti-fascist platform. In this respect, it shared affinities with both the top-down initiatives of the Comintern and the more grassroots, women-led efforts such as the Comité Mondial des Femmes (CMF). The ankét brought together a wide range of intellectuals and other public figures from across the ranks of liberals and what remained of the political left after many social democrats and communists were forced into illegality after the fall of the Hungarian Republic of Councils in 1919. More than thirty years after the first steps taken by both radical and liberal feminism and the early women workers’ movement, women’s labour rights and the acknowledgement of women as equal citizens remained burning issues. In the atmosphere of conservative backlash and in a polarised anti-democratic space, consensus-building became a survival strategy in an ever-narrowing political sphere. Indeed, consensus-building is an attractive framework to add nuance to the analysis of highly polarised historical situations. However, cleavages persevered under the surface, ideological divides remained and there was a clear demarcation of who could sit at the same table with whom, as demonstrated by the earlier failure of the FE-initiated ‘Debating Club’, which aimed to recruit conservative women,Footnote 60 as well as by the striking absence of communist women at the ankét.
The Participants
Women’s employment was a popular topic in the context of the economic crisis, used to legitimise the broader backlash against women’s equality. The publication of a range of opinions about curbing women’s employment as a solution to the labour crisis in Reggeli Újság prompted Melanie Vámbéry to contact a group of public figures sympathetic to their feminist cause. The editor-in-chief of Reggeli Újság, Endre Sós, social democratic sociologist and journalist who after the Second World War joined the Communist Party, immediately tackled the issue in his editorial, with a title resonating with the ankét’s: ‘And the Women Should Then Starve to Death?’,Footnote 61 where he rejected the option of pushing women out of the labour force. This and his role in the call for suggestions prompted Vámbéry to invite Sós, alongside the social democratic politician Anna Kéthly; the Duchess Odeschalchi, born Countess Klára Andrássy (hereinafter referred to as Klára Andrássy), sister of the wife of Mihály Károlyi, Katinka Andrássy; the neuroscientist Dr Ernő Szinetár; national-liberal MPs Pál Magyar, Béla Fábián and János Vázsonyi; Margit Szalkay Vázsonyi, the mother of the latter; as well as the popular writer Ilona Várady, nom de plume Iván Vándor; and Dr Lilla Wagner, psychoanalyst and lawyer, a long standing member of the FE. The speeches of these participants are preserved in the archives of the FE,Footnote 62 and press reports from the time also mention the speeches of Pál Ignotus, the civic radical Dr Géza Feleky and Lajos Nagy from the Budapest City Hall. Pál Ignotus (1901–78) was a long-term supporter of the FE, though the relationship was marked by heated debates as well.Footnote 63 A writer, editor, journalist, ‘son of a prominent assimilated Jewish journal editor, who fused some elements of turn-of-the-century “civic radicalism” with aspects of social democracy and Western European liberal references’,Footnote 64 before emigrating from Hungary in 1939 due to the antisemitic legislation, Ignotus authored the book A horogkeresztes hadjárat (The Swastika Crusade) (Budapest, 1933). Based on the style and the approach to feminism, democracy and antisemitism, the last archived speech without a name was probably written by him.
