Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of the First World War: From Rights to Revanche 9781350020498, 9781350020528, 9781350020504

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Timeline
Introduction: From Rights to Revanche
1. The Promise of Progress: Women’s Rights and Women’s Movements in Hungary, 1904–1918
2. Between the Private and the Public: The Hungarian Women’s Debating Club
3. Did Hungarian Women Have a Revolution?
4. To Regenerate the Hungarian Family and the Nation
5. The Political Is Personal: The Friendships and Fallings-Out of Emma Ritoók
6. A Perfect Storm of Citizenship
Conclusion: The Long Shadow of Cecile Tormay
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of the First World War

Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of the First World War From Rights to Revanche Judith Szapor

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Judith Szapor, 2018 Judith Szapor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Demonstration of MANSZ against the Trianon Treaty © FORTEPAN/ Fődi Gábor under Creative Commons licence All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data women’s activism in the wake of the First World War : from rights to revanche / Judith Szapor. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017021717| ISBN 9781350020498 (hb) | ISBN 9781350020504 (epdf) | ISBN 9781350020511 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism–Hungary--History–20th century. | Women–Hungary–Political activity–History–20th century. Classification: LCC HQ1610.5 .S963 2017 | DDC 305.4209439–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017021717 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2049-8 PB: 978-1-3501-1892-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2050-4 ePub: 978-1-3500-2051-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Abbreviations Timeline Introduction: From Rights to Revanche 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Promise of Progress: Women’s Rights and Women’s Movements in Hungary, 1904–1918 Between the Private and the Public: The Hungarian Women’s Debating Club Did Hungarian Women Have a Revolution? To Regenerate the Hungarian Family and the Nation The Political Is Personal: The Friendships and Fallings-Out of Emma Ritoók A Perfect Storm of Citizenship

vi viii x xi 1

15 35 55 87 115 131

Conclusion: The Long Shadow of Cecile Tormay

147

Notes Bibliography Index

159 183 201

List of Figures I.1

I.2 1.1

1.2

1.3

1.4

2.1

3.1

The reception of the city for delegates of the 1913 Suffrage Congress, with Mayor István Bárczy in the middle and Countess Teleki on the left. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Cecile Tormay and the women of MANSZ present Horthy with the national flag, 16 November 1919. Courtesy of Filmhiradók Online Rosika Schwimmer with, from left, Paula Pogány, Janka Dirnfeld, and Franciska Schwimmer in 1913. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Vilma Glücklich, the lifelong acting president of the FE with a copy of The Woman and Society. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Peasant socialists and feminists: representatives of the Balmazújváros women at the 1913 Suffrage Congress in Budapest. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations The employment service of the Association of Feminists during the war. Adél Spády is on the left; Paula Pogány is on the right. They would both join the Communist Party in December 1918. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Countess Katinka Andrássy, the wife of Count Mihály Károlyi, in the early 1920s. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Budapest streetcar, the site of class and gender transgressions at the end of the First World War, with the caption ‘From the era of streetcar misery’. Courtesy of the Hungarian National Museum, Historical Photo Department

2 2

19

20

25

29

38

57

List of Figures

3.2

4.1 6.1

6.2

Election of the Budapest Soviets in April 1919: the second woman from the left standing is Mrs József Kelen, section head in the Commissariat for Education. Courtesy of the Hungarian National Museum, Historical Photo Department Cecile Tormay in the early 1930s. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons The executive of the FE in the mid-1920s. From the left, first: Melanie Vámbéry, third: Mrs Szirmay, fifth: Vilma Glücklich, sixth: Mrs Meller. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations The verso of the same photo, with handwritten annotations that speak for themselves. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

vii

79 95

145

146

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my colleagues and friends: Bettina Bradbury, Julie Gottlieb, Steven Jobbitt, Maura Hametz, Gabriella Hauch, Veronika Helfert, Éva Kovács, Rudolf Paksa, Laila Parsons, Mary Anne Poutanen, János M. Rainer, Luke Ryder, Agatha Schwartz, Matthew Stibbe, Louise Vasvári, and Marina Vorobieva, who at various stages read and commented on the research, outlines, and draft chapters of this study, or who with their own work inspired my own. I am especially grateful to Judy Rasminsky, who read and made valuable comments on multiple chapters. My colleagues at the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, along with the students of my honours and graduate seminars, have provided a stimulating intellectual home. Throughout the seven-year gestation of this study I was assisted by a string of talented and highly organized research assistants: Alexandra Havrylyshyn, Elena Kingsbury, Emily Zheng, Taylor Dysart, Kinga Korányi, Marie-Luise Ermisch, Eden Rusnell, and Stacy Le Gallee. At one point all undergraduate or graduate students of the History Programme of McGill, their assistance ranged from finding archival sources to writing summaries, assembling annotated bibliographies, and offering help with all things Mac. Two of them, Diego Zuluaga Laguna and Ila Astren, provided enthusiastic and reliable assistance that went beyond the call of duty, at the beginning and end of the project. I thank the librarians and archivists at The Manuscripts and Archives Division of The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, The John Rylands Library of The University of Manchester, The Hungarian National Library, The Manuscript and Old Books Archive of the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, The Historical Photo Department of the Hungarian National Museum, and The Hungarian National Archives for their expert assistance. Dorottya Lipták of the Hungarian National Library and Katalin Jalsovszky, the former director of the Historical Photo Department of the Hungarian National Museum, deserve special thanks for going out of their way to locate printed and visual sources. Rhodri Mogford and Beatriz Lopez of Bloomsbury Academic proved to be the most flexible and helpful editor and editorial assistant, respectively, one could possibly have. The comments of the two anonymous reviewers for the

Acknowledgements

ix

press helped to make the manuscript more accessible to non-specialists – but I am of course solely responsible for all its remaining shortcomings. A McGill Internal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Grant awarded in 2009, an SSHRC Standard Research Grant held between 2010 and 2013, and a Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) grant for new research faculty awarded in 2014 provided invaluable financial support, from the early stages of research to the finishing touches.

Abbreviations FE

Magyarországi Feministák Egyesülete (Association of Feminists of Hungary)

ICW

International Council of Women

IWSA

International Woman Suffrage Alliance

MANSZ

Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége (National Alliance of Hungarian Women)

MNE

Magyar Nőtisztviselők Egyesülete (Hungarian Association of Women Clerks)

MNOSZ

Magyarországi Nőegyesületek Országos Szövetsége (National Alliance of Women’s Associations of Hungary)

MSZDP

Magyarországi Szociáldemokrata Párt (Social Democratic Party of Hungary)

OL

Országos Levéltár (National Archives of Hungary)

PTIL

Politikatörténeti és Szakszervezeti Levéltár (Archives of Political History and the Trade Unions)

WILPF

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

Timeline March 1848–October 1849: Liberal revolution and war of independence with Austria, defeated with the help of imperial Russia, followed by absolutist rule 1867: Compromise establishes Dual or Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, a personal union of Austria and Hungary, with joint foreign affairs and defence 1890: Founding of Social Democratic Party of Hungary 1894–1895: Laws regulating church–state relations: civil marriage, state registration of births and deaths, freedom of religion, including acceptance of Jewish religion 1896: Celebrations of Hungary’s Millennium December 1904: Founding of Association of Feminists of Hungary 1905–1906: Political crisis, introduction of universal manhood suffrage in Austria 1908: First issue of Nyugat (West), the modernist literary magazine appears 1910: Last prewar parliamentary elections, with 6.4 per cent of the population eligible to vote 1912: Yearlong demonstrations for universal suffrage, last feminist suffrage campaign of the prewar period May 1913: 7th Congress of IWSA in Budapest July 1914: Austria-Hungary declares war November 1916: Francis Joseph dies, followed by Charles IV (as king of Hungary) December 1917: Vilmos Vázsonyi submits electoral reform bill that includes women June 1918: Parliament rejects electoral reform bill 23 October 1918: National Council, formed by Károlyi Party, Bourgeois Radical Party, and Social Democratic Party, headed by Mihály Károlyi 31 October 1918: Károlyi appointed Prime Minister, released of his oath to the king 3 November 1918: Austria-Hungary signs armistice with Italy 7 November 1918: Károlyi government begins negotiations of armistice 11 November 1918: Proclamation of Charles IV de facto dissolves the Monarchy 12 November 1918: Declaration of the Republic of Austria 16 November 1918: Hungarian People’s Republic announced

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Timeline

23 November 1918: First Decree of the People’s Republic: universal suffrage for men over twenty-one and literate women over twenty-four December 1918: Romanian and Czechoslovak armies occupy Transylvania and Slovakia January 1919: National Council declares Károlyi President, Dénes Berinkey appointed prime minister; MANSZ founded February 1919: Arrest of leaders of Hungarian Party of Communists; Károlyi begins distribution of his own estate 20 March 1919: Entente military mission present Hungarian government with new temporary borders, government refuses to accept and resigns 21 March 1919: Arrested leaders of Communist Party and Social Democratic Party agree on merger, Revolutionary Governing Council announces proletarian dictatorship and Republic of Councils April 1919: Election of Workers and Soldiers’ Councils; Red Army takes up fight with Romanian and Czechoslovak armies 1 August 1919: Republic of Councils collapses, government of moderate Social Democrats formed 6 August 1919: Centre-right government formed August–October 1919: White terror in the countryside; Budapest occupied by Romanian army 16 November 1919: Admiral Miklós Horthy and National Army enters Budapest January 1920: Parliamentary elections by universal suffrage (men and literate women over twenty-four); Margit Slachta, representing the Christian National Camp elected as sole woman MP March 1920: Horthy named head of state 4 June 1920: Trianon Peace Treaty signed, depriving Hungary of two-thirds of its prewar territory and nearly 60 per cent of its population, leaving 2.3 million ethnic Hungarians beyond the new borders September 1920: numerus clausus law introduced March 1922: Electoral decree reduces the number of eligible voters, introduces open elections in most of countryside; Social Democrat Anna Kéthly elected as the sole woman MP January 1923: First issue of the conservative literary magazine Napkelet, edited by Cecile Tormay

Introduction: From Rights to Revanche

A sea change – Timeframe and its significance – Scope and scholarship – Structure and more concepts – Legacy and significance

A sea change Two events, both preserved in photos and newsreels, frame this study. They provide bookends, as it were, for Hungarian women’s activism in the wake of the First World War. The first, a reception for the delegates of the 7th Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), given by the city of Budapest and hosted by the mayor, István Bárczy (1866–1943), took place on 16 June 1913.1 Six years later saw a reception of a different kind: on 16 November 1919, the leader and members of the right-wing National Association of Hungarian Women (MANSZ) greeted Admiral Miklós Horthy (1868–1957). Hungary’s interwar head of state had led his National Army into Budapest that day, reclaiming the city after two failed revolutions.2 Both events will receive more attention in the following chapters – here they serve to mark the sea change that had taken place between them. The objective of this study is, at its most basic level, to reclaim women’s activism in the period between these two dates. How did the content, forms of, and space – both in concrete, spatial terms and metaphorically – for women’s political activism change during this seismic period? How did political changes affect women’s access to the political process – and how, if at all, did women change the rules of the political game itself? Writing women into the aftermath of the First World War inevitably means raising the question, even if it has by now become something a cliché, of whether Hungarian women had a revolution at all. By expanding this study to the entire aftermath period to include both the revolutions and the counter-revolution, both left-wing and right-wing

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Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of WWI

Figure I.1 The reception of the city for delegates of the 1913 Suffrage Congress, with Mayor István Bárczy in the middle and Countess Teleki on the left. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Figure I.2 Cecile Tormay and the women of MANSZ present Horthy with the national flag, 16 November 1919. Courtesy of Filmhiradók Online.

