The Rhetoric of Weaving and Healing: Women's Work in Interwar Hungary, a Failed Anti-Democratic Utopia

Abstract

The concept of Hungary as a Volksnation was reaffirmed by the Treaty of Trianon (1920) which left Hungary with the urgent need to redefine the concept of citizenship. To redefine the role of women in the new Hungary the conservative political elite revived the concept of 'cottage industry' as a possible solution for both the pressing economic needs of women to seek for employment and as a response to the concept of the independent, wage-earning 'New Woman'. The metaphor of Hungary as a sick mutilated body after 1920 opened up space for possible alternative definitions of women’s role as healers for the first generations of university graduates. The example of women doctors shows the impossibility of harmonizing the rhetoric of employment with women's duties in the family. However, due to the Great Depression the concept of 'bread-winning woman' started to shed its ennobled connotation as wider social strata of women had to start some wage-earning activity. Those female professionals who were not satisfied with the neo-conservative vision of women's employment in cottage industry - employment till marriage if it did not threaten the male-bread-winner model - nor with the alternative version offered by the social democratic and the communist party, found empowerment in the rhetoric of exceptionalism: e.g., exceptional times not only allow but require a select stratum of women to enter the labour force. The rhetoric of women doctors about their profession proves that healing and caring was the self-image appropriated by the first generation of female professionals and that it necessarily pushed them to the extreme right. Analysis of the female membership of the Hungarian Nazi Party, the Arrow Cross Party, shows an over-representation of intellectual women among its members. In this chapter I aim to map varying trends that went to form the 'rhetoric of work' in the special context of the 'Trianon trauma', pointing out the factors which shifted the definition of women's work towards radically racialized body politics.