One newspaper article mentions the fourth woman MP in the Hungarian Parliament, Lilla Melczer (1890–1965),Footnote 65 a divorced landowner and noble woman, who had a peculiar political agenda with a conservative view on the family and a starch opposition to abortion, whilst advocating for better health care and family protection. Two newspapers report about the participation of Tibor Rakovszky, from the Independent Small holders’, Agarian and Civic Party, together with Béla Fábián.Footnote 66 The invitation card from the FE archival fond also mentions Zsolt Arady, a Catholic journalist from the newspaper Nemzeti Újság (The National Newspaper), and Kálmán Balkányi, director of the Hungarian Trade Association (Országos Magyar Kereskedelmi Egyesülés, OMKE), an economist-journalist from an assimilated Jewish background.Footnote 67 I have not managed to locate any further documentation of Melczer, Arady, Balkányi and Rakovszky, whose diverse political positions would certainly have enriched the broad political palette of the event. Fábián’s note on sending his speech to the FE is in the archival fond,Footnote 68 but the speech itself is not.Footnote 69 The journal Dolgozó Asszonyok Lapja – founded by the FE member Mrs Ernő Bródy, née Erzsébet Hirschfeld – not only reported on the forum, but also debated with its content. In my analysis, I focus on those talks that are available in the archival fond or described in detail in the contemporaneous press. The press reports suggest that the two-day event, held at the Museum of Social Health and Hygiene (Társadalomegészségügyi Múzeum),Footnote 70 was followed by vivid discussions and had a large audience,Footnote 71 which according to one source amounted to 600 women ‘squeezed into the room’.Footnote 72
Vámbéry chose her allies strategically: all speakers were in agreement that the crisis in the labour force could not be remedied by punishing women. Many took Sós’s rhetorical question about women’s starvation to death literally (e.g., Feleky),Footnote 73 which easily side-tracked their argument, but others used the opportunity for either suggestions of different economic arrangements or analysing the roots of women’s inequality and the processes of women’s emancipation of the previous decades. The main argument for keeping women in the labour force, presented by János Vázsonyi, who came from a Jewish family with a strong national-liberal tradition,Footnote 74 was that competition was enhanced by women’s participation. Remaining within the capitalist-patriarchal framework and using a rationalist argument, Endre Sós, Klára Andrássy and others found it important to point out that since women’s wages were lower, filling their positions with men would not provide economic welfare to those men’s families.Footnote 75 The implication was that, if forcing women out of the more prestigious white collar jobs would not bring economic assistance to (young) men and their potential families, then the discourse and action in this direction was just as essential for the re-traditionalisation of women’s roles.
Women’s access to work (primarily meaning civic sphere middle-class jobs) was more than an economic necessity to those who considered it a prerequisite of women’s emancipation. There was a range of conceptualisations of how this mattered. Klára Andrássy talked at length about how being restricted to the domestic sphere had a detrimental effect on women’s intellectual capacities. She claimed that women’s human dignity depended on their chances of accessing the labour market and working outside the home, what Andrássy defined as ‘the sphere of the kitchen and the nursery’.Footnote 76 Andrássy thus considered working outside a home not only an economic means towards emancipation but also one that would emancipate women through the development of their mental-intellectual capacities. Work as a platform for intellectual development and a possibility for individual women’s talents to flourish was at the core of the reasoning of Mrs Vázsonyi (née Margit Szalkai Schwartz, 1877–1949), who referred to the achievements of the archaeologist Dr Zsófia Torma (1832–99) and the mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850–91). She urged for a more open labour platform and greater opportunities for women, so that talent would not be wasted and work would not become a hobby for wealthy women.
The biographies of the women at the ankét add crucial interpretative layers to their political ideas. Mrs Vázsonyi is one of the examples of how these women’s intimate relations, social status, and their self-perception through these two aspects, shaped their arguments as well as how their arguments were perceived. Mrs Vázsonyi’s position was determined by being the wife (widow) and the mother of progressive politicians, and she used her traditional role as wife and mother to exert authority in the debate about women’s work. By authoring two memoirs – which documented the work of her husband, the assimilated Jewish liberal politician, first minister of Israelite faith in Hungary and long-term ally of the FE Vilmos Vázsonyi (1868–1926),Footnote 77 and of her son, János Vázsonyi (1900–45), whom she lost in the Holocaust – she likewise documented the era in which they all lived and acted.Footnote 78
Klára Andrássy, Lilla Wagner, Anna Kéthly
Women with very different life trajectories from that of Mrs Vázsonyi made similar crucial contributions to the debate, and surprising alliances were woven into the argument about class-based hypocrisy in the political effort to reduce women’s participation in the labour force. The way these positions converged and diverged characterise well the specificity of anti-fascist coalitions and their wide-ranging ideological underpinnings in Hungary. Three women from distinct backgrounds offered especially nuanced positions, emphasising the difference between middle-class and white- collar working class jobs, on the one hand, and the extremely difficult underpaid physical labour of factory and domestic workers and agricultural labourers, on the other:Footnote 79 the noblewoman Klára Andrássy, the socialist politician Anna Kéthly and the Jewish lawyer, psychiatrist and feminist activist Dr Lilla Wagner.
