Women's History Review

ISSN: 0961-2025 (Print) 1747-583X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwhr20

Ambiguities of emancipation: women and the

ethnic question in Hungary

Maria M. Kovàcs

To cite this article: Maria M. Kovàcs (1996) Ambiguities of emancipation: women and the ethnic
question in Hungary, Women's History Review, 5:4, 487-495

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612029600200127

Published online: 20 Dec 2006.

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 WOMEN AND THE ETHNIC QUESTION IN HUNGARY
Women’s History Review, Volume 5, Number 4, 1996

Ambiguities of Emancipation:
women and the ethnic question
in Hungary
MARIA M. KOVÁCS
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
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ABSTRACT In Hungary, women’s emancipation happened under paradoxical

circumstances, at a time when the general trend of Hungarian political

development was not toward increasing liberalism and democracy, and equality

of individuals, but precisely the opposite: toward a growing ethnic and social

fragmentation of Hungarian society. This paradoxical timing of women’s

emancipation then shaped the politics of emancipation as well as the profile of

Hungarian women’s movements in a highly ambiguous fashion. This paper

looks at some of these ambiguities by putting them in the historical context of

their appearance with special emphasis on the early, turn-of-the-century

political debates on emancipation. It was in this early phase that the

conjunction between ethnicity and gender emerged in public polemics. Second,

the paper pursues the handling of the ethnic issue by women’s organisations

after the political emancipation of women in 1920. In Hungary political

emancipation in 1920 happened concurrently with a reverse process of

de-emancipation; the same year that women received the vote educational

restrictions were imposed on women as well as on Hungary’s Jewish

population – men and women. The second critical chapter of women’s

emancipation which came after the Communist take-over in 1948/49, repeated

a similar pattern; while the Communist Government of Mátyás Rákosi opened

up unforeseen career opportunities for women, it also introduced a cruel

limitation of education and employment opportunities for whole classes of

people lumped together in what was, at the time, called ‘category “X”’.

Individuals born into families of the former ‘ruling classes’ were lumped

together in this clumsy and crude, but operative, social category which, for all

practical purposes, included all those not born into ‘working-class’, or ‘peasant’

families. The paper shows how this paradoxical concurrence of emancipation

and de-emancipation shaped the politics of emancipation as well as the profile

of Hungarian women’s movements in a highly ambiguous fashion.

487
 MARIA M. KOVÁCS

In this paper, I examine the connection between ethnic cleavage and gender
cleavage in Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century. My interest in
the subject grew out of earlier research on the history of the Hungarian
academic professions.[1] What caught my eye was the marked conjunction of
political anti-Semitism with anti-feminism in the crisis period that followed
the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. In 1920, only 2 years after
gaining national sovereignty, the Hungarian parliament passed a law that
imposed a rigorous 6% ceiling on Jewish enrolment in institutions of higher
learnings. A thriving community before the war, Hungarian Jews were now
subject to discriminatory legislation severely limiting their access to
institutions of higher learning and, in consequence, the academic
professions.
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In trying to identify the forces and motives behind the discriminatory

legislation I came across a striking phenomenon. In its first draft, the
ominous demand to establish a restrictive quota system in the professions
was directed not against Jews, but against women.[2] It was only through
the efforts of Christian Socialist pressure groups that in 1920, the
Hungarian parliament ended up restricting the professional and educational
rights of Jews, rather than, as originally intended, of women. In the final bill,
women were not even mentioned.[3]
How was this possible? What needs to be explained is not so much the
defencelessness of Hungarian Jews in the face of postwar nationalism and
anti-Semitism, but the remarkably successful fight put up by women’s
groups in the face of pending measures to revoke their rights. What makes
the story even more perplexing is that in 1919, the idea of an anti-women
quota system originated with the same Christian Socialist political forces
which, once in power, took the historic step of granting voting rights to
women. This obvious inconsistency calls for a special explanation.
In anticipation of my conclusions, I would remark that in Hungary this
may have been the first, but was certainly not the last time that a major step
in women’s emancipation – in this case, granting the vote – happened
simultaneously with a reverse process of a partial de-emancipation of some
other social group – in this case, the Jews. The second critical chapter of
women’s emancipation which came after the Communist take-over in
1948/49, repeated a similar pattern. While the Communist Government of
Mátyás Rákosi opened up unforeseen career opportunities for women, it also
introduced a cruel limitation on education and employment opportunities
for whole classes of people lumped together in what was, at the time, called
‘category “X”’. Individuals born into families of the former ‘ruling classes’
were lumped together in this clumsy and crude, but operative, social
category which, for all practical purposes, included all those not born into
‘working-class’ or ‘peasant’ families.
Hence my usage of the expression ambiguities of emancipation in the
title of this paper, which serves to draw attention to the fact that the history

