Ambiguities of emancipation: women and the ethnic question in Hungary

Abstract

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 organizations after the political emancipation of women in 1920. In Hungary political emancipation in 1920 happened concurrently with a reve...