Women and "the alternative public sphere": Toward a new definition of women's activism and the separate spheres in East-Central Europe

Andrea Pető,Judith Szapor

doi:10.1080/08038740410004623

Abstract

In the years following the end of the cold war in 1989, Western feminist scholars and activists expressed disappointment in the failure of the newly democratic Eastern and Central European countries to sustain mainstream women's rights movements and achieve a marked increase in women's participation within the new political parties and political life in general. The authors, historians of Hungarian women's movements with a broad East-West perspective, offer a novel explanation for this phenomenon. Following an outline of the main stages of Hungarian women's movements and women's political participation, they focus on two instances in twentieth-century Hungarian history that resulted in a rapid transition from anti-democratic regimes to liberal, parliamentary systems: the 1918 bourgeois democratic revolution and the 1990 re-introduction of free parliamentary elections. Examining these two turning points in recent Hungarian history, separated by 70 years, as case studies of women's activism, the authors propose a new, critical re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres, offering a timely if co-incidental comment on the recent debate in the Journal of Women's History.2 Research for this article had been completed by the time of the publication of the Spring 2003 issue of the Journal of Women's History, 15 (1), devoted to "Rethinking Public and Private".

Highlights

Recent studies on the history of European bourgeois women’s movements have uncovered a tightly knit, international web of institutional and personal networks, along with striking similarities in the local movements’ goals, concerns and dynamics (Rupp 1997, Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker 2004)
In keeping with the similarities with Western European women’s rights movements, Hungarian bourgeois feminists reaped the reward of their 15-year long struggle at the end of the First World War
Karolyi himself had been a declared supporter of women’s rights since before the war, and the Feminists joined the National Council that provided the mandate for his revolutionary government until parliamentary elections, scheduled for March 1919

Summary

Introduction

Recent studies on the history of European bourgeois women’s movements have uncovered a tightly knit, international web of institutional and personal networks, along with striking similarities in the local movements’ goals, concerns and dynamics (Rupp 1997, Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker 2004). This “alternative public sphere” was created in opposition to the “public sphere” of official, mainstream politics and as the expansion of a private sphere that took on positive connotations as a site of resistance and integrity with the result that at critical junctures, women activists sided with their male counterparts, forfeiting or delegating the representation of separate gender interests to them.

Results

Conclusion