From Rights to Revanche

3

women, we can gauge women’s mobilization and re-mobilization in a period that drastically and repeatedly altered the conditions of political activism for women – and men. While reclaiming little-known, unknown, or forgotten instances and actors of female activism with the help of previously unused or underused sources, this study also attempts to explore the content and broader meaning of their activism. Why were some causes and interests perceived, presented, and represented as marginal and specifically female and others as crucial to the survival of the nation? How would the liberal feminist agenda, including woman’s suffrage as a whole, become marginalized and its champions lumped together with Bolsheviks? How would both liberal democrats and communists be stigmatized as conspirators bent on destroying the Hungarian family? The answers to these questions are based on the specific Hungarian context of the war’s aftermath. But their broader implications – the interplay of nationalism, left- and right-wing radicalism, anti-Semitism, postwar violence, and women’s citizenship in the era of suffrage may, albeit with important distinctions, be applied to other European countries. Another specific characteristic of the Hungarian case in the war’s aftermath, the competing models of liberal and radical socialist and their dynamic with rightwing, illiberal women’s activism can be extended longitudinally. As I suggest in the Conclusion, it offers clues to the long-term impact of the postwar period’s nationalistic, illiberal – and as I argue, highly gendered – ideology which, as I argue in the Conclusion, has penetrated Hungarian society so deeply that its legacy can be still felt almost a century later. Beyond the specific and respective content and forms of liberal, revolutionary, and counter-revolutionary female activism, this study also speaks to the larger narratives of the interwar period in Hungary. I think especially of the paradigm change from a liberal to an illiberal political framework and dominant ideology that set the tone for the entire interwar period. Not long after its appearance in Hungarian public life in 1904, liberal feminism was identified by contemporaries – supporters and detractors alike – as the embodiment of social modernization. Its detractors and competitors, from traditional conservatives to radical nationalists and anti-Semites, had associated liberal feminists and the liberal model of women’s emancipation with the decline of the traditional family. Moreover, when the feminists diagnosed and offered treatments for symptoms of urbanization and economic and social modernization, especially marked in Budapest (prostitution, venereal diseases, illegitimacy, the problem of domestics, etc.), conservatives did not hesitate to blame the diagnostician for the disease. In their view, feminists and educated, emancipated women in

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Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of WWI

general embodied the reversal of the natural order. And following the two failed revolutions and the granting of the suffrage they blamed not only feminists but women’s emancipation itself for upsetting the political and gender order. Right-wing, nationalist women activists did an enormous service to the counterrevolutionary regime by advocating an anti-emancipatory agenda, the restoration of the traditional family, and, importantly, by endorsing and legitimizing counterrevolutionary violence. The restoration – and protection from the supposedly destructive influence of liberals, socialists, Bolsheviks, and Jews, all conveniently lumped together – of an imagined and idealized Christian Hungarian family was the cornerstone of their agenda; and crucially, they tied it to the revision of Hungary’s Trianon borders as well as a racially defined, vicious anti-Semitism to which they eagerly contributed. The restoration (in contemporary parlance ‘revision’) of prewar borders went hand in hand with the restoration of social and gender order – at the expense of the liberal values of emancipation, political democracy, and equal citizenship. This combination was key to the counter-revolutionary agenda’s potency and wide popular appeal: because the crucial role and expectations placed on women in this programme of national regeneration also lent them a significant level of perceived or real agency, thus assuring their co-operation. This study also aims to contribute to the historical scholarship of Hungary’s interwar period by shedding light on its fundamentally gendered nature. The marginalization of liberal feminists and the liberal model of women’s emancipation by the Horthy-regime’s official, right-wing nationalistic women’s movement went far beyond a conflict between competing women’s movements – it represented the regime’s first line of attack against the liberal values of modern citizenship and social modernization. This is not to say that others, most of all Communists, Jews, and left-wing intellectuals, were not targeted by equal or greater force – only that liberal feminists were seen as embodying all the enemies: Jewish, left-wing, intellectual, pacifist, and internationalist. The two events cited previously framed a period that overturned and fundamentally altered every level of political and social life. Within a year after the IWSA Congress, the First World War started – and when it ended, the AustroHungarian Monarchy was defeated and dissolved. Exactly a year before the entry of Admiral Horthy into Budapest in November 1919 (and, as we will see, the date is no coincidence) the new, independent Hungary that emerged from the ruins of the Dual Monarchy was declared a People’s Republic by the head of the liberal revolutionary government, Count Mihály Károlyi (1875–1955). The dissolution of the Dual Monarchy was by then accomplished, and the end of multi-ethnic Hungary was a fait accompli – although the Treaty of Trianon with its devastating conditions

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was not signed until June 1920. This first, liberal revolution was followed by a Bolshevik-type second that in turn was overthrown; and by the time Horthy rode into the capital in November 1919, counter-revolutionary forces were in full charge of the country and the government. The changes in governments were accompanied by changes in the form of state: The People’s Republic, itself turned into the Republic of Councils, was turned back into, nominally, the Kingdom of Hungary, a country without a monarch but with Horthy as regent. The change in terms of political systems was no less fundamental. Prewar Hungary was a liberal parliamentary democracy – in addition to an intricate arrangement between the two halves of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which governed their common affairs – but with an extremely limited suffrage. From 1906 Austria had universal manhood suffrage, whereas in Hungary approximately 6 per cent of the male population had the vote. The post-revolutionary system was thus more democratic, with universal suffrage for men and women, but also much less liberal and more authoritarian. In the prewar period, the Social Democratic, liberal and peasant parties were kept outside of Parliament; by contrast, all were represented in the interwar period’s assembly. Yet in comparison, the prewar political scene was more pluralist, with political freedoms more widely observed, producing a rich associational scene, a cosmopolitan, urban culture, and a small but influential artistic and literary avant-garde, mainly centred in Budapest but with outposts in other cities and towns as well. During the long decade before the First World War, universal suffrage was the most pressing issue of political life – along with the problem of ethnic minorities – and women’s suffrage became the rallying cry of the Feminist Association of Hungary (FE) shortly after its founding in December 1904. This small but dynamic liberal women’s rights movement frequently raised a formidable voice in the prewar political arena. It also formed and broke alliances with a wide range of women’s organizations, but remained closely associated with an emerging coalition of progressive movements and organizations, the so-called ‘second reform generation’ or progressive counter-culture. All things considered, as Budapest greeted the representatives of the international suffragist movement, Hungary, saddled with the systemic problems of the Dual Monarchy as well as its own grave political and social problems, could pride itself with producing a promising line of progressive, reformist movements and initiatives, and a lively urban culture.3 By the end of 1919, the fin de siècle’s thriving political and associational scene was shattered: most members of the prewar pluralist political and cultural scene who had taken part in either or both of the two revolutions had gone into exile or withdrawn from public life. Despite the extended, although gradually

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curtailed, political rights during the interwar period, its political system was strictly authoritarian, its liberal and left-wing parties intimidated and reduced in influence, its cultural and educational scene fundamentally conservative, its leftist and avant-garde members pushed to the margins. When it came to women’s movements, the chapter heading and subtitle of this study ‘from rights to revanche’ expresses the changing of the guard from the FE, the defining women’s rights movement of the prewar period, to MANSZ, which received official status throughout the interwar period and readily supported – and to a large degree supplied – the government’s nationalistic and anti-Semitic agenda. The poles-apart difference between the former – liberal, suffragist, internationalist, and pacifist – movement and the latter – nationalistic, conservative, and anti-Semitic – organization encapsulated the shift between the two eras. It also, in many ways exemplified or foreshadowed the broader political and ideological developments in the interwar period in Hungary and the rest of East-Central and Central Europe.

Timeframe and its significance While this study sets the period between 1913 and 1922 in which to locate the main trajectories and turning points of women’s activism, the timeframe of its core is even shorter, limited to the years between the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1920. The first date marks the beginning of the last, unsuccessful suffrage campaign; the second the elections in which Hungarian women voted for the first time. Dictated by events of Hungarian political and women’s history, this chronological framework does to some degree privilege the suffrage while also resonates with milestones of European women’s history. Both of these considerations invite some clarifications. The first of these is the connection to the narrative, long-held but largely discarded by the early 1990s, that tied the granting of the suffrage to European women to the First World War.4 More recently, comparative studies have complicated this popular but simplistic narrative while pointing out the obvious: that a triumphalist narrative does not hold for large swaths of Western Europe, including France, Portugal, and, apart from short periods, Spain and Italy.5 As we will see, the Hungarian case further challenges this narrative while pointing to the need to consider the suffrage in a more nuanced manner. The second clarification concerns the formerly ‘“nearly hegemonic” model of “first wave” and “second wave”’ women’s movements, in which the First World

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War marks the end of the high period of the “first-wave” women’s movements’.6 Since the 1990s women’s historians have come to a consensus over the relative merits of the war itself in achieving the suffrage, recognizing the primacy of long-term developments and the continuities between the pre- and immediate postwar periods over false breakthroughs conveniently aligning with global events.7 Others pointed to the problem of measuring the advancement of women’s rights solely on the basis of the vote, a point which, as will be shown, is particularly salient in interpreting the Hungarian case.8 The traditional narrative of Central and East-Central Europe has long treated the First World War as a milestone in multiple ways; and it would be impossible to deny the war’s fundamental impact on all aspects of the region’s political, economic, and social history, including the redrawing of its map and establishing new states. Equally difficult to dismiss would be the fundamental importance of the war and especially its conclusion to Hungarian history. The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the end of Hungary as a multiethnic country, the two revolutions of 1918 and 1919, the counter-revolution, the January 1920 elections, the establishment of Horthy as regent in March 1920, and the consolidation of his regime by 1922 all attest to the war’s role as the single most important event in the country’s twentieth-century history. Leaving this chronological framework in place, a parallel sub-narrative, emerging in Hungarian historiography since the 1970s, has woven two other significant dates into the timeline of early-twentieth-century history. Most notably, this scholarship rediscovered the Hungarian fin de siècle, re-energized intellectual and cultural history, and took into account parties and political movements deprived representation in Parliament. In addition to a more nuanced treatment of the Social Democratic Party (MSZDP) – always a stalwart of the preceding Marxist historiography – it highlighted the important role of the democratic socialists gathered around the journal Twentieth Century (Huszadik Század) and later in the Bourgeois Radical Party in political and intellectual life – and awarded a footnote to liberal feminists as well.9 The two dates of this sub-narrative, 1906 and 1916, mark turning points in Hungarian political and intellectual history; they signalled, respectively, a break between presumed national interests and progress and the coming together of a radical right-wing, anti-Semitic nationalist rhetoric and political coalition.10 Whether the addition of the perspectives of women’s activism and gender will confirm, modify, or subvert in any way the traditional periodization – the initial ambition of women’s history when it set out to establish and legitimize the field – is a question I will address indirectly throughout this study.11 Some of the chapters

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follow the traditional timeframe quite obediently, for instance Chapter 3 on women’s activism during the two postwar revolutions, to acknowledge the significance of the revolutions and counter-revolution that fundamentally altered the framework of women’s activism. My choice of treating the suffrage campaigns and the date of the first election that featured women voters as central to the book’s narrative reflects the crucial place of the suffrage in the feminist programme. At the same time, both these events demonstrate the limitations of the suffrage in and of itself to bring about political change and the potential of universal suffrage to enforce and even legitimize authoritarian rule. This history of the three main strands – liberal feminist, conservativenationalist, and socialist – of women’s activism in Hungary in this singularly turbulent period is not only the first to offer their detailed history but also the first that considers their dynamic with one another and the broader political context.12 As such, it can furnish important modifiers to the chronology of mainstream political history. As we will see, whether wartime or postwar, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, the mobilization and re-mobilization of each of the three movements and activists at times followed in lockstep but at other times anticipated and preceded the developments in politics at large. Ultimately, integrating women’s and gender history into the Hungarian history of the years 1918 to 1920 subverts, if only in subtle ways, the prevailing narrative of Hungarian history. Perhaps more importantly, both the broader – 1913 to 1922 – and narrower – late 1917 to early 1920 – timeframes of this study confirm the temporal definition of the First World War as significantly longer – stretching from 1911 to 1923 – than previously understood.13 In another reminder of the importance of considering national histories in a comparative European perspective, the evidence of the Hungarian women’s movements and activists in this period reinforces the value of studying the ‘aftermath’ of the First World War in a comparative European context.14

Scope and scholarship Originally conceived as the first comprehensive study of right-wing women activists, this study has gradually been extended. In its final form, it encompasses the liberal feminist movement, against which the right-wing women’s movement defined itself, along with a wide range of women’s activism during the two revolutions. This has happened almost against my intention, out of what I felt was a somewhat old-fashioned but necessary and highly overdue task: to write women into the most turbulent period in twentieth-century Hungarian history.