Klára Andrássy (1898–1941) was one of the four Andrássy sisters of the old noble family with a prominent role in Hungarian history since the sixteenth century.Footnote 80 She is often outshined in historical memory by her sister, the ‘Red Countess’ Katinka Andrássy, wife of Mihály Károlyi, the leader of the National Council from October 1918, the first prime minister, and then until 21 March 1919 the president of the People’s Republic of Hungary. The radical democratic politics of the Károlyis alienated most of Katinka’s predominantly loyalist family. Klára and Katinka’s relationship was also strained by Katinka’s dedication to socialism and Klára’s stringent anti-communism. Despite their differences, both sisters were allied with the FE. Katinka joined the FE in the last year of the First World War, working with FE founder Rosika Schwimmer to re-invigorate the feminist struggle for suffrage and create a broad coalition, even with the involvement of the conservative National Alliance of Women’s Associations of Hungary (Magyarországi Nőegyesületek Országos Szövetsége, MNOSZ) and its new ‘Christian feminist’ agenda.Footnote 81 The endeavour failed, the conservative MANSZ was founded in January 1919, and the collapse of the Hungarian People’s Republic on 21 March 1919 ensued. The Károlyis left Hungary in June 1919, and it took Klára and Katinka several years to mend their relationship. Klára followed the course of the political legitimism of her uncle and stepfather, Gyula Andrássy Jr. and Albert Apponyi. In 1934, the Károlyis were still in exile, whilst Klára Andrássy remained active in inter-war Hungarian politics. A few weeks after the ankét, Klára Andrássy gave an interview to Reggeli Újság, where she justified joining the feminists:
The political marginalisation of women and their economic oppression brought me to the feminist camp. They [the feminists] had just had the 30th anniversary of their movement. It is rather sad that the past thirty years did not bring the desired results, and that especially in the past couple of years, women face an increasing number of injustices all over the world. Dictatorships wage a war against women everywhere.Footnote 82
Andrássy even published a longer essay about the subject in the journal Századunk,Footnote 83 the journal of the civic radicals, the same year, probably as the first duchess ever publishing in a civic radical intellectual journal.
In her biography, Éva Tóth Vásárhelyi argues that Klára Andrássy’s politics was primarily socially oriented, which soon estranged her from the conservative-nationalist Magyar Nők Szent Korona Szövetsége (The Holy Crown Alliance of Hungarian Women), from which she resigned as managing president in 1937. She was fiercely opposed to fascism and the politics of Nazi Germany and was active in the anti-German, pro-Anglo-American illegal resistance. On her way to the United States, carrying letters documenting her sabotage actions against German train deliveries, she was killed in a bombing in Dubrovnik.Footnote 84
The Jewish intellectual and psychoanalyst Dr Lilla Wagner (1903–78)Footnote 85 held a PhD in the humanities and, following her studies in psychology, literature and art theory, also became an expert of legal theory. Wagner was active member of the FE, who published and lectured extensively about women’s legal status within Hungarian family law.Footnote 86 She was married to the lawyer Mátyás Vészi, with whom she co-published an award-winning book about the legal profession.Footnote 87 She published in the civic radical Századunk (Our Century),Footnote 88 and also wrote poetry, novels (mostly about women) and literary analyses. She was elected member of the Hungarian Psychological Association, but her career as a psychoanalyst began only after her emigration to the United Kingdom in 1951, where she practiced as a member of the British Psychoanalytical Association until 1977. Wagner’s publications are well documented, but her biography is less accessible. Based on the available information, she was probably one of the most complex and educated feminist thinkers of the inter-war period, combining law and psychoanalysis in her approach.
