‘Communicative’ Approaches to Women’s History in Hungary

Abstract

In Hungary, both writing women’s history and the neglect of works thus produced has had a long history. In the state-socialist era, propaganda proudly proclaimed the solution of the ‘women’s question’ and the fulfillment of women’s emancipatory project. Thus, any discussion about existing inequalities immediately became political1—all the more so because feminism was interpreted as a Western ‘bourgeois’ ideology that had no relevance for socialist societies. Women’s studies, therefore, could not be institutionalized and the discipline mostly remained on the margins of the academic world. There is no space to discuss the complex processes that have shaped women’s social and family roles since the change of regime, the reception— and mainstream rejection—of Western feminism, and the ideal(ized) gender and family models which are inseparably linked with the different political ideologies. Suffice it to say that in the Hungarian academic world institutionalization progressed slowly: the Research Center of Women’s History was, for instance, founded in 2015 at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). The collection of essays entitled Medien, Orte, Rituale is the result of a joint enterprise and extensive research project conducted by the Finno–Ugrian Institute of the University of Vienna, the Historical Institute of the Slovakian Academy, and the ELTE Research Center of Women’s History. It is to the merit of the three editors that they were able to implement this long-term collaboration among women’s historians and literary critics from the three countries by offering a unique opportunity both to established scholars and early-career researchers to “come together” and engage in fruitful dialogue, the result of which has materialized in the form of this impressive volume of collected papers.