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Almost a hundred years after these events, we should have a history of the First World War, the two revolutions in its aftermath, and the counter-revolution with women in it. This study is meant to represent a step in that direction. The book has a second, more ambitious objective: to contribute to a gendered history of Hungary’s history in the first half of the twentieth century. Writing women’s activism into the suffrage campaign of the last war year, as well as the multiple periods of electoral campaigning by, and political re-mobilization of, women will not only round out the political history of this period but provide a long-overdue examination of the history of citizenship. This is all the more important because, as I will argue, it all played out during the very period when the content and definition of Hungarian citizenship underwent a fundamental shift.15 Moreover, the changing dynamic – and ultimate changing of the guard – between the liberal and right-wing nationalistic women’s movements illustrated, and to some degree preceded, the paradigm shift between the liberal prewar and illiberal post-revolutionary periods. The special focus on right-wing women activists serves two aims: it rescues their legacy and demonstrates their significant contribution to the counterrevolutionary ideology. One could argue that the privileged position and full government support these activists enjoyed in the interwar period – and, indeed, the recent revival of their legacy in post-Communist Hungary – makes this task unnecessary. But it is a legacy that needs to be explored and its revival closely examined and questioned; for the contribution of right-wing nationalistic women was crucial to the long-term appeal of the interwar authoritarian regime. Moreover, such an exploration reveals the fundamentally gendered nature of the counter-revolutionary rhetoric and ideology and points at the ways in which it managed to penetrate Hungarian society. This brings me to two areas of historical scholarship my study has benefited from and, at the same time, is hoping to contribute to: the historiography of European women’s movements in the interwar period, in particular of rightwing and fascist women, and Hungarian historical scholarship of the interwar era, especially the right-wing movements. Both fields have shown an explosive growth recently but for very different reasons. In the first case, aside from pioneering studies on German Nazi women and the gendered aspects of the Italian Fascist regime, women’s historians have come quite reluctantly to the study of right-wing women, a reluctance that may be at least partially explained by the progressive, activist roots of women’s history.16 Be that it may, the studies accumulated in the last two decades have significantly broadened our understanding of female activism.17 They highlighted the ways right-wing

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Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of WWI

women were co-opted by authoritarian regimes and, in an era of resurgent nationalism and preoccupation with the nation’s body, supplied the maternalistic rhetoric and policies to prop up these regimes. Some of these studies have proven especially enlightening for the Hungarian case: the shifting postwar landscape of competing German women’s movements, the re-mobilization of right-wing activists,18 their role in defending the family against ‘destructive forces’ and creating the stab-in-the-back myth,19 and the ‘defection’ of particular German activists20 find especially strong echoes – significant differences in the political context aside – in post-revolutionary Hungary. Studies of right-wing women’s movements, activists, and ideas also contributed to a more nuanced and inclusive comparative European women’s history and complemented the efforts of three recent edited volumes and a handful of articles that expanded the boundaries of comparative women’s and gender history east of the border of Austria and Germany.21 One would have expected to see the growing scholarship on European right-wing, fascist, and proto-fascist women to gradually seep into the general historical scholarship on Fascism – but with some exceptions these two fields continue to develop in isolation.22 A similar disconnect lingers between the local women’s and gender historical scholarship of the East-Central European region and the publications mostly by North American or North American–trained scholars writing on the region. On the one hand, there has been a large body of valuable studies published in English.23 On the other hand, locally established, young, emerging women’s and gender historians remain, with some notable exceptions, mostly uninformed of or uninterested in the theoretical approaches and concerns of decades of Western scholarship. This attitude may be particularly characteristic of Hungarian scholars working in women’s and gender history but it is one shared by the Hungarian historical trade in general. Once again with notable exceptions, Hungarian historical scholarship today is more insular, more detached from international developments and the workshops of historical scholarship outside of the country than ever before. In turn, foreign scholars are not always readily accepted: if they overcome the challenge of the near-impenetrability of the Hungarian language, they are often at a loss to understand the inner workings of a field ruled by decades of tribal-like divisions. The study of the interwar period and in particular the Right is one of the most dynamic areas of recent Hungarian historical scholarship, as if to make up for the decades before 1989 when, with the exception of rare but still relevant and useful works,24 the Horthy regime was simplistically labelled as fascist. Represented by a

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recent volume of essays edited by the doyen of the Horthy era’s historical scholarship25 a cohort of young historians has continued to pour out biographies of leading politicians, political parties, and right-wing social and intellectual movements.26 These studies are important and long overdue and on the whole conscious of and informed by the results and theoretical approaches of relevant, broader scholarship. Linked by a shared interest in the political and intellectual history of the Hungarian Right, a few North American (born or trained) historians have successfully made inroads into this body of scholarship with their thoughtful studies.27 But what all these studies have in common is a persistent blind spot for women: a close reading of all this work would turn up no more than a handful of sentences or mentions of female politicians, activists, or organizations. If they are mentioned at all, it is invariably in – literally – footnotes and auxiliary roles. This lack of interest in the women, who, after all, were high-profile actors in the period’s rightwing elite, carries over to the gendered aspects of the interwar regime itself. One of the aims of my study is to argue for the significance of the contribution of rightwing women activists; but beyond that, I also hope that it will draw attention to the quintessentially gendered nature of the counter-revolutionary ideology and rhetoric, and encourage the study of its expression in official propaganda, art, public display, and pageantry, as well as youth and cultural movements. I am fully aware of the limitations of my study; most of all that despite my initial resolution to widen its geographical scope it remains very much Budapestcentred. This has to do with the historical actors themselves – many of whom were born outside the capital but ended up spending most of their working life there –, the centrality of the capital in terms of progressive movements and as the seat of power for most of the period, and the availability of archival sources. I am also keenly aware of the work that it leaves to be completed by others. The following is a brief and by no means complete enumeration of the scholarly studies whose findings I consulted and occasionally disagreed with. The history of Hungarian mainstream feminist movements has been relatively well covered.28 The prewar dynamic between the liberal and socialist women’s movements is no longer uncharted territory, even if the available studies are highly partisan in their interpretation.29 Young scholars are currently engaged in an exploration of the liberal feminist press and have already published some preliminary studies.30 The legal history of women’s access to university education has been thoroughly covered by two monographs, dating from 1976 and 1988,31 while a more recent monograph explored women’s education in the context of nation-building.32 The single available monograph on the history of women’s suffrage fails to distinguish between contemporary sources and interpretation

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but is useful for details of the parliamentary debate of the 1917–1918 electoral reform bill.33 Studies on fascist women by the leading Hungarian gender historian, Andrea Pető, provided inspiration with her theoretical approach, but both her subject and time period fall outside of this study.34 During Hungary’s state socialist decades a number of left-wing – Social Democratic and Communist – activist women were enshrined as martyrs or icons. But aside from a few memoirs and young adult biographies this did not translate into scholarly studies. Suffice it to say that to this day the short history of the early socialist women’s movement dating from 1947 still serves as a frequent reference.35 Not surprisingly, the 1989 regime change and the end of communism did not generate a renewed interest in left-wing women activists. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, studies are still sorely lacking on the traditionally charitable, largely religiously organized Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women’s organizations and activists, both before and after the First World War. Although the study of religious organizations and activists has been considerably reinvigorated since 1989, the rare studies on women activists either lack a scholarly approach or are informed by a partisan agenda.36 Two right-wing women activists who figure prominently in this study were also writers, thus their biographers tend to be literary historians mindful of the historical context. This makes the short literary biography of Emma Ritoók (1868–1945)37 and the essays written on Cecile Tormay (1875–1937)38 eminently useful. However, another literary scholar who has specialized in Tormay and recently published a biography as well as two volumes of essays clearly crossed the line from scholar to hagiographer.39 In addition, scholarly work on women writers in the prewar and interwar period, informed by literary as well as gender theory, has produced a number of prosopographies and biographies, including some mentioned in this study.40 This study is based on previously untapped archival and press sources. The following, partial list is meant to point out some of the highlights. One of the most important archival collections, and one of the most used by women’s historians, consists of Rosika Schwimmer’s (1877–1948) voluminous papers.41 They are among the most researched sources of women’s history. But the documents from the 1917–1919 period – perhaps because the great majority of them are in Hungarian – have somehow eluded the attention of the many historians who have consulted the collection. In their heft decidedly not up to the Schwimmer Papers but in their range and specific perspectives and occasional unexpected find, equally important are the collections of a number of left-wing, Social Democratic and Communist women activists in the Archive of the Institute of Political History. I have also found extremely useful the many volumes of newspapers, namely A Nő

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és a Társadalom, from 1914 published as A Nő, Nőmunkás, Magyar Nő, Magyar Asszony, and Nőtisztviselők Lapja, representing, respectively, the liberal feminist, socialist, Christian socialist, and right-wing nationalist movements as well as the liberal Hungarian Association of Female Clerks. With the exception of the liberal feminist newspaper (and this too mainly up until the war) these papers have scarcely been studied, yet proved to be uniquely informative to detect the shifting positions of female activists around political issues. The unpublished memoirs of Emma Ritoók and the correspondence of individual activists, as well as the frequently cited Feminist Association papers42 and other, smaller collections also at the National Archives in Budapest, round out this far from complete list of the more important documentary sources, with photo and film collections providing illustrations and visual information.