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 WOMEN AND THE ETHNIC QUESTION IN HUNGARY
of women’s emancipation in Hungary presents us with a cautionary tale
about the methodological pitfalls of constructing a narrowly-focused dual
image of history in which women’s history is removed from the general
trend of evolution. In Hungary, the emancipation of women happened under
truly paradoxical circumstances, at a time when the general trend of
Hungarian political development was not toward increasing liberalism and
democracy and equality of individuals, but precisely the opposite: toward a
growing ethnic and social fragmentation of Hungarian society. This
paradoxical timing of women’s emancipation then shaped the politics of
emancipation as well as the profile of Hungarian women’s movements in a
highly ambiguous fashion. I propose in this paper to look at some of these
ambiguities by putting them in the historical context of their appearance.
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The first major political debate on the emancipation of Hungarian

women took place at the turn of the century when male suffrage was still
severely limited by both property and educational qualifications, with
enfranchised males not exceeding 8.6% of the total population. By the early
1900s, however, Hungary’s limited electoral system was coming under
increasing attack both internally, primarily from the social democratic
movement, and externally, from the Habsburg establishment, which presided
over the quasi-federal structure of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy
established with the Ausgleich of 1867. Having relatively rarely intervened
in Hungarian domestic affairs, strangely enough it was on the issue of
electoral reform that the conservative monarch, Francis Joseph, put pressure
on the Hungarian Government, urging it to broaden the franchise to larger
sections of society. The old Kaiser’s political motives had to do, as always,
with seeking to stem the tide of Hungarian nationalism and separatism.
Broadening the franchise would have meant including in the political
process important groups of the Kaiser’s tactical allies against Hungarian
nationalists, namely, on the one hand, lower-class non-Hungarian minority
populations of Hungary and on the other, a substantial social democratic
constituency.
Under such circumstances, electoral reform would obviously be an
extremely sore point in Hungarian politics. Well connected in, and to a large
extent, coming from, the circles of the political élite, the first generation of
Hungarian feminists understood their age only too well. Coming from the
metropolitan, progressive, and politically liberal middle classes and the
liberal segment of the aristocracy, feminist leaders such as Countess Teleki,
Róza Bédy Schwimmer, and Vilma Glücklich shared the aims and values of
feminists in most Western countries: a commitment to values of equality,
cultural and political emancipation. But they were also aware that they
needed to proceed cautiously if they wanted to make sure that the issue of
the female vote did not get drowned in Hungary’s perpetual ethnic
confrontation, even if, in itself, the question of the female vote was

489
 MARIA M. KOVÁCS

independent of the larger national and ethnic issues at stake in the electoral
debate – or so it seemed at first sight.
In any case, the first liberal generation of Hungarian feminists
anticipated a long and difficult road to the female vote. Rejecting the offer of
alliance by the social democrats who tried to win feminists over to their
campaign for universal suffrage, feminists opted for a more prudent
gradualist solution.[5] The early gradualism of liberal feminists was
reinforced by pragmatic considerations. In their search for powerful
potential allies, their best tactical ally seemed to be the liberal party of the
talented old liberal politician, Vilmos Vázsonyi, an advocate of urgent
electoral reform, whose unique achievement was to turn his strong liberal
municipal power base in Budapest into a national force that, to some extent,
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stood outside the painfully unproductive bipolar division of Hungarian