Whilst we know little about the life of Lilla Wagner, the social democratic politician Anna Kéthly’s life is commemorated, among others, in a movie by the award-winning director Márta Mészáros,Footnote 89 and also in the recent biographies by Zsuzsanna B. Kádár and Jean-Pierre Liotard-Vogt.Footnote 90 In 1922, Kéthly (1889–1976) became the second woman elected to the Hungarian parliament. She joined the MSzDP at the age of eighteen and remained a devoted socialist until her death. In the inter-war years, she was the editor of the two crucial socialist newspapers, Nőmunkás (Woman Worker) and Népszava (People’s Word). A social democrat at heart, Kéthly was also a close ally of the FE, maintaining a lengthy, supportive correspondence with them since her election to parliament in 1922,Footnote 91 in full agreement about the necessity of women’s suffrage. She worked for women’s rights within the social democratic women’s movement, for a while as chair of the Women’s Bureau, among other roles. During her tenure in parliament, Kéthly spoke for social and labour rights, as well as women’s suffrage, protesting the restrictions after 1920, especially the census that discriminated against women based on age and number of ‘children alive’. She often addressed this aspect in relation to infant and early childhood mortality, adding that ‘it was by no means the fault of working class women that their children die, there is no need to punish them any further for that’.Footnote 92 Many of her parliamentary speeches, as also shown by Kádár in her monograph, were testimonies to the living conditions of working class and peasant women and their families. She fought for children’s schooling and battled the scarily high numbers of infant mortality. After the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Kéthly remained in the country as a member of the MSzDP, which could only maintain its legal existence through a clear condemnation of the communists, the social democrats in exile and the ‘Red Terror’. The latter was the easiest, as Kéthly herself was strongly opposed to any form of violence. She was also a devoted democrat, who viewed the Soviet Union as a dictatorship, the example of which was not meant to be followed in Hungary.Footnote 93 However, after the Great Depression and the shift to the extreme right in Hungarian politics, Kéthly’s own position in many regards also shifted towards the radical left within the MSzDP, urging public resistance against the government and support for union protests. Her most important inspiration came from the writings of August Bebel and the life and politics of Rosa Luxemburg. She was confronted with the hardening labour conditions and shrinking access to the labour force, which explains her willingness to speak at the FE’s ankét in 1934.Footnote 94
These three women – Andrássy, Kéthly and Wagner – came from very different social backgrounds, but at the time of the ankét all enjoyed comfortable living conditions unimaginable to working class women. However, they were equally sensitive to the hypocrisy behind the argument that women needed ‘saving’ from the world of paid labour and would potentially find rescue in the domestic sphere. This gives credibility to their statements far more than the superficial discourse about ‘ordinary housewives’ and working class women in 1918 at the Debating Club, as recovered by Judith Szapor.Footnote 95 At the 1934 event, Klára Andrássy made a clear distinction between the emancipatory function of work for middle- and upper-class women and the exploitative physical labour that working class women are forced to undertake.Footnote 96 This distinction was crucial for dispelling the accusation that their fight for women’s labour rights was a fight for women’s further exploitation, which also meant that Andrássy’s individualistic focus on self-development and self-realisation merged into a system-critical stance about class and gender. Their arguments relate in surprising ways to the social democratic and liberal feminist contradictions about the protective regulations of women’s work in certain types of industry as opposed to gender-neutral legislations. Kéthly’s presentation was also deeply invested in the class contradiction when it came to women’s employment:
The woman should march back to the hearth . . . but only the woman of the middle class . . . But who has ever protested against the proletarian woman working since the first decade of the nineteenth century? . . . These were the women who broke the path for women’s work outside the home . . . The woman worker should thus . . . only be entitled to dirty and lowly physical labour? How can this be reconciled with the ideal in the name of which they want to exile women from the sphere of public work?Footnote 97
Kéthly explicitly called this position hypocritical. Lilla Wagner’s opening argument was similar, and no less witty:
