The Women of Viharsarok: Peasant Women's Labour Activism in 1890s Hungary

Abstract

This article explores peasant women’s labour activism in 1890s Hungary, in the southeastern part of the Habsburg Empire, where repeated harvesters’ strikes and peasant uprisings took place during the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, making it the first centre of agrarian workers’ socialist organizing in Hungary. Informed by a more inclusive approach to women’s activist histories and subaltern studies, this article develops a new perspective on the periodization and geography of the international and Hungarian history of women’s social movements, to contribute to the historiographies of peasant women’s labour activism in the Eastern European countryside.