Structure and more concepts A number of required elements remain, first among them a quick tally of the study’s chapters and their specific findings. In the hope that these findings will be sufficiently explained in the text itself, instead I would like to highlight the organizing principle behind the chapters. On the whole they proceed in concentric circles, from the broad historical, political, and intellectual context through the mid-level of organizations and movements to a club straddling the public and the private, all the way to individual activists, only to come full circle and return to the broad political context in the last chapter. To a degree, this structure was dictated by the necessity of providing much-needed context to readers not familiar with the intricacies of Hungarian history in this tumultuous period and the wish to cover as many levels and forms of activism as possible. But along the way, from layers of historical context, political activism, political and organizational relations, personal acquaintances, friendships, and hostilities, a conceptual organizing principle emerged: women’s politics and activism as a moving target, constantly shifting between the public and the private, and relationships between political actors who were also personal acquaintances constantly challenged by the dichotomy of the personal and the political. Confirmation that this insight was indeed valid came from a collection edited by Mineke Bosch at a stage when I had already finished the first draft.43 In her brief but illuminating introductory essays to the correspondence between leaders of the IWSA, Bosch offered important insight into ‘the prosaics and poetics of IWSA friendships’44 to show that ‘the personal lives of the women suffrage leaders were

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completely interwoven with the feminist politics they practiced’.45 In the time period discussed in this study, even male politicians’ supposedly professional elite was shot through familial and personal connections. No wonder, then, that around the introduction of woman suffrage the rituals and gendered codes of politics for women were not yet formalized. Women activists depended on familial and personal networks by necessity, and as they were inventing and building their political and professional networks, the dichotomies of the private and the public, and the personal and the political deserve our special attention. In addition to the partial survey of the scholarship offered earlier, I would like to briefly register my debt to recent historical studies instrumental in developing concepts I have found especially illuminating for the Hungarian case. The two most important of these are the concepts of the aftermath of war and violence, especially gendered violence; this is also an area of historical scholarship to which I hope to contribute by examining the violence committed – by legitimizing it, as in the case of right-wing nationalist women – by women rather than to women.46

Legacy and significance Lastly, this study will consider, if only briefly, the long-term legacy of individual female activists and their respective agendas. What made the period under study so appealing was the fact that within a short time it introduced three models of women’s emancipation: the liberal, the radical socialist, and the conservative nationalist. Each of these had a limited run, as it were, in the aftermath of the war – but each (although perhaps with a slightly modified DNA, so to speak) would get another chance sometime during the rest the twentieth century to inform government policy and the lives of families, men, women, and children. I had already begun research for this study when the resurrection of the literary and political legacy of Cecile Tormay, the Horthy era’s leading female politician and anti-Semitic ideologue, alerted me to the need to look at the lasting effects of not only particular women activists and movements but also of the respective sets of gender and family values they advocated. In the conclusion of this study I will argue that the revival of Tormay’s literary and political legacy, however shocking, is less important than the long-lasting connection between extreme nationalism, perceived national interest, and illiberal gender values. This connection, forged in the immediate aftermath of the First World War by right-wing women activists, has outlived them by a century and constitutes their true legacy.

1

The Promise of Progress: Women’s Rights and Women’s Movements in Hungary, 1904–1918

‘Happier days’ – Precursors and pioneers – From the fringes to the mainstream: The FE from 1904 to 1914 – The rise of Christian Socialism – Socialist women’s organizations – Women’s organizations in context – The battle for suffrage – Membership and constituency – ‘Strong, loving mothers for the nation’ – For peace – Rosika Schwimmer and feminist pacifists in wartime – ‘By right of the common suffering’

‘Happier days’ Between 15 and 20 June 1913, the Seventh International Woman Suffrage Congress, the gathering of delegates of member countries of the IWSA held every other year, was hosted by the FE in Budapest.1 Founded in 1904 in Berlin, the younger, more radical sister organization of the International Council of Women – itself in existence since 1888 –, the IWSA started out with six members, women’s rights organizations representing Australia, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. At the Budapest conference, their membership, with newly admitted Belgium, China, Galicia (later Poland), Portugal, and Romania, reached twenty-seven. The official meetings for the nearly 3,000 delegates were followed by nightly receptions. For the duration of the congress, a special post and telegraph office, interurban telephone service, and public telephones were made available to the delegates. A ‘specialty of Budapest’, the telephone broadcast, a precursor of the radio, available at ‘all hotels and coffeehouses’, offered ‘a daily report of the latest news, the program of the Opera and musical performances’.2 At the formal opening of the Congress, the Hungarian minister of education greeted the delegates on behalf of his government, followed by the address

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of the President, Mrs Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947). The following day, István Bárczy, Budapest’s progressive mayor, gave a reception up on the city’s famed Fishermen’s Bastion, where delegates feasted on a spread catered by the city’s best patisserie, Gerbaud. The city of Budapest and the government each contributed considerable funds toward the costs.3 All this might have created the illusion that the country’s political establishment was firmly behind women’s political rights – but the unsuccessful suffrage campaigns of the previous years had made abundantly clear that the Hungarian political elite would not even consider giving women the vote. Yet they would not pass over the opportunity to generate a little international goodwill – after all, there could be no harm in being photographed in the company of women who, despite the occasional reform dress, were overwhelmingly upper-middle class and, in some cases, like Countess Teleki (1860–1922), the Chairman [sic!] of the ‘Hungarian Committee of Arrangements’, were even aristocrats. At its conclusion, the congress was considered the most successful of all congresses of the IWSA. It therefore validated the FE, the Hungarian liberal feminist organization whose existence was inspired by the IWSA. ‘The very fact that after Washington, Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and Stockholm, they accepted our invitation, demonstrates the esteem of our movement,’ stated the yearly report of the FE.4 Although the Feminists did all of the organizing, the National Alliance of Women’s Associations of Hungary (Magyarországi Nőegyesületek Országos Szövetsége, MNOSZ), a conservativeleaning umbrella organization, and its president, Auguszta Rosenberg (1859– 1946) were also given prominent place at the events. In retrospect, the ‘happier days’ of May 1913 had proven to be not only the high point of Hungarian liberal feminism but also the zenith of the international movement. Suffrage would eventually come to some European women – although far from all of them – in the aftermath of the First World War. But never was their movement and leadership more unified, their fight for equal rights more promising, than in the last year before the war. In less than a decade since its founding in December 1904, the FE had grown into a vibrant organization and succeeded in bringing the issues of women’s political, economic, and educational rights into the political mainstream. The FE’s well-publicized, liberal feminist programme, public rallies, and debates acted as a lightning rod, eliciting reactions from women’s organizations and male politicians of all stripes. This chapter, a brief survey of Hungarian women’s movements between 1904 and October 1918, will thus focus on the FE and its relationship with competing women’s movements, in the broader social and political context.

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Precursors and pioneers The early women’s associations signalled some trends in Hungarian society; in time they would also provide the women’s movements forming around the beginning of the twentieth century with their own ‘origin myth’.5 As elsewhere in Europe, the earliest women’s organizations in Hungary were founded to provide charitable services. The first, Jóltevő Asszonyok (literally: women doing good), was founded in 1816 from the highest echelon, by the Habsburg Archduchess Hermina (1797–1817), to support upper-class women who had fallen on hard times. This episode of early Hungarian women’s history was never part of the creation myth of either of the women’s rights movements but serves as an example of a top-down trend typical of early women’s organizations. Other, grassroots charitable organizations such as the Israelite Women’s Association of Pest,6 the National Catholic Association for the Protection of Women, and the Protestant Zsuzsanna Lorántffy Association7 were formed along denominational lines. By the late nineteenth century some of them began to provide assistance to increasing numbers of white-collar working women. The history of charitable organizations and social work in general falls outside of the framework of this study. It still should be noted, however, that a liberal, institutional social-work model was developing in step with Western Europe in the early years of the twentieth century before it was interrupted by the war.8 Hungary’s belated but rapidly developing industrialization and the corresponding rise in women’s employment at the end of the nineteenth century shaped the emerging new type of women’s organizations and created their respective, and at times overlapping, constituencies. The rise in female white-collar employment led to the largest association representing a female occupational group, the Hungarian Association of Women Clerks (Magyar Nőtisztviselők Egyesülete, MNE), founded in 1897. The MNE represented thousands of mostly young and unmarried women who helped run an emerging modern economy as typists, telephone operators, and secretaries. Other organizations, founded by upper-middle-class women to assist middle-class working women, appeared in the 1880s. The Maria-Dorothea Association (Mária-Dorothea Egyesület), established in 1885, assisted the growing numbers of schoolteachers (who by the early twentieth century represented the overwhelming majority of the field) and raised funds to build a home for retired teachers, while the Association of the Home for Cultivated Women (Művelt Nők Otthona Egyesület) provided housing for educated, working single women.9

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From the fringes to the mainstream: The FE from 1904 to 1914 Economic and social modernization was very much a part of the origin myth of the liberal feminists. A leading member and chronicler of the FE, the feminist-turnedsocialist Mrs Péter Ágoston (1878–1967) grounded the feminist association’s founding and mission in Hungary’s belated modernization: ‘The situation of Hungarian feminists was completely different from the English ones . . . . In economically and politically backward Hungary at the fin de siècle every question needed attention at once. Women clamored for political rights when they were still fighting for the right to be employed … and when workingclass women had no social protection whatsoever.’10 This explains the wideranging programme of the feminists and its representation of not only whitecollar working women but all women. The main point of their programme included universal suffrage including women, access to all schools and professions, equal employment conditions and wages, the fight against prostitution and white slavery, the rights of children born out of wedlock and unwed mothers, the protection of infants and mothers, employment and childrearing advice, fight against alcoholism and venereal diseases. To accomplish all these objectives, the association demanded women’s participation in political life and parliament.

Then Mrs Ágoston went on to cite an early episode of the suffrage fight that became a standard part of feminist lore: ‘Not only did they [the feminists] battle apathy and lack of sympathy but also nasty slander and brutal mockery. In 1907 the minister for education and religion proposed a bill to limit women’s access to university faculties, to stop the spread of feminism, the creation of “female monsters,” in “defense of the Hungarian family” ’.11 The two most prominent leaders of the FE had originally been trained in the local battles of MNE, and their experience in organizing the growing numbers of young women office workers transferred easily into the running of a national organization. Rosa Schwimmer, whose Hungarian surname, Rózsa, was turned into Rosika in the international movement and who in Hungary was always addressed by her married name, Bédy-Schwimmer, even long after her divorce and Vilma Glücklich (1872–1927) developed a distribution of labour: FE took over the larger battles, while MNE focused on the daily, bread-and-butter issues. A close co-operation and a bit of overlap between the two organizations could be also detected in their personnel and among the contributors of Journal of Female

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Clerks (Nőtisztviselők Lapja) and the feminist paper, The Woman and Society (A Nő és a Társadalom).12 Another important part of the FE’s origin myth concerned its close organizational ties to the IWSA: it was shortly after their attendance as Hungarian delegates at the International Council of Women (ICW) at the November 1904 founding of the IWSA in Berlin that the two decided to form the FE. And they went on to share its leadership for the next decade: While Schwimmer, with her exceptional oratorical and language skills, would in short order become the face of the Hungarian liberal feminist movement at home and internationally, the no less competent but self-effacing Vilma Glücklich helmed the ship at home. Despite the mercurial Schwimmer’s later reputation as difficult, to all appearances the two got along wonderfully, although they addressed one another in the formal form in correspondence all their lives. Members of the core feminist leadership were highly educated (typically with high school, some even with university, education) and came mainly from Jewish families, with some notable exceptions, such as the Countess Teleki. Other prominent members of the executive included Mrs Meller Eugénia

Figure 1.1 Rosika Schwimmer with, from left, Paula Pogány, Janka Dirnfeld, and Franciska Schwimmer in 1913. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Figure 1.2 Vilma Glücklich, the lifelong acting president of the FE with a copy of The Woman and Society. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Miskolczy (1872–1944), Szidónia Wilhelm, Melanie Vámbéry, and Mrs Oszkár Szirmay (1886–1959),13 and from a slightly younger generation Paula Pogány and Adél Spády.