It appears that it is first and foremost the women of the middle class who need rescuing from work. Factories seem to be without any desire to forgo the work of the woman worker, or . . . [that of] the female domestic servants, who work not for themselves, but for a wage for someone else, and whom not even the most conservative social order would want to dismiss/liberate from work.Footnote 98
Wagner is one of the few speakers who explicitly addressed the attacks on feminism and thematised the language of the backlash discourse of the time, which labelled women’s struggles for equality as ‘hysteria’. She emphasised that working class women took on the ‘doubled burden’ (sic: kettőzőtt teherviselés) out of economic necessity, and not for what the public discourse of the time called ‘hysteria’ or ‘feminism’.Footnote 99 Importantly, she re-claimed the term double burden from the backlash discourse of the inter-war period. The concept at the time was significantly more in use by those who argued against women’s employment and who sought to relieve women’s burdens by depriving them of their paid labour.Footnote 100
Of all the speakers, it was Kéthly who thematised explicitly what was implicitly there in many of the speeches: the direct correlation between the attack on women’s labour and its escalation during what she called the economic crisis.Footnote 101 She showed through a rather familiar Marxist economic-historical argument that the economic crisis could not be remedied by a return to earlier socio-economic patterns of the gendered division of labour and access to rights. What in the conservative discourse was presented as the ‘disruption of the balance between family and work’ and what Kéthly called ‘the ways in which women traditionally contributed to social and biological reproduction’ was the result of the transformation of production (in the wake of industrialisation). The transition from ‘family-based production’ to ‘social production’ was impossible to reverse, and the solution could not be to exclude certain pre-set groups from the world of labour, claimed Kéthly. Moreover, the conservative ideal of sending women back into the domestic sphere through marriage was numerically impossible: ‘Should all women who cannot find an occupation in their birth family, or feel superfluous there, get married? The 20 million surplus women in Europe is an answer in itself.’Footnote 102 Kéthly not only detected the economic crisis as a problem but also connected it to the post-war crisis of masculinity that could not be remedied through women’s return to the household. Kéthly’s counter-argument against marriage as a solution was joined by Lilla Wagner, whose expertise in family law was instrumental in showing that even if all women could get married, they would not be economically protected without the institution of widow’s pension, which was not encoded in the legislation at the time.Footnote 103
Generational Clash? Responses to the Ankét in Dolgozó Asszonyok Lapja
The dialogues that Vámbéry’s organising created among the participants were not entirely well received by the younger generation of feminists. The ankét was addressed critically by the feminist journal Dolgozó Asszonyok Lapja. One of the regular authors of the journal, Ágnes L. Osváth, advocated for a feminist agenda dictated by women, not men, but also emphasised the need for economic arguments instead of political ones. ‘This is the twelfth hour’, she wrote, meaning that it was too late to discuss ideas; immediate economic measures were necessary.Footnote 104 Osváth’s remarks signal a critical urgency that was different from the discourse on the 1929 financial crisis and the alleged crisis of the family as a value system. It was women who would be most affected, ‘leading to another financial crisis among the female part of the population’.Footnote 105 Osváth even turned around the argument of the crisis of the family, which all too often was addressed as the responsibility of women’s alleged emancipation, on the one hand, and a moral crisis brought along by modernity, on the other. To Osváth, however, the crisis of the family, similar to the crisis of masculinity explicated by Kéthly, meant that the family protected women ‘neither financially, not morally’, the latter point also referencing Vámbéry’s argument about women being forced into prostitution.Footnote 106 Vámbéry, however, was critical of Osváth’s position, whilst welcoming her feminism; their dialogue in the journal is a snapshot of the debate between a younger feminist generation raised on FE literature but less embedded in the national-liberal establishment and the consensus-seeking position of the FE leadership vis-à-vis the progressive liberal and national-liberal political mainstream that characterised the organisation throughout its history.
