Women and Hungary: An Introduction

Agatha Schwartz and Marlene Kadar

To date, the participation of Hungarian women in various aspects of public life has not been sufficiently documented. Hungarian women's participation in both politics and the arts has been recognized, if at all, mainly in relation to the role Hungarian women fulfilled as mothers and wives and supporters of men in their fight for various causes. Or, as for the arts, their work has been measured by standards set by a largely male-dominated establishment whose interests do not necessarily serve the interests of women writers and artists. Often the contributions of women to the culture both in Hungary proper and in the Diaspora have been undervalued or misinterpreted according to masculinist norms of quality, aesthetics and reason. It is no surprise that in Hungary, as in Western Europe and North America, women's intellectual work is denigrated as trivial, dealing with topics not considered adequately "universal" to be taken seriously by the legitimate judges of taste and value. During the communist era in Hungary, publications about women's issues were scarce, and a critique of the state socialist interpretation of "the woman question" was all but forbidden. According to communist party doctrine, women were emancipated by their equal right to and acquisition of paid labour. Hungarian women, like Russian women, were portrayed as happy workers, released from the drudgery of home and hearth.

Nevertheless, there were signs of equity in the public sphere: women had the right to work and were paid the same salary for the same type of work as men. Moreover, the state provided inexpensive childcare. But the ideology that supported these otherwise progressive initiatives was conventional, unchanged and oppressive for women in the family and in other aspects of both the private and public spheres. Thus, women still tolerated oppressive laws and social controls in Hungary. They persevered the double burden of paid productive labour and unpaid "unproductive" labour in the household; gender stereotypes were reproduced in the family, in society and understandably extended into the workplace; women's bodies and reproductive rights were still in large measure controlled by the state. To make matters worse, these important topics were rarely discussed in a public forum. As a matter of fact, the National Council of Hungarian Women, the "official" women's organization during the communist era, helped the state maintain the hypocritical ideology because, as an organ of government, this Council did nothing to foster a critique of either the communist agenda for women, nor the condition of women's lives.[1]

In the years following the fall of the Iron Curtain, a heightened awareness of women's issues has emerged in Hungary. Women have organized themselves politically and initiated diverse political groups. There has been more research with a focus on inequalities and discrimination based on gender, be it in education or in society in general. More-over, Hungarian scholars are, like feminist scholars abroad, interested in uncovering women's forgotten history. Although women's studies as a degree programme is still not taught at Hungarian universities, in the past decade several initiatives at a few universities have resulted in courses in various disciplines that fall within the disciplinary category of women's studies. At Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Éva Thun, one of this volume's contributors, has been teaching a course on feminist pedagogy for several years now, and Judit Acsády, another of our contributors, initiated, while still a student, a series of lectures on "Woman and Society" in 1989. Publications on various women's and gender studies-related topics have multiplied over the past years, in the form of articles in newspapers and/or magazines; special volumes (such as Férfiuralom [Male Rule], Miklós Hadas, ed., Replika-series, Budapest, 1994); anthologies (Magyar költőnők antológiája [Hungarian Women Poets' Anthology]; Margit S. Sárdi and László Tóth, eds. Budapest, 1997); monographs (Anna Fábri, "A szép tiltott táj felé": A magyar írónők története két századforduló között, 1795-1905 [Hungarian Women Writers Between 1795 and 1905] Budapest, 1996); conference proceedings (Szerep és alkotás: Női szerepek a társadalomban és az alkotóművészetben [Women's Roles in Society and the Arts], Beáta Nagy and Margit S. Sárdi, eds., Debrecen, 1997); or translations from various languages (Kaari Utrio, Éva lányai: Az európai nő története [Eve's Daughters: A History of European Women], Budapest, 1989). Scholars outside Hungary have followed along the same lines, as can be seen from publications such as Chris Corrin's Magyar Women: Hungarian Women's Lives 1960's-1990's (London, 1994).