The rise of Christian Socialism Rapid industrialization and an emerging Christian Socialist movement in its wake led to the rise of a Catholic women’s movement. Political Catholicism in Hungary came to life not as a reaction to socialism, but to protest the Hungarian government’s efforts to separate state and church.14 Its name notwithstanding, the movement had started off with a deficit of ‘socialism’ and, compared to Western and Central European countries, was deeply conservative in political terms.15 Similarly to other Christian Socialist movements in East-Central Europe, the anti-capitalist side of Hungarian political Catholicism added a strong dose of anti-Semitism to its ideology.16 The charitable arm of the powerful Catholic Church, the Social Mission Society (Szociális Missziótársulat), and its twin institution, the Association for the Care of the Poor (Szegénygondozó Egyesület), were founded in 1908 by the missionary sister Edith Farkas (1877–1942). These institutions were inspired by the church’s leading ideologues and their social gospel and run entirely by women: missionary sisters who belonged to the church and laywomen as external members. Farkas’s spiritual leader was Bishop Ottokár Prohászka (1857–1927), the leading, militant ideologue of the Catholic Church of the early twentieth century. The Social Mission Society played a pioneering role in the professionalization of social work in Hungary; ‘in 1911 it established the first training programs for social work, founded homes for destitute children and young girls, operated soup kitchens, spread their ideas by publishing a journal, the Bulletin (Értesítő) and organized literary evenings and social meetings’.17 These efforts would be doubled during the First World War; in the last two years of the war, specialized courses focused on assistance to war victims, such as war orphans, and the training of female family visitors.18 At this point more a semi-professional welfare service provider than a movement, what distinguished the Social Mission Society from its French, German, or Austrian counterparts was its close alliance with the Catholic Church, itself increasingly anti-liberal, and its anti-modernization gospel. By 1912 spokesmen for the Catholic Church fully articulated the argument that modernization, including women’s increasing employment, was the root cause of all social ills, most importantly the ruin of the traditional family. Prohászka represented a socially more progressive position but also an elaborate cultural anti-

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Semitism, while the Jesuit priest Béla Bangha (1880–1940) and her protégée, the educator Sarolta Geőcze (1862–1928), led a veritable crusade against the ‘Jewish press’. They also increasingly associated social and cultural modernization with Jews and viewed liberal feminists as the agents of this perceived moral erosion.19 The protection of the traditional gender order was at the heart of the popular appeal of Christian Socialism before the war. The direct association between capitalist modernization, women’s emancipation, Jewish economic and cultural influence, and the erosion of the traditional family would be established not long after the founding of the first liberal women’s rights organization.

Socialist women’s organizations Industrialization also featured prominently in the origin myth of socialist women’s organizations but from yet another angle. In Hungary, as in Germany, trade unions were the backbone of Social Democratic organization, and the chronicler of the socialist women’s movement – incidentally the same Mrs Ágoston whose account of the FE was cited earlier – carefully grounded the beginning of socialist women’s organization in the male-dominated trade unions.20 She located the turning point of the Hungarian ‘women’s movement’ in a February 1903 meeting of working women and their resolution to found an organization for freelance women and homemakers. She singled out the September 1904 founding of Association of Working Women of Hungary (Magyarországi Munkásnőegyesület), significantly preceding, if only by a few months, the December 1904 founding of the FE. (In fact, the Association was founded in 1903 but its charter was approved by the Ministry of Interior only in 1905.21) The publication date of the first issue of the Association’s journal, Woman Worker (Nőmunkás), in March 1905 is even more auspicious, having preceded the Feminist newspaper, The Woman and Society, by two years. The intent was quite obviously to ensure the primacy of Socialist women over the liberal feminists, likely explained by Mrs Ágoston’s personal history and the time of the writing of the account. Originally the president of the FE’s branch at Nagyvárad, the important Transylvanian city, Mrs Ágoston would cross over to the socialist camp in the last year of the war – and her account clearly reflects an attempt to steal the thunder of the liberal feminists. The year of her account, 1947, was a time when the independence of the Social Democrats was already threatened by the Communist Party, which was about to take total control of political life. This lent particular importance to prove the pioneering role of socialist, as opposed to bourgeois liberal, feminist women.

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In her short history of the Socialist women’s movement, the prewar period took up no more than a couple of pages, naming the early organizers and events but failing to indicate the number of organized women.22 What she also left unmentioned was the fact that throughout the prewar period the MSZDP suspended its support of the female suffrage, at least in practice, in favour of universal male suffrage – and that Socialist women resigned themselves to this policy.

Women’s organizations in context By the early twentieth century, then, three distinct streams of women’s movements emerged. (At the same time, the old-style, charitable women’s organizations had also modified their initial mission – the assistance of the elderly, the sick, and the vulnerable – partly in response to state and municipal welfare programmes, and  reframed it around the protection of young, working women from the perceived dangers of the city.) All three movements traced their roots to industrial and social modernization, and the ways in which the resulting socio-economic and cultural changes had affected women and the family – but this is where their similarities ended. Their differences, in ideology, social base, objectives, membership, and leadership, were just as important as their respective recipes to the social problems which they had defined in very different terms. All three women’s movements had strong ties to larger social and political movements but connected in different ways to their respective domestic, international, or global hierarchies. Despite their diagonally opposing ideologies, both the Socialist and Catholic women’s organizations were set up as auxiliaries of pre-existing, male-led organizations which constituted political and ideological powerhouses on national and international scales. While the liberal feminist movement was free of any domestic or international political or ideological hierarchy, it was closely tied to the international liberal women’s rights movement. Ironically, it would be the only one eventually accused of representing foreign interests, of not being sufficiently Hungarian. Also different was the respective place that the three streams of women’s movements occupied in the prewar Hungarian political structure. The privileged position of the Catholic Church was reflected in land ownership, representation in public life, Parliament, and in its influence in Hungarian society and education. In contrast, the socialists, despite their growing number and influence among the working class and even intellectuals, were barred from Parliament by an antiquated electoral system designed to keep the

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national minorities, the working class, and the peasantry out. Socialist leaders were also ambiguous about the independent organization of working women. Along with the Socialists, a small group of social scientists and intellectuals set up a debating society, the Society of Social Sciences (Társadalomtudományi Társaság, 1901), and an influential journal of sociology, the Twentieth Century (Huszadik Század, 1900) – and just before the war they founded the Bourgeois Radical Party. Based on their left-of-centre views, extra-parliamentary position, and shared ideas for democratic reform, the Social Democrats and the Bourgeois Radicals were seemingly destined to be allies with the liberal feminists – but as much as the goal of the suffrage united them, the possible ways to achieve it divided them.23 The prewar period represented the first and last time in Hungary’s modern history when, within a rich associational life, various streams of women’s movements coexisted in a peaceful manner. This is not to say that they were not keenly aware of their significant ideological differences and competing agendas or refrained from using a sharp tone when referring to their competition. Their constituencies sometimes overlapped, such as in the case of the growing numbers of women with high school and university education and in the professions. The latter were targeted by both the feminists and the Christian-conservative organizations, as were the first cohorts of university graduates whom both the socialist women activists and liberal feminists were trying to recruit.24 The competition remained civil, quelled by the understanding that they shared a public space and provided compatible services. However, already before the war divisions emerged along class lines, especially with Socialist women activists anxiously guarding their charges, working-class women, against clerical influence. Among these competing women’s movements, the FE acted as the lightning rod, at once attracting and polarizing women of the middle class, and antagonizing working-class women. Like its organizational predecessor, the MNE, the FE was a modern, secular organization and carried no denominational designation. At the same time, the Jewish lower-middle and middle class was overrepresented in the private sector and the leaders of the MNE and, to a lesser degree, the FE also came from the assimilated Jewish middle class. This reinforced the tendency of Hungarian society to identify urbanization and progressive, secular, nondenominational organizations as Jewish. The FE’s most successful attempt to transcend class boundaries and its designated role as a middle-class organization was the long-lasting relationship with a group of peasant women activists from the town of Balmazújváros,

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a hotbed of agrarian socialist activism in the early twentieth century. At first loosely connected to the Socialist Democratic Party, the peasant activists soon developed an independent programme as the MSZDP had no agrarian policy to speak of, and none that would address the semi-feudal living and working conditions of the agrarian proletariat of the barely industrialized Great Plains region in Eastern Hungary. It must have been quite a coup then for the FE to snatch them, so to speak, from the embrace of the Socialist women whose organizations were formed more or less in the same period. The FE archives preserved some of the correspondence, written by ‘the women of Balmazújváros’. Letters filled with spelling mistakes in a childish hand convey a sense of sisterly solidarity: thanking their Budapest ‘friends’ for the postcard sent from Amsterdam, the 1908 IWSA Congress, and for issues of The Woman, the feminist periodical.25 The women of Balmazújváros also sent a delegation to the 1913 Congress and in an undated programme, likely from 1913, called themselves ‘Socialist and feminist women of Balmazújváros’.26 The friendship continued throughout the war when the peasant women sent much-

Figure 1.3 Peasant socialists and feminists: representatives of the Balmazújváros women at the 1913 Suffrage Congress in Budapest. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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needed food staples to the capital, even into the 1920s. In an undated letter – the mention of war widows helps place it in the last year of the war – an FE writer asked, ‘all the kind feminist members’ for hand-me-downs to the schoolchildren of ‘our poorest working mothers’.27 The feminists managed to antagonize both ‘flanks’, the Socialist and Christian Socialist women, when they represented a radical feminist position, opposing legislation designed to limit women’s night work. Legislation was finally passed in 1911.28 Socialist women did not take kindly to the liberal feminist claim of representing all women’s interests; they often mocked liberal feminists as idle bourgeois women who would not know the first thing about working-class women. At the same time, the FE’s efforts to introduce sexual education in the schools and achieve equal rights for unwed mothers and illegitimate children raised the ire of Christian Socialist women who increasingly regarded these attempts as evidence that the forces of liberalism were out to ruin the traditional family.29

The battle for suffrage Between 1905 and 1913 the FE waged an almost incessant battle for the vote. But what complicated the Feminists’ task was the parallel fight for universal male suffrage by the Social Democrats and Bourgeois Radicals. Even if they were all – in principle – in favour of universal suffrage for men and women, their priorities and strategies divided them and set the tone for future mistrust. In the run-up to the 1906 parliamentary elections the FE launched its first campaign, using methods borrowed from the well-studied international suffrage movement. They held rallies, sent a memorandum to Parliament, quizzed each candidate by way of a questionnaire, printed postal stamps, and put up posters.30 And they seemed to get results: Of the nine MPs elected in Budapest, five pronounced themselves to be in favour of woman suffrage.31 In 1908 a delegation of the FE and the MNE presented a suffrage proposal to the Speaker of the House, Gyula Justh (1850–1917). Schwimmer met with one of the party leaders, Count Gyula Andrássy (1860–1929), who ‘responded very politely but cautiously. … He also remarked that it is not politics he wanted to protect from women but women he wanted to protect from politics’.32 The Prime Minister, Sándor Wekerle (1848–1921), refused to meet the delegation. In 1917 and 1918 the same politicians would be called on to vote on the reform bill submitted by of one of the Budapest MPs elected in 1906, the liberal Vilmos Vázsonyi (1868–1926).