Women’s roles in productive processes were incorporated into Ernő Szinetár’s (1902–1996) speech, which gave a lengthy account of his views on ‘the thousand-year-long’ history of the oppression of women. Szinetár, a psychiatrist, incorporated contemporaneous scientific arguments as well as his critical analytical account of the role of religion and churches in women’s oppression. He also made claims about women’s sexuality that, despite reinforcing the passivity aspect, also signalled the presence of the early discussions around sexology in debates about socio-economic issues. In many ways, this confirms the importance of the focus on sexual education and sexual liberation in the early work of the FE and in the early writings of Mariska Gárdos, one of the founders of the working women’s movement, who was also present at the foundation of the FE. Szinetár, however, did not acknowledge this feminist prehistory to his work. In the talk, he reflected on the role of different forms of production and reproduction in the contemporaneous situation. He contrasted the male production of goods (árutermelés) to the female production of humans (embertermelés) and a surplus of vitality (életerőtöbblet).Footnote 107 Despite the value of their contribution to society, added Szinetár, ‘patriarchy has forced women into the exile of the family home’.Footnote 108
The same year, Szinetár and Sós published a short co-authored booklet – What Awaits Women in the New Middle Ages?–,Footnote 109 which attempted to address the ongoing attacks on women’s rights, following their liberation, which, however, only seemingly took place. The thirty-two-page long booklet is an imprint of the era, as the desperation in its title and the confusion in its message show. Reflecting on the crisis of modernity, it attempted to understand and battle the anti-modernist and reactionary trends of the time, often without differentiating between the two. Both Szinetár and Sós struggled with their sustained belief in women’s biological predestination to motherhood, and generally their caregiving duties. On the other hand, their anti-fascism brought them closer to the FE’s stance and the acknowledgement of women’s right to work. As they argued, the ‘new middle ages’ were brought back by language and legislation dismantling the modernised gender-regimes, inspired by Hitler’s Germany. Thus the metaphor refers to Nazism without reflecting on the cult of the Medieval Holy Roman Empire in Hitler’s political imagination or the cult of St. István in Horthy’s Hungary. Discussing fascism as the return of the Middle Ages was a rather ahistorical reference, without acknowledging the layers of difference and so building a metaphor of the alleged darkness of the era.Footnote 110
The discourses of crisis were accompanied by almost apocalyptic visions, which were not explicitly about crisis itself, but represented a fear that something even worse was to be expected, accelerated by the economic hardships and the radicalisation of political languages. Several speakers pointed to the crisis of humanity, implicitly or explicitly under the threat of fascism. Klára Andrássy described the era as an age of ‘a chaotic lack of order’, where the attempts to tackle ‘anarchy’ were not driven by ‘self-reflective logic but primarily by violence and arbitrariness’.Footnote 111 This quotation is symptomatic of Andrássy’s growing despair about the state of the country, which for a long time, she had hoped to change through the politics of a socially aware form of legitimacy. The crisis of humanity and humanist values also became a topic of impassioned concern for several speakers, including Mrs Vázsonyi and the writer Ilona Várady, as well as in the final documented speech in the FE archival fonds. This text, of uncertain authorship, declared: ‘Neither men, nor women today are considered humans’.Footnote 112
The discourse on the crisis of humanist values was intertwined with references to the Third Reich and the threat of fascism. Endre Sós connected the measures against women as the first steps towards this threat:
As much as it is true that every strike on the head first hits the Jews but then reaches the counts and priests too, then it is also true that every dictator sets off their career by confiscating women’s rights, and when he is done annihilating those, he will not miss the chance to force men to the ground too.Footnote 113
In his editorial in Reggeli Újság, Sós argued that, claims against women’s rights are ‘even more radical’ in Hungary than those of than ‘the swastika embracers’. He continued: ‘Even in Hitler’s Germany there is no comprehensive legislation and they at least tolerate women to be employed as nurses and elementary school teachers. Moreover . . . even as typists.’Footnote 114 He presented his conviction that the revival of the slogan ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (children, kitchen, church) in the Hungarian context followed Goebbels’s propaganda, which was also his claim in the pamphlet What Awaits Women in the New Middle Ages? Footnote 115 Wagner also suggested that vis-à-vis women, the Horthy-government was even more oppressive than the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, which at least either financially compensate women who ‘voluntarily’ leave the labour force, or limit the wages of unmarried male state officials.Footnote 116 She intended this as a warning and not in the least to relativise fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which transpires from this speech as well as her writings elsewhere.Footnote 117 Together with the other Jewish women in the FE circles, Vámbéry, Miskolczy-Meller and Vilma Glücklich (who died in 1927), Wagner was more than aware of the increasing antisemitism and how the world around them was shrinking.