political forces along the lines of pro- and anti-Habsburg attitudes.
1917 was the year of the first breakthrough for Hungarian feminists.
With Vilmos Vázsonyi’s appointment as cabinet minister responsible for
developing an electoral reform bill, feminists seemed to have scored a major
success. For the first time in Hungarian history, Vázsonyi’s reform bill finally
included the long-awaited extension of electoral rights to women, even if the
female vote was to be restricted by so-called cultural qualifications. Women
with middle school education were to be enfranchised together with women
who, failing to satisfy educational requirements in the bill, had proof of
membership in some cultural or scientific association.
With hindsight it is not easy to understand why the instant uproar
upon the publication of Vázsonyi’s bill caught feminists by utter surprise,
but nonetheless it did. Part of the explanation probably has to do with the
fact that the main thrust of the opposition to the bill came not from
traditionalist forces viscerally hostile to female emancipation, but precisely
the opposite, from the modernist segment of the Christian Socialist
movement which was, in general, not at all adverse to the idea of extending
political rights to women. Their opposition, therefore, was not directed
against the principle of female suffrage as such, but only against one
particular aspect of Vázsonyi’s proposal, namely that female suffrage based
on educational qualifications would have multiplied the electoral strength of
urban minority constituencies vis-à-vis Hungary’s rural, agrarian majority.
As soon as Vázsonyi’s bill was made public, statisticians began
researching census data and came up with startling results. An astonishing
40% of the 260,000 women to be enfranchised by the bill belonged to what
were, at the time, generally considered minority populations. Some 26% of
them were of the Jewish faith, and 14% were of German mother tongue, at a
time when Jews and Germans, taken together, made up only a tenth of the
country’s population. This meant that nearly half of the female electorate to
be enfranchised under Vázsonyi’s bill would have come from minority
segments of Hungarian society.

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 WOMEN AND THE ETHNIC QUESTION IN HUNGARY
Not surprisingly, the controversy therefore came to centre on the
conjunction between ethnicity and gender. Liberal feminists had been naive
to assume that they could avoid touching ethnic sensibilities in pushing
ahead with their concern with the enfranchisement of women. It became
amply evident that in Hungary’s multiethnic society the issue of female
suffrage was no less independent of the highly sensitive ethnic and national
issues than were other areas of electoral reform. If indeed universal suffrage
would have enfranchised the masses of non-Hungarian (Slovakian and
Rumanian) agrarian populations and had wide ramifications on Hungary’s
national policies, a female suffrage restricted by educational qualifications
would also have triggered a potential change in the ethnic balance of the
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electorate by giving disproportionate advantage to other minority elements,

the Jews and the Germans. At the same time the public debate drove home
the unhappy realisation that minority groups within Hungary’s urban middle
classes were conspicuously ahead of the majority society in providing for the
formal educational qualifications of their female members. As Géza Polónyi,
an opponent of the Vázsonyi bill succinctly put it in Parliament: “The
unfortunate reality is that the higher the educational standards are set, the
more disproportionate advantage we give to the Jews”.
Stealing a page from the liberals’ book, Christian Socialists therefore
contested plans for a limited female franchise on the grounds that it was
incompatible with the univesalistic and democratic intent behind liberal
principles, because it would only deepen ethnic cleavage in Hungarian
society by sharpening, instead of lessening, the ethnic division of political
power. As Edith Farkas, chairwoman of the Christian Socialist Association of
Women argued,

Vázsonyi’s concept of a restricted franchise based on educational

qualifications is fatally flawed because it favors those noisy

mademoiselles (who, in our society, are typically not Christian) over our

true Hungarian women. We must admit that it is a shame that Christian

society has been too lazy and idle to provide better formal education for

its daughters who are, in reality, by no means less cultured but as long

as this is the case, we must not allow the noisy middle school element in

female society to put itself in the forefront. We demand that there either

be no female vote or if it is to be introduced our Christian women with

their sober mentality be included.[7]

The outline of future conflicts now began to appear in an articulate form.

Once the political split between Christian Socialist women’s groups and
liberal feminists was a fact, Christian Socialists increasingly identified their
liberal rivals with the hostile image of a “noisy, urban, dishevelled
suffragette-type” minority whose norms and concerns are alien from the
sober mentality of majority society.[8] Although in the end Vázsonyi’s bill
was not passed during the war, peace among liberal and Christian Socialist
women’s groups was not restored. Instead of subsiding the political passions

491
 MARIA M. KOVÁCS

whipped up during the debate about Vázsonyi’s bill survived into the

postwar period and set the context for the bitter confrontations that

followed.

As for female enfranchisement, its formal introduction was now only a

matter of months away. In November 1918 under the left liberal, pacifist

revolutionary government of Mihály Károlyi, Hungary seceded from the

Habsburg Empire and introduced universal suffrage, including female

suffrage, in the newly sovereign Hungarian Republic. However, after only a

few months, Károlyi’s pacifist republic collapsed under the tremendous

pressure of the military offensive by Romania and Czechoslovakia,

aggravated by the policies of hostile Entente powers. After the 5-month

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episode of Béla Kun’s Bolshevik Revolution, women were finally able to

exercise their right to vote for the first time in 1920.