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Membership and constituency A crucial point of the contemporary characterization – by its competitors – of the FE as a by-product of modernization was the claim that its organization was limited to Budapest and that its membership came overwhelmingly from the ranks of the assimilating Jewish middle class. To date, there is no study that would provide detailed data on the membership of the FE and address this important, if sensitive, question. The only historian to venture some figures put the number of members at 500 in 1907 and close to 3,000 in 1917.33 My own research in the logbooks of the FE offers more details on the provenance of the FE membership and at the very least a preliminary answer to the question of the organization’s scope. A typed summary of the membership among the Association’s documents was given as 2,947 for Budapest only, with 4,333 for the total membership in – likely – 1912.34 Yet another number was given in the FE’s logbooks of newly enrolled members, which figured what was likely the total of members in Budapest at the end of 1913 (22 December 1913) as 1,492.35 The logbook for 1917 contradicts the characterization of the FE as a movement limited to the capital as it listed the major cities with local branches, showing especially strong numbers in Szeged (260), Nagyvárad (242, where Mrs Ágoston was president) and Nyíregyháza (114).36 A long list contained additional, smaller towns with FE branches – some of which were resorts, where the FE conducted membership drives during the summer holiday season.37 As for the distribution among Budapest districts, the marked prevalence of the downtown 4th and 5th districts where the assimilated Jewish upper-middle class tended to reside did give credence to the widely held view that the FE recruited most of its members from this milieu.38 But it is also likely that the picture was different in the countryside, where the division between the Christian and Jewish intelligentsia and professionals was not – yet – as deep as in the capital. The FE membership remained remarkably stable before the war and during its first two years, until the end of 1916 when a significant new dynamic had emerged – but that is a development that, along with the renewed fight for the suffrage, will be treated in the context of the overall changes brought by the war.

‘Strong, loving mothers for the nation’ Narratives of European women during the First World War invariably begin with statistics about the dramatic increase in women’s employment. Unfortunately, we have no studies to rely on for specific numbers. Mrs Ágoston, in her short 1947

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account, cited 15 per cent of women employed in the industrial sector in 1913 and an increase to 40 per cent by 1917.39 The field’s leading Hungarian historian provided the overall percentage of women in general employment in 1920 as 31.1 per cent with the comment that during the war the percentage would have been higher.40 What we do know anecdotally, from memoirs and material in the FE archive discussed on the following pages, confirms the similarity of the Hungarian case to other European nations: women increasingly employed in previously allmale occupations. These included occupations that were performed in highly visible public space, such as tram ticket inspectors and street cleaners.41 This brief discussion of wartime changes should be prefaced by mentioning a couple of general trends. When it came to the dynamic of the three strands of women’s organizations, the war initially seemed to diminish their differences; for their ideological differences and position towards the war notwithstanding they all engaged in war relief work. By mid-1916, however, the initial national solidarity started to wear off as liberal feminists and socialist women began to challenge the official, militaristic discourse and, as much as it was possible under the wartime restrictions on free speech and assembly, agitate for peace. The year 1916 also came to mark a watershed recently identified by Hungarian historians: the articulation of a radical nationalistic, increasingly anti-Semitic rhetoric and a corresponding, deepening division in Hungarian political life and society. A cursory survey of the FE archives attests to the fervour with which the feminists threw themselves into the war effort. The Association decided to voluntarily cease publication of The Woman.42 (In 1914 the bulletin had only two more issues until it resumed publication in 1915.) Members of the executive interrupted their summer holiday and as early as July 1914 met with the president of the National Association of Industry, as well as directors of several companies owned by or under contract with the city. The companies agreed to employ women as street sweepers and ticket inspectors. The FE was invited to participate in the establishment of a ‘Central Aid Committee of Budapest’ called to life by the city’s liberal mayor, István Bárczy, in early September 1914.43 The regular FE executive meeting, held on 31 August 1914, reported the following developments: The FE set up sewing workshops to produce uniforms, established at least two day cares, and, within a month, secured employment for several hundred women.44 A letter from the FE’s Nagyvárad branch reported the employment of hundreds of previously unemployed women, mostly in households and sewing but also in shops and teaching.45 The following months testified to the FE’s undiminished energy as they extended their services in the war effort. In January 1915, at the request of

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Figure 1.4 The employment service of the Association of Feminists during the war. Adél Spády is on the left; Paula Pogány is on the right. They would both join the Communist Party in December 1918. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

the Zombor hospital (a town neighbouring Serbia) the FE sent ten ‘qualified, registered, intelligent, and if possible fluent in German’ nurses.46 A May 1918 decision by the municipal government of Budapest named the FE, along with dozens of mostly religiously based charitable organizations, a welfare organization, indicating that these activities continued throughout the war. But the handwritten note – ‘Important! Read over!’47 – at the top of the official decree, presumably from the president, seemed to indicate the alarm of Glücklich and the FE executive. As a charitable organization, the FE would have had to report on all its activities to the city. The Feminists were also wary of being lumped together with conservative, religiously based charitable women’s organizations. In the end, Glücklich found a compromise: only their committee for the protection of children and mothers would qualify as a charitable organization and thus would fall under the mandatory reporting.48 While enthusiastic engagement with the war effort was to be expected from charitable and conservative or Christian women’s organizations, given the well-

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known pacifist principles of the FE their seemingly unconditional rallying behind the troops begs the question: Was this driven by genuine enthusiasm or, alternatively, motivated by expediency, to collect political capital? If at war’s beginning the Feminists took on war relief work with gusto, it was in fact motivated by a genuine wish to help ‘women to support themselves and their family’, ‘to fill the jobs vacated by the call-ups’ and ‘to take care of the children whose mothers and adult relatives are obliged to work or are unable to work’.49 In the early days, they were not above a bit of patriotic, maternalistic rhetoric: ‘We have to do all what strong, loving, active mothers can do for their nation, stricken by war.’50 But these were not empty words: as the FE’s bulletin reported in June 1915, during the four months between December 1914 and March 1915 the FE distributed milk and breakfast buns in three schools, to 200 students daily.51

For peace The FE’s war relief work, most importantly their employment referral agency and mother and child protection service (under the able leadership of Mrs Szirmay), with close collaboration with municipal authorities continued throughout the war. But from mid-1916 on the documents also tell a different story. In June 1916 the Szeged FE branch reported that their anti-war demonstration was banned by the police chief.52 The Nagyvárad branch sent its members a circular, reminding them of the importance of keeping in mind the suffrage in these difficult times. Yet another letter in July 1916 by the executive of the Nagyvárad branch to the FE national executive spoke of ‘these trying days when the fight for our principles, the spreading of our ideas are barred at every turn, when the struggle for the political rights of women needed to be ceased almost entirely’.53 They declared their support for the executive at a time when ‘driven by brave respect for the truth … they took a stand with the result so that Hungarian women also raised their voice against the murderous disaster of humanity, the war’.54 In the same month a membership form, issued by the FE, for new members of the Hungarian Feminist Committee of Permanent Peace stated the committee’s two guiding principles: ‘(1) The resolution of all conflicts between nations by peaceful means’ and (2) One of the indispensable tools of maintaining the peace is women’s suffrage.’55 Still in 1916, a letter by the deputy police chief of Budapest to the FE granted permission for a ‘memorial rally’ on the anniversary of the women’s congress of The Hague.56 Since anti-war demonstrations were banned, the purpose of

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the rally was given as ‘Women’s contribution to the welfare of society’,57 without specifying that The Hague Congress held the year prior was organized by leaders of the IWSA from neutral countries, to keep alive solidarity among their members and advocate for peace. Two Hungarians attended, Paula Pogány from Budapest and Rosika Schwimmer, arriving from the United States.

Rosika Schwimmer and feminist pacifists in wartime Schwimmer’s wartime trajectory and international activities, as well as her continuing role in the Hungarian movement, deserve a short detour. As Second Press Secretary for the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance from 1913, the Hungarian feminist found herself in London, cut off from Hungary at the start of the war. An enemy alien, she had to resign from the post (the IWSA archives preserved her formal resignation letter – it is a model of professionalism58) and leave England. She embarked on a speaking tour in the United States and was one of the organizers of the pacifist women’s conference at The Hague in May 1915.59 In 1915 she helped organize the Ford Peace Ship, sponsored by the American industrialist to tour the neutral countries of Europe and initiate peace talks. By the time the ship arrived in Oslo the organizers were no longer on speaking terms and the money promised to the IWSA never materialized.60 Schwimmer consequently had a personal falling out with Aletta Jacobs (1854– 1929), the Dutch elder of the IWSA and her long-time friend and mentor.61 This permanently damaged her standing in the international movement but failed to break Schwimmer’s spirit – she remained among the most consistent advocates for peace for the rest of her life. Early on during the war, Schwimmer resigned from the Hungarian executive, most likely to spare the FE of an uncomfortable situation. But the unbroken and highly public support that she continued to receive from the FE while travelling the world in search of a diplomatic solution for peace sheds an entirely new light on the FE’s apparent support of the war effort. The FE leadership performed a delicate balancing act: they played a continuing role in war relief, yet did not waver from their pacifist principles. As early as 1915 they submitted a petition to Parliament calling for separate peace negotiations, supporting the leader of the parliamentary opposition, Mihály Károlyi, in his similar efforts.62 They joined the Women’s International Committee for Peace – soon renamed WILPF – and reported on its formation in January 1916.63 They followed Schwimmer’s peregrinations closely,

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supporting her at every step on the frequently censored pages of The Woman.64 The feminist paper reported on The Hague Congress in detail65 and published highlights of Schwimmer’s speech.66 They published Schwimmer’s photo on the front page of the July 1915 issue and excerpts of her speech in Budapest, where she visited briefly.67 The December 1916 issue appeared with almost more blank pages than not – and the table of contents revealed that it was Schwimmer’s editorial and a Christmas message to the troops that were erased by the censor. By 1917 the FE’s tone became more defiant. They reported on wartime regulations virtually paralysing their activities not considered war related or charitable work. ‘Our committee’s [the Peace Committee] cash was confiscated as punishment for our agitation for peace. Public lectures banned, our newspapers ruthlessly censored, our international correspondence completely stopped, our letters, telegrams, printed material sent and received both the victims of censorship, [we became] isolated from the outside world’.68 And there was no holding back in their support of Schwimmer: ‘When the soul, the initiator of women’s international peace efforts, Rosika Schwimmer returned for a short stay, she was trapped; they did not let her leave the country. Every effort, every attempt was in vain’.69

‘By right of the common suffering’ By early 1917 the FE developed a sophisticated version of the argument of common suffering and women’s work to be rewarded by the vote. In a petition addressed to the governing party, they claimed that the martyrs of the trenches did not suffer more than the women. … If the payment for loyalty, the reward for suffering is the vote: the sea of our bloody tears, our superhuman travail earned that right. But we do not demand the vote for women as a reward but in the interest of those national tasks, demanding superhuman efforts, that we can accomplish after the war only by relying on political rights.70

A similar, if not identical, argument was voiced by the Social Democratic Women’s Journal, appealing to women’s crucial role in the maintenance of any sense of normalcy, from the preservation of the lives of children to the work of women doctors and nurses.71 Social Democratic women conducted a survey in 1917. The twenty extant questionnaires, each a single page with twenty short questions, do not make a statistically meaningful sample but they still offer highly informative insight into the appalling living conditions of working