Conclusion
The increasing threat of fascism and Hungary’s approximation of it was clearly sensed by the company of presenters at the FE’s public forum. Tragically, fascism ended the life of many of them a decade or more after they gave their witty speeches in 1934. Of the women presenting at the ankét, including the hostess and organiser, Melanie Vámbéry, no one had a future in Hungary after the Second World War. Melanie Vámbéry had to give up her position in the FE after the first ‘Jewish law’ was passed in 1938, and moved to the countryside with her daughter, Nóra Kunfi.Footnote 118 Later, both of them were deported and killed in Auschwitz. Klára Andrássy was killed by an Axis bomb in Dubrovnik. Mrs Vázsonyi committed suicide in 1949. Her biographers assume that this was a consequence of losing her son in the Holocaust. János Vázsonyi was transported to Dachau after the German invasion of Hungary in 1944 and died after the liberation of the camp in a hospital in Hannover in 1945. Anna Kéthly, after her failed attempts to stand up for democratic values in the country and spending four years in prison and house arrest, chose exile after the 1956 Revolution. The only presenters who could continue living and working in Hungary after 1945 were those joining the Communist Party, such as Sós and Szinetár. Sós continued working as a journalist and editor, and as is documented in the FE’s correspondence, he refused to offer space for the FE’s politics in the newspaper Magyar Nemzet [The Hungarian Nation] in 1946,Footnote 119 after the creation of what became the official communist women’s organisation.Footnote 120 Szinetár led one of major psychiatric wards in Budapest, and many of his methods were heavily contested later.Footnote 121
Understanding what happened to the participants during and after the war is an integral part of this story, but there is much to learn from focusing on the moment of the ankét. The debate organised by the FE (accompanied by Osváth’s commentary in Dolgozó Asszonyok Lapja) offers a tableau of progressive and moderate ideas of women’s rights and crisis discourses in the shadow of fascism. It also shows the ways in which inter-war Hungarian feminist language and ideology were differentiated and open for dialogue, and highly different from the conservative women’s rights discourse, which substantiated conservative and reactionary backlash against women’s equality.
Acknowledgements
The development of this paper was significantly shaped by the workshop ‘Political Crisis in Central Europe in the Interwar Period and Today’ in June 2022, convened by Martin Schulze-Wessel at the European Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. I am deeply grateful to Balázs Trencsényi for our many discussions on political crisis, which substantially influenced the direction of this work. I also wish to thank Alexandra Ghiț and Manca G. Renko for their valuable comments. Ongoing conversations with the wonderful team of the ERC project I currently lead, HERESSEE – The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929–2001, since the start of our work in June 2023 informs and enriches all aspects of my writing. My heartfelt thanks go to all the colleagues and friends mentioned above, as well as to the two anonymous peer reviewers, whose generous and incisive feedback greatly improved this paper. Also, endless thanks to Cody J. Inglis for offering the most insightful copy editing one could wish for. Needless to say, all remaining shortcomings are my own.
Funding statement
This research was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement MSCA-IF-EF-ST 841489, hosted by the University of Cambridge.
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