The female franchise introduced in 1920 was wider than anything

imagined before. The concept of ‘cultural qualifications’ did not disappear

totally, but was reduced to a simple requirement of literacy without any

proof of formal schooling. Other than that, women came to enjoy identical

voting rights with men; i.e. all citizens of 6 years’ duration over the age of

24 and with permanent residence for at least 6 months were enfranchised.[9]

In stark contrast to earlier expectations, however, the granting of the

female franchise did not help to consolidate the achievements of

emancipation. On the contrary, in 1920, the same year that women first

received the vote, Parliament began discussing the numerus clausus that

established a system of limited enrolments in higher education. With the

universities swamped by refugee students after the separation of

Transylvania and Slovakia from the Hungarian kingdom, the crisis provided

a psychologically appropriate occasion for questioning the already

institutionalised achievement of women’s access to higher education. In the

1920s, public discussion of women’s rights centred almost exclusively

around the right of women to a university education – a right that had been

recognised in the last decade of the nineteenth century in most academic

fields except in certain kinds of legal and technical education. The bitterness

of the ensuing conflict surpassed anything known to the pioneers of

feminism at the turn of the century. Initially, the numerus clausus bill of

1920 was intended to revoke the right of women to higher education, or –

in its more moderate version – to set a ceiling on the proportion of women

among university students. The legal debate about the proposal dragged on

for a year. It was precisely upon this proposal that the erosion of the liberal

concept of equal access to education began, only to give way to the idea of a

numerus clausus, that is, a quota system with a government-imposed ceiling

on the total number of enrolments. However, as the coming months saw a

sweeping outburst of political anti-Semitism, this movement transformed the

idea of an anti-women quota system to one serving to keep Jewish students

out of the university. After one full year of debate and hearings, Parliament

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 WOMEN AND THE ETHNIC QUESTION IN HUNGARY
ended up transforming the anti-women quota system into one that would

keep Jewish students – men and women – out of higher education by

establishing an ethnic and racial quota on university admissions. In the end,

the numerus clausus law contained no explicit measures against women.

But the transformation of the anti-women bill into an anti-Semitic law

made little difference to women. By this time, in anticipation of anti-women

legislation, most universities had taken independent action and banned

female students from enrolling. Indeed, women continued to be banned from

Hungary’s largest university in Budapest for another 5 years, until 1925.

It was these 5 years which saw the birth of the second, conservative

generation of the Hungarian women’s movement. Obviously, the concerns of

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this second generation were different from the concerns of the first. With

voting rights granted and simultaneously the right of women to higher

education effectively cancelled in 1920, the concern of this generation was

first to find an appropriate political form in which they could re-establish the

earlier gains of emancipation. In order to lobby for women’s interests, this

new generation of women’s advocates allied themselves with the strongest

political force in postwar Hungary, the conservative Right. The platform of

their new organisation, called the ‘National Association of Hungarian

Women’, was explicitly anti-liberal in its philosophy and adapted its rhetoric

to the xenophobic nationalism of the 1920s. In the words of its president,

Cecile Tormay, a writer of respectable social novels, “Our organization has

nothing in common with international feminism. It is not an outgrowth of a

foreign movement ... It sprang from the Hungarian soil, it is as native as

Hungarian wheat.”[10]

Second, the new association also felt the need to redefine the social

image of the women’s movement. These women saw perfectly well that a

good deal of resentment against their prewar liberal predecessors came from

the fact that feminism had been too closely associated with minority

elements in urban society – the Germans, and even more, the Jewish

minority. Hence in 1920, after the passing of the anti-Semitic numerus

clausus law, there was no way the new women’s movement could avoid

taking sides in the Jewish question, especially in the light of the fact that the

proportion of Jewish women among female professionals and university

students was very high, over half in some fields.[11] Although initially

relatively free of anti-Semitic leanings, the leaders of the new movement

explicitly supported the anti-Semitic version of the numerus clausus bill,

and chose to adopt a consistent, if moderate, anti-Semitic posture in order to

distance the issue of women’s educational rights from the wider Jewish

problem. To quote Cecile Tormay again, “We demand the enforcing of the

numerus clausus law not in order to oppress the alien race, but in order to

promote our own race, because we think it would be insane and suicidal on

the part of the nation not to want to recruit its intelligentsia from among its

own, native race”.[12] What gives these words a particularly curious

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 MARIA M. KOVÁCS

colouring is that Tormay herself came not from a Hungarian family, but

from a family of long-time German settlers, and she had made the problems

and traditions of German minority existence in Hungary the subject of many

of her literary pieces. Her usage of the term “native” as against the “alien”

race is, to a certain extent, symptomatic of the kind of assimilationist

zealotry so common to minority intellectuals in a nationalist culture.

