Emancipated or Excluded? Women Workers and the Gender Regime in State Socialist Hungary

Abstract

In the first part, the chapter introduces major directions in Hungarian labor-history writing and labor sociology after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It shows that albeit the thesis that the working class was homogenous, united and had a revolutionary consciousness, was central to the legitimating ideology of the state socialist regime, labor history studies, which challenged this thesis, oscillated between the persecuted, tolerated or even supported research. The most well-known dissident authors at the time applied a left-wing critique of the regime, which failed to realize the workers’ state and operated with the concept of class to attack the shortcomings of “actually existed” socialism. The second part introduces an oral history project conducted in the mid-1970s, and argues that the lives of working-class women also failed to fulfill the emancipating project of socialism. However, gender was a subordinated category to class, and the revelation of existing gender biases and hierarchies failed to challenge the legitimacy of the regime.