The present volume was compiled with the intention of contributing, from outside of Hungary, to this positive tendency in recent Hungarian scholarship. We chose the title of this volume, "Women and Hungary: Reclaiming Images and Histories," for several reasons. The first part of the title, Women and Hungary, indicates our wish to interrogate the much-connoted syntagma, "Hungarian Women." Not only is it difficult to say what constitutes "Hungarian," but what constitutes "Hungarian" or "woman" is not a fixed entity. "Women and Hungary" as opposed to "Hungarian Women" opens up the possibility of a new, creative relationship of women with this changing geographic place called Hungary. A new relationship anticipates better representation for women, and less reliance on unchanging categories of gender and nation. On the other hand, "Hungarian Women" already defines our subject in a specific, preset context, where "woman" herself is understood in a narrow way, and "Hungarian" is understood according to some unprovable (and therefore dangerous) genetic, biological or national equation.[2]

One of the objectives of gender studies is to deconstruct preconceived notions of femininity or masculinity; in our context these are the stereotypes of a "good," a "typical," the "way-it-should-be" Hungarian woman. In addition, this woman could only be determined by an enumeration of the genes which would be "Hungarian" and those which would be "other." Reclaiming Images and Histories indicates that women in relation to Hungary are both Hungarian-born, and/or born elsewhere, and they may define themselves as both Hungarian and /or at the same time something else. Women in relation to Hungary are in the process of claiming their own space, of defining their identity in their own words and not only according to the geographic boundaries of birthplace (which in relation to modern Hungary are also unfixed) and genes.

Reclaiming is the process of taking back what had once been inscribed as "Hungarian Woman," her place or rather the lack of it in the writing of history, and the images that had been created for her about herself. The articles in this volume follow up on this process of reclaiming the images of women in Hungarian history, politics, literature, and the arts. The contributors to this volume attempt to remove the layers that different ideologies have imposed upon women over long periods of time. They aim to reclaim histories and images for the purpose of understanding women's influence in Hungary and on Hungarian research anew.

The articles in this collection were written by academics and non-academics alike, both from Hungary and from the English-speaking world. They offer therefore a wide spectrum of diverse approaches to various topics. Indeed as time passes, the most cogent feminist theorizations of gender in Hungary or among Hungarian women in the Diaspora have developed among scholars in the Diaspora - in Britain, the United States, France, and Canada. Think, for example, of the work of Chris Corrin, Zsuzsa Ferge, Barbara Einhorn, to mention a few.

Part I, "Politics and History," draws a circle from the present through the past back to the present again. The articles gathered in this part concentrate on the scope of women's political participation and its history in Hungary. Chris Corrin and Éva Thun present the reader information on most recent developments in Hungarian political culture and its gender bias as well as the legacy of the communist past that in certain respects has negatively impacted - and continues to so impact - women's broader inclusion into Hungarian politics. Judit Acsády deconstructs the myth of the lack of a feminist tradition. She uncovers details about women's active political participation in Hungary in the past centuries. Moreover, Acsády includes information on various policies and traditions that in the long run have improved women's condition and women's lives in Hungary.

As mentioned above, our contributors come from very different backgrounds and therefore present their ideas in a number of distinct forms. Kenneth McRobbie, for example, gives a short introduction to the life of a remarkable Hungarian - later Hungarian-Canadian - woman, Ilona Duczynska, followed by a longer excerpt from her translated memoirs. Thus we can follow the process of the object (of the article) becoming a subject who speaks in her own voice, a process that reflects what women's studies and women's activism stand for: to find women's own voice(s) and express women's ideas about themselves, their identity, their history, and allow them to paint their own images in relation to it.

Parts II and III present essays on women in Hungarian literature and the arts. Part I treats women in Hungarian literature as authors, subjects and characters, and translators. Here we start with the past, a century ago, a period that brought about, as we have seen in Part I, not only the first organized women's movement but also an intensified literary production among women with an awareness about their new place in society. Next to a few famous names, such as Margit Kaffka - who is considered "the" lady of Hungarian modernism - other women writers emerge. Despite success and recognition in their own time, these women (Emma Ritók, Anna Szederkényi, Terka Lux, Renée Erdős) have been, according to Agatha Schwartz's research, forgotten or ignored by recent literary history.