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women, without any family support and often with young children, relying on soup kitchens to feed themselves.72 The war years also brought significant gains in women’s rights, perhaps most markedly in the access to higher education.73 By the second year of the war women’s ratio among medical students reached 25 per cent. This phenomenon, however, provoked a virulent backlash and, unlike the backlash experienced against women’s wartime employment, erupted well before the end of the war. Heated debates in the press about the dynamic of women’s rights and wartime needs divided progressives who claimed there was no turning back, conservatives dead set against the phenomenon, and pragmatists who saw the phenomenon as temporary and women as useful to fill in needed positions for the duration but not once conditions returned to normal. The influx of recent female university graduates, an overwhelming majority of them from Jewish families, no doubt contributed to the significant growth of the FE’s membership: Following a steady but slow increase in the first two years of the war, between the end of 1916 and the end of 1917 membership grew from 1,956 to 3,061, and from the end of 1917 to May 1918 to 4,727.74 Progressive university students also mobilized against the war: The documents of the Galileo Circle,75 a progressive student association founded in 1908, testify to the broad issues at stake and the ebb and flow of wartime emergency measures. Young women students initiated a campaign to keep university faculties open against universities’ attempts to limit women’s enrolment in July 1917 and tried to gain the support of the conservative MNOSZ.76 Like the FE, from mid-1916 the Galileo Circle students also focused on antiwar activities. The minutes of the February 1917 executive meeting reveal that ‘the police gave permission to hold the series of lectures on peace. In addition to the series, Rosika B. Schwimmer will give a talk on “Permanent peace and … [left blank in the original]” ’.77 This relative easing up on police and censorship control of pacifist activities in the spring of 1917, however, proved only temporary. A little more than a year later, the anti-war activists and Galileo members Ilona Duczynska (1897–1978) and Tivadar Sugár (1897–1938) were caught distributing leaflets to factory workers and, after a high-profile trial, convicted and given long prison sentences.78 In the same period, from mid-1916 there was a perceptible rise in antiSemitic rhetoric.79 Its source was no doubt a combination of the above factors: the wartime shortages and falling living standards affecting the middle class and the dramatically increased enrolment of woman and Jewish university students, both perceived as a threat to the interests of the Christian middle

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class. It was further stoked by the Galician refugee wave80 that created a moral panic about the perceived ‘takeover’ of Christian Hungarian society and fuelled by scapegoating, adding new elements: the myth of the Jewish shirker and black marketer, and the Hungarian version of the ‘stab in the back’ to already established anti-Semitic stereotypes.81 Amidst a change at the top, the death of Emperor Francis Joseph (1830–1916) and the coming to the throne of Charles IV (1887–1922) at the end of 1916 and the resignation of the widely unpopular PM Count István Tisza (1861– 1918), as well as military failures, domestic shortages, popular unrest, and the news of the Russian revolutions, the Hungarian government threw a bone to its parliamentary opposition and the population. Vilmos Vázsonyi, a long-time supporter of female suffrage, was named minister for electoral reform and in December 1917 tabled an electoral reform bill. In anticipation of this event, The Woman announced on the front page of its December 1917 issue: To members of the FE and the Hungarian Feminist Committee of Permanent Peace! This Friday, December the 21st we are expecting an event of epochchanging significance for our cause: That is the day Vilmos Vázsonyi, minister of electoral reform will submit the proposed electoral bill. All of us must do everything in our power to turn this proposal into a bill and make the included active and passive suffrage for women a reality!82

If all this sounded a tad too dramatic – after all, hadn’t the liberal feminists been through this before? – there were promising signs that this time it was going to be different. In June 1917 a broad alliance of political parties both from within and outside Parliament, the Electoral Bloc, had come out in favour of universal suffrage. A surge of strikes, in some cases with women at the forefront, put pressure on the government.83 There was indication of an emerging, wider front among women’s organizations: even the conservative National Alliance of Hungarian Women’s Associations (MNOSZ) had voted in favour of limited female suffrage.84 Despite its substantially increased membership the FE still needed to forge new alliances and perhaps mobilize previously untapped constituencies. Headed by Rosika Schwimmer, home from her travels, the next fight – which turned out to be the last suffrage battle for her as well as for the FE – was going to mobilize old and new constituencies and connect the two causes Schwimmer and the FE so valiantly represented throughout the war: suffrage and peace.

2

Between the Private and the Public: The Hungarian Women’s Debating Club ‘A Wanderer who never tires’ – Peace and suffrage: The founding of the Women’s Debating Club – ‘A gathering place of socially useful intercourse’ – ‘Good Hungarian women’ versus the ‘female troops of radicals, feminists, and Jewish intellectuals’ – A gathering place or the hotbed of counter-revolution? – The legacy of the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club – Between the public and the private

‘A Wanderer who never tires’ The 25 May 1918 issue of The Woman, the bulletin of the FE reported on a suffrage rally only two weeks earlier, on 8 May.1,2 The first speaker, Rosika Schwimmer, was followed by Countess Apponyi (1867–1942) president of MNOSZ (National Alliance of Women’s Organizations of Hungary) and Countess Károlyi (1892–1985). The last two were unlikely participants, let alone speakers, at rallies organized by the FE: relations between the FE and MNOSZ were strained at best and Countess Károlyi had no previous involvement in public life. The conservative activist, and wife of Hungary’s Minister for Religion and Education, ‘explained in warm, intelligent and accessible terms the need of the state for the political activity of the housewife and mother’.3 ‘Next up was Countess Mihály Károlyi, the representative of the youngest feminist generation who was first introduced to a larger audience. She highlighted the political aspect of the women’s question […] especially from the point of view of the workingclass woman’.4 The report’s tone, in a sharp departure from previous years, was almost reverent towards both women. Under normal circumstances, no writer for the feminist bulletin would have missed the opportunity to point out the ultimate irony of Countess Apponyi speaking in the name of simple housewives and Countess Károlyi assuming the representation of ‘working-class women’.

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A second item in the same issue, titled ‘In the Name of Dissension (AntiFeminism)’, concluded an ongoing polemic with the manifesto of ‘Christian feminism’ published earlier that year in Hungarian Woman (Magyar Nő), the bulletin of the Catholic Mission Society appearing from March 1918.5 The writer pointed out in no uncertain terms the possible motifs for the usurping of their good name and the name of their newspaper, by conservative, Catholic women activists: to mislead and misinform the less-informed readers. Even the name and masthead of the new ‘Christian feminist’ paper looked deceivingly similar to the feminist bulletin. As for the agenda of this purportedly new movement, it was nothing short of a deceptive, disguised anti-feminist attack.6 While this polemic confirmed the deepening division between the progressive and right-wing nationalist political forces trend described earlier, the May 1918 suffrage rally and its unusual mix of speakers seemed to support an opposite trend. Indeed, between the summer of 1917 and the summer of 1918 a new and unprecedentedly broad coalition of women activists came together in support of woman’s suffrage. As we will see, this coalition temporarily overwrote the deeply running divisions – such as the one between liberal feminists and the Catholic activists advocating their ‘Christian feminism’. During the last year of the war and for another six months in its aftermath, the battle-hardened feminist and pacifist leader Rosika Schwimmer and the glamorous Katinka Andrássy, the young wife of Count Károlyi, organized the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club. At first, their efforts seemed to pay off: they successfully mobilized previously apolitical aristocratic women and for a few months sustained a broad coalition of women activists in the suffrage campaign. Importantly, this co-operation of women activists for the suffrage preceded and anticipated the initial broad support behind the government of Count Károlyi and the National Council. As I will argue, the history of the Club anticipated the larger political developments in other ways as well: only a couple of months into the revolution the Club became a hotbed of counter-revolutionary remobilization, yet again anticipating the trends in political life at large. The subject of this chapter is the political and personal alliance of the two women and the story of their joint creation, the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club that in many ways anticipated and encapsulated the larger developments of the last year of the war and the first year of its aftermath. Rosika Schwimmer was back in Budapest since the fall of 1916.7 After the previous two years of roaming two continents, this ‘rare, inexhaustible energy of action and wisdom’ (in the words of the editorial of the feminist newspaper – of which she

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was still editor-in-chief and frequent contributor)8 must have been frustrated with the narrowed space for activism in wartime Budapest and Hungary. Shortages of paper and financial resources reduced The Woman to a few pages every month, and wartime censorship frequently rendered even some of those pages to blank columns. Public rallies were banned and although Schwimmer’s lectures in Budapest as in the countryside were always eagerly anticipated and advertised, they were few and far in between – or, like the one scheduled for February 1917, cancelled because of coal shortages (presumably for lack of heating).9 But she was by nature an optimist. The political events since her return to Hungary – the resignation of the hated PM Tisza, a staunch opponent of woman’s suffrage, the June 1917 formation of the Electoral Bloc, Károlyi’s rise as leader of the opposition, his well-known commitment to universal suffrage, and, finally, the December 1917 electoral reform bill proposal – seemed uniquely promising and re-galvanized Schwimmer and the FE. Yet she must have also realized that this time the suffrage had to be tied to the cause of peace. Articles in The Woman and other, limited public pronouncements of the FE had already joined the two causes together since 1916 but in order to have a chance to succeed, the feminists needed to forge a broad coalition, beyond the usual, small number of allies. The vehicle to build such support for the suffrage was a women’s club, a venture that would also provide an outlet for the newly embraced feminist convictions of Countess Károlyi – and we would never know that such a club ever existed if not for the memoirs of the Countess, written many decades later. A single, albeit crucial, reference to the Club’s history in the memoirs of Countess Katinka Andrássy, Together in the Revolution, the first volume of Katinka’s memoirs, published in Hungarian in 1967 offers the only printed evidence for the Club’s existence.10 In her account of a long, extraordinary life spent with her husband, Mihály Károlyi, Katinka spared only a couple of paragraphs for the founding of the Club. In two more short sections, no more than two and a half pages altogether, she presented the origins of the Club as an idea born out of her conversion to the cause of women’s suffrage, part of her political education.11 She located this event in the early months of 1917, shortly after her meeting with the leader of the Hungarian liberal feminists, Rosika Schwimmer, who made a deep impression on her.12 She noted Schwimmer’s tremendous organizational skills (Katinka herself was notoriously disorganized) and, most of all, her charisma as a public speaker.13 ‘When she stepped on the podium, she radiated such vitality, strength, dynamism that one overlooked her unappealing looks or the fact that she was overweight, and admired her oratorical skills; everyone was taken by the passion, combatting spirit, humour, sharp wit of Rosika Schwimmer’14 – high praise indeed from Katinka, widely admired for her beauty and athleticism.

