‘Good Hungarian women’ vs. ‘radicals, feminists, and Jewish intellectuals’: Rosika Schwimmer and the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club in 1918–1919

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article provides the first detailed account of the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club, a forgotten episode of Hungarian women’s activism. Organized in early 1918 by Countess Katinka Andrássy to drum up support for women’s suffrage, the Club gathered women politicians and newly mobilized aristocratic women. New evidence from Rosika Schwimmer’s papers and memoirs of other female politicians reveals Schwimmer’s behind-the-scenes role in the Club. The Club’s significance goes well beyond its role in the last suffrage campaign, before universal male and female suffrage would be granted in November 1918, by the liberal revolutionary government of Mihály Károlyi, Katinka’s husband. The testimonies shed light on the beginnings of a right-wing, nationalistic women’s movement, MANSZ that would eventually become the interwar period’s official women’s organization. The Club’s brief history illustrates Hungarian women’s mobilization at the end and in the aftermath of war and Hungary’s illiberal, nationalistic turn in politics at large.