Éva Kiss-Novák tells the stories of contemporary Hungarian women writers who talk about women's current problems in their country. They diagnose the gaps between the burdens of tradition that women carry on their shoulders consciously or unconsciously and their desire for happiness in an emancipated lifestyle; in the given circumstances, this often proves to be impossible and results in a breakdown. This group of articles allows the reader to reflect on how much emancipation has really been achieved by women within Hungary, how much the gender patterns have changed or remained the same yet disguised, in what ways women still carry the double burden of another century. Although feminist theorists in the West often speak of the double burden of women in the West, and of inequities in the public sphere and the private sphere, women in Hungary suffer a delayed reaction to these issues in their country. After 1989 unemployment soared among women, child care became less readily available, and the right to abortion, threatened. So, although there are some similarities in the experiences of women in the West and women in Hungary, there are also significant differences. Some of the more poignant differences are addressed in the essays that follow.

Marlene Kadar's article on Ilona Duczynska Polanyi's contribution as a literary translator can be read as a paradigm for women's work throughout the centuries: women as helpers of men whose names history would record but whose own names may be forgotten. The case of Ilona Duczynska does not fall strictly within this category, of course, since Duczynska's political work has been given due recognition, and in Kadar's essay, her name appears at the bottom of the translation of Attila József's poems, alongside Earle Birney's. Yet the position of the woman as "midwife", the one who helps in the process of birthing of anything assigned to the glory of men has been unduly underestimated and insufficiently documented, especially in regard to the writing of Hungarian political, cultural or intellectual history. It is particularly positive to have this article in our volume since it talks about the "midwife" in the complex process of translation, and not so much about the translator and his or her particular biography.

Part III includes two contributions, one by Katherine Gyékényesi Gatto on the Hungarian filmmaker, Ildikó Enyedi, the other by Phileen Tattersall on the Hungarian-Canadian sculptor, Dora de Pédery-Hunt. The discussion about women in the arts is always thorny: do women lack a voice because they were not there, did not have a presence, or because of a lack of adequate interest in and knowledge about their work? We tend to believe that it is for the second reason: women artists still do not generate the interest or the exposure their male counterparts enjoy. The reasons for this sad fact could be exposed at length.

The two artists discussed in this section are, however, well known in the countries where they make their homes - in Hungary and/or in Canada. Ildikó Enyedi's films have been screened at international film festivals and movie theatres around the world, and Dora de Pédery-Hunt is one of Canada's finest artists. It is important to have these two articles included in our volume for they show, particularly in the case of Enyedi, that women in the arts are about to gain fame when they treat topics that relate to women's experiences in the Hungarian context. Accordingly, the subjects reveal a feminist approach to gender issues and questions of identity, while maintaining a sense of subtle irony and humour about their work.

The editors hope that the readers will find the objectives outlined in the introduction confirmed in the contributions themselves and that this volume will be one other pebble in the construction of a path to changing the images of women in relation to Hungary and its Diaspora.


NOTES

The editors would like to thank Professor George Bisztray and the Hungarian Studies Association of Canada for their assistance with this special issue. Professors Chris Corrin, Katherine Gatto, Marlene Kadar, Éva Novák, Agatha Schwartz and Éva Thun first presented their papers at the annual meetings of HSAC. The editors would also like to thank Professor Nándor Dreisziger for his careful attention to this project. He has been a fine colleague, a discerning editor and translator, and a helpful advisor from start to finish.

1 The existence of this "paper" organization made women's grassroots activism practically illegal. Such was the case of a campaign organized by a group of university students to protest the passing of the 1974 legislation restricting abortion. The organizers of this campaign were excluded from university and many of them left the country.
2 For more information about the potential danger inherent in national labels, see Vera Ránki, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1999), especially pp. 1-24 and pp. 37-51.

 

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