Abstract
In this paper I argue that the Hungarian Numerus Clausus edict, introduced in 1920, was aimed at restricting not only the number of Hungarian Jews, but also the number of women in higher education. What is more, university admission policies, often applied beyond the legal framework of this law, reinforced and reproduced the male, nationalist, Christian and conservative hegemony. However, while the Numerus Clausus edict lived on in Hungarian common memory as the first step towards the later introduced anti-Jewish laws and the subsequent extermination of the majority of Hungarian Jews, the consequences of the law regarding women’s exclusion from higher education and thus from the intellectual elite remains mainly unknown to date. Moreover, since “gendered memory” still does not exist in Hungary, there is no way to remember the introduction of the Numerus Clausus law as one of the historical moments that marked women’s place and role in Hungarian society until well after the Second World War and as the symbolic moment when anti-Semitism and sexism met.
Highlights
In this paper I argue that the Hungarian Numerus Clausus edict, introduced in 1920, was aimed at restricting the number of Hungarian Jews, and the number of women in higher education
While the 1920 Numerus Clausus edict is always considered as the law that restricted the number of Hungarian Jews in higher education, the fact that it was aimed at restricting the number of women admitted to universities and generally into the intellectual elite remains mainly unknown
University admission policies were often applied beyond the legal framework of this law with the primary objective of reinforcing male, nationalist, Christian and conservative hegemony and reproducing the Christian Hungarian middle-class
Summary
Spatial metaphors like “taking the place of soldiers” or “occupying the places of their male colleagues”, utilized by those who opposed women’s admission to universities, demonstrate well how both the committee of the Budapest Faculty of Medicine and the press, which utilized the same rhetoric, considered women’s admission to higher education to be an ultimate threat that has to be eliminated Both argued that the inclusion of either women or Jews, whose number at the universities nearly equaled the number of Catholics in 1917, could only happen at the expense of Christian men and supported this argument by emphasizing the professional, moral and national inadequacy of both women and Jews for intellectual professions
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