With these substantial ideological adjustments, the new movement was

finally able to score important successes. Following its persistent lobbying

efforts, most faculties in Hungarian universities were again reopened to

women in 1924. The stubborn opposition of the medical faculties to

readmitting women was suppressed in 1926 by the personal intervention of

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the Minister of Education, Count Klebelsberg, a close friend of Cecile

Tormay. With this, the threat of institutionalised discrimination against

women in the universities and the professional labour market was finally

ended.[13] Despite the survival of a good deal of tacit discrimination against

women, the 1930s became a period of consolidation for women’s

emancipation. The image of the educated, independent, professional woman

was finally accepted, even if some professions still remained closed to

women. On balance, however, from the 1930s, the right of women to work

in an ever-growing circle of highly qualified occupations was no longer

seriously questioned.

In this sense, the new ‘deal’ made by the second generation of women

with mainstream illiberal politics fulfilled a certain purpose. But to return to

my point about the paradoxical timing of women’s emancipation in Hungary

during a period of growing ethnic and class fragmentation, I would argue

that the same ‘deal’ to accommodate the women’s movement to illiberal

politics was, in the long run, also self-destructive. In an effort to salvage

access to academia at a time of increasing social and ethnic fragmentation

and conservative retrenchment, this new conservative generation of women’s

advocates carefully distanced itself from those gender-specific concerns of

women that were traditionally associated with the more liberal, mainstream,

Western version of feminism. Despite all their accomplishments in

consolidating educational rights, the price they had paid for political

accommodation was to reduce their movement to a dull, if successful,

single-issue association which was unable to leave behind a politically

attractive and intellectually stimulating tradition that could have served as a

source of inspiration for new generations of Hungarian women.

Notes
[1] Maria M. Kovács (1994) Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics: Hungary

from Habsburgs to Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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 WOMEN AND THE ETHNIC QUESTION IN HUNGARY
[2] Cf. Katalin Szegvári (1988) Numerus clausus rendelkezése az elleforradalmi

Magyarországon [The Numerus Clausus Counterrevolutionary Hungary]

(Budapest).
[3] For a detailed description of the history of the bill, cf. Kovács, Liberal

Professions, pp. 54-58.

[4] I have made a similar argument in an earlier paper (1994) The politics of
emancipation in Hungary, History Department Working Paper Series, 1,
pp. 81-85 (Budapest: Central European University Press).
[5] For the social democratic view, see László Rudas (1906) Polgári ës proletár
nömozgalom [Bourgeois and proletarian women’s movements], 24
Nömunkás,

April.
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[6] A Nö, 15 March 1918.

[7[ Keresztény Nö, 7, 1918.
[8] Expressions of Ida Bobula, a prominent leader of the conservative women’s
movement in the interwar period.
[9] According to the figures given by Ignác Rosics, the electoral decree of the
Friedrich government in 1920 enfranchised 74.6% of the population over the
age of 24. In 1922, new legislation initiated by the Bethlen government
introduced an educational restriction of 4 years of elementary education for
males and 6 years for females. A further restriction was introduced in the case
of females by raising the voting age to 30 years. A total of 750,000 persons
were disenfranchised by these restrictions, out of whom 550,000 were females:
Rosics (1982) Ellenforradalom és konszolidáciö [ Counterrevolution and

Consolidation ] (Budapest).
[10] Cecile Tormay, MANSZ,(May-June 1925), p. 4.
[11] In the last year of the war the proportion of Jewish women among female
medical students was 68%, and in the humanities it was 48%.
[12] Cecile Tormay, MANSZ.

[13] From the late 1920s, the proportion of women in the university student body
was a steady 10-15%.

MARIA M. KOVÁCS is permanent research fellow at the Institute of History

of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Assistant Professor of History at

the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 225 N. Mills Street, Madison, WI

53706, USA. Her main academic interest is the history of right-wing

movements in Central and Eastern Europe; her book Liberal Professions

and Illiberal Professions was published by Oxford University Press in 1994.

Since 1994 she has collaborated with the East-West research group IRSGC

at the Central European University in Budapest run by Professor Nancy

Stepan.

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