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Figure 2.1 Countess Katinka Andrássy, the wife of Count Mihály Károlyi, in the early 1920s. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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The friendship of Katinka Andrássy and Rosika Schwimmer would serve as the basis for their joint enterprise, the Club. Strange political bedfellows and unlikely friends, Schwimmer and the Károlyis entered into a lifelong political and personal alliance that lasted until the Hungarian feminist leader’s death. I will return to this alliance shortly and will also elaborate on the exact circumstances of the Club’s founding, mission, and activities. Such a detailed account has been made possible by the discovery of previously untapped documents in Rosika Schwimmer’s voluminous papers in the New York Public Library; they not only add detail to Katinka’s account but also substantially modify it by revealing the two women’s respective share in the Club’s origins and organization. The inconsistencies between the two testimonies – Katinka’s memoir and the carefully preserved documents in Schwimmer’s archival collection – do not simply indicate potential failures of memory but go to the heart of the story of the Women’s Debating Club – in short, it was designed as feminism by stealth, as it were. This makes Katinka’s account and her taking full credit for the idea of the Club an odd relapse to the original, slightly conspirational set-up. To this day the only printed evidence of the Club’s existence, Katinka’s memoirs presented a plausible story: They described how she came up with the idea for the Club to popularize women’s suffrage among her aristocratic relatives and peers. This was necessary, she explained, to extend the influence of feminist ideas beyond the ranks of the educated, Jewish women who, at least in Katinka’s view – incidentally one shared by most contemporaries – provided 99 per cent of the membership of the FE.15 As for the lack of a more elaborate account of the Club’s activities, one does not have to look far for an explanation. From October 1918 Katinka became the wife of the Prime Minister and from November, wife of the President of the new People’s Republic of Hungary; and the relentless pace of revolutionary events pushed aside much of anything else in Katinka’s life – reason enough that in her memory the Club faded out. She mentioned the Club only once more, in the dying days of the Károlyi government at the beginning of 1919.16 But while the unceremonious ending of the Club’s history in her rendering does make perfect sense, several details in the way she tells the beginning of its story raise questions. Even before she was burdened with the heavy responsibilities as presidential wife, Katinka, known for her flighty nature, lacked the sustained organizational skills the Club required. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine that Schwimmer would play second fiddle to the Countess or keep her political views to herself – which was the way Katinka characterized the role of the feminist leader. All this is to say that despite the understated role assigned to her in Katinka’s account, Schwimmer’s fingerprints, so to speak, were all over the Club, suggesting that she

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Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of WWI

played a prominent role, if only behind the scenes. The voluminous collection of documents in Schwimmer’s papers in the New York Public Library confirmed this suspicion. Entire folders of correspondence, minutes of meetings, drafts of membership rules, lists of members, exacting plans for programmes and lectures, almost all of it in Schwimmer’s own hand, show the feminist leader’s crucial role in the idea and realization of the Club. The history of the Club, by its very existence linked to the last suffrage campaign, constitutes an important part of the struggle for suffrage. But what makes this episode significant beyond the history of the suffrage is that during its brief history, the Club numbered among its members virtually every highprofile woman activist, from liberal feminists to conservatives and Christian Socialists. In the history of Hungarian women’s movements there had been no other instance of women activists of such a wide spectrum gathered in the same room, let alone working together, if only for a short period. With its setting, agenda, and members’ interactions documented in generous detail, the Club presents an unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated tableau and a unique opportunity to study the Hungarian women’s movements. Especially noteworthy is the involvement of previously apolitical aristocratic women, Katinka’s peers. At first glance, this would seem to hint at a new wave of female mobilization and as such align the Hungarian case with the general European trend at war’s end. This interpretation seems to be supported by the membership numbers of the FE in the same months, growing by leaps and bounds, as mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. But it is the participation of the same, newly mobilized aristocratic women in the emerging counter-revolution only a few months later that gives this story a very specific Hungarian flavour. The backstage involvement of Schwimmer also raises important questions. The documents preserved among her papers present undeniable evidence that the Club was in fact her idea, down to the smallest detail of its charter. Yet there are indications that her role was deliberately kept, if not necessarily clandestine, vastly underplayed, in order to make female suffrage palatable to Katinka’s aristocratic friends and relations. This confirms that liberal reforms, including the suffrage, were firmly associated with a small, urban, and overwhelmingly Jewish intelligentsia, isolated by the deep-seated anti-Semitism of Hungary’s traditional elite. That it necessitated such an elaborate ruse, that Schwimmer and her pacifist and liberal feminist agenda had to be introduced by ruse or stealth, as it were, is in itself an indication of the limited appeal of female suffrage and liberal democratic reform in Hungary. With women from opposite ends of the political spectrum joining in the last suffrage campaign, the Club’s beginnings in the last months of the war represent

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a momentous episode of Hungarian women’s history. But the Club’s subsequent months in late 1918 and early 1919, during the liberal revolution led by Katinka’s husband, Mihály Károlyi, may be more significant and will overlap with the narrative of the next two chapters. This account of the Club’s history will consider and attempt to reconcile all of the available evidence. It will argue that, rather than functioning as a neutral site where political women from all sides could engage in impassioned discussion, as Katinka Károlyi claimed, throughout its entire existence the Club functioned as a place of competing but hidden political agendas.

Peace and suffrage: The founding of the Women’s Debating Club A typewritten letter dated 16 February 1918 extended an invitation to the ‘founding general meeting of the Women’s Clubb [sic!]’.17 Signed by the ‘preparatory committee’, this invitation is only one of the numerous other documents among Rosika Schwimmer’s papers that testifies to her feverish activity in the weeks leading up to the establishment of the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club. The brief paragraph outlining the Club’s goal, ‘To become the centre of national social life and to advance relaxed social intercourse’, strikes a deliberately vague note. It is followed by a couple of caveats, highlighting the political neutrality of the Club. The Women’s Club does not represent any political or social direction. Hence it cannot serve the interests of political parties or participate in fundraising, and on the whole will restrain itself from any activity that could be described as a demonstration of any kind. The Women’s Club then is not merely the gathering place of society but serves to advance knowledge and socially useful intercourse.18

Even the severe wartime emergency measures that restricted associational life fail to explain these self-imposed limitations. And what of the old-fashioned, almost archaic, choice of words? Another document, dated three weeks later, offers a clue to the possible reason to steer clear of even the appearance of political affiliation. A list – in Schwimmer’s hand no less – contains all forty-three members of the Club’s executive.19 Among them we find the leaders of virtually every Hungarian women’s movement, from liberal to conservative, as well as the wives of leading establishment politicians and aristocratic women from the oldest Hungarian noble families. Apart from Schwimmer – as always in the Hungarian context, mentioned by her married name, as Bédy-Schwimmer – other liberal feminist leaders included Vilma Glücklich, Mrs Oszkár Szirmay, and Melanie Vámbéry,

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with the last two emerging as prominent leaders of the FE during the war. Mária Gosztonyi represented the younger generation of feminists and, against stereotype, came from old noble stock. Valéria Dienes, with a doctorate in philosophy and mathematics, and Sarolta Steinberger, the first female physician who graduated from Budapest University – whom we already encountered in the previous chapter – were card-carrying feminists but also representatives of the new professional women. Margit Slachta and Edith Farkas, also mentioned in the previous chapter, were leaders of the Social Mission Society, the semisecular order of professional social workers of the Catholic Church. Sarolta Geőcze, another leader of the Christian Socialist women’s movement was listed near the top of the list as general secretary of the Club. Mrs Albert Apponyi and Auguszta Rosenberg were the president and vice-president, respectively, of MNOSZ, while Mrs Perczel Flóra Kozma, a well-known conservative activist, was listed as one of four presidents, along with Mrs Károlyi and two aristocratic women, the last two previously not involved in politics. With only a few exceptions (such as the British wife of the wealthy Jewish patron of modern literature, Baron Hatvany, a personal friend of the Károlyis) the rest of the list could be divided into two partially overlapping cohorts: wives of politicians, including MPs and government ministers; and female members of prominent aristocratic families, with a generous sprinkling of Katinka’s relatives. By all accounts, this was an unprecedented constellation and for that reason alone, the history of the Club should be of great interest not only to women’s historians but also to Hungarian political historians – not least because of the many ‘historical’ names belonging to members of the traditional political elite. And yet, the Club has never been as much as mentioned in any historical account. What brought these women together from such diverse socio-economic and political backgrounds? The last time Hungarian women’s movements had found common ground was, briefly, in 1913 – but even the broad spectrum of political views assembled in the organizing committee of the IWSA’s Budapest Congress lacked the diversity of the Club’s executive. Back then MNOSZ, the conservative member organizations could agree on very little with the liberal feminists. Their common demands, of legal protection for unmarried mothers and their children and the condemnation of prostitution, as well as vague slogans about representing the interests of working women rarely translated into joint action. The suffrage campaigns of the prewar years, doggedly pursued by the FE, only highlighted the political and ideological divisions between them. For instance, in 1912, during the last sustained suffrage campaign of the prewar era conservative

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women insisted on strict social, economic, and educational limitations to the vote, to exclude the ethnic minorities.20 The aristocratic women listed on Schwimmer’s sheet, high-profile society ladies who had never before been involved in any women’s organization, must have insisted on a certain level of discretion. But while it may explain the extremely cautious, apolitical wording of the Club’s mission, their appearance on the executive of the Women’s Club still indicates a degree of political mobilization. A more important question is what prompted this mobilization and what possibly could have led – after the acrimonious, public spats of the prewar years – to co-operation among liberal feminist leaders, leaders of conservative, old-style, charitable organizations, heads of the militant, religiously based Christian Socialist women’s movements, and newly mobilized aristocratic women. And what are we to make of Katinka’s account, according to which she was the Club’s sole founder who singlehandedly came up with its idea, recruited the members, and organized the activities? Katinka’s version omits Schwimmer’s role entirely or, rather, while mentioning her as an occasional guest in the Club, keeps mum about her actual role. How does this help us to interpret the folders full of Club-related material in the Rosika Schwimmer papers that clearly indicate the decisive measure of the Hungarian feminist leader’s involvement? It is the inconsistencies between the two accounts – the one told by the documents of Schwimmer, the other told by Katinka in her memoirs – that in a way reveal the Club’s original mission. Rather than a spontaneous political awakening, the involvement of aristocratic women was more likely the result of a strategy carefully designed by Schwimmer and Mrs Károlyi. It seems very likely that in its initial design the Club was to serve as both a female vanguard and an auxiliary to help usher in universal suffrage for men and women and to provide support for Károlyi’s efforts to end the war. Two parallel developments taking place from mid-1917 and throughout the first half of 1918 elucidate the birth of the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club and the respective, complementary roles of Katinka and Schwimmer in its founding: the intensifying efforts of Mihály Károlyi, leader of the parliamentary opposition, to negotiate a separate peace for Hungary, and the emergence of the Electoral Bloc, the left-liberal coalition already mentioned in the previous chapter. The alliance of Rosika Schwimmer with the Károlyis furnished the linchpin for the establishment and original mission of the Women’s Club. Mihály Károlyi’s biographies place the meeting of the rebel aristocrat and future leader of the liberal revolution with the feminist leader in the summer of 1917.21 Károlyi was the scion of one of Hungary’s longest-standing aristocratic families and heir to one of the largest landholdings in the country. Shortly

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before the outbreak of the war he gave up his bachelor ways and married Katinka Andrássy who came from an even more fabled Hungarian aristocratic family. Her grandfather, Gyula Andrássy, was the first prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after the 1867 Ausgleich, and her uncle was the last minister for foreign affairs of Austria-Hungary. (The latter, Count Gyula Andrássy Jr, figured in the previous chapter as the house leader who received the FE delegation in 1912 – and gallantly dismissed them.) Their wedding united two of Hungary’s largest fortunes and most distinguished noble dynasties.22 But the couple soon began to defy their respective families’ expectations. Károlyi, a late bloomer, surprised everyone by turning into a serious politician. As founder and leader of the opposition Independence and 1848 Party, he worked towards peace almost from the beginning of the war. From 1917 on he cultivated ties with the extra-parliamentary opposition and became an advocate of democratic reforms.23 Katinka’s growing interest in politics and the couple’s open houses attended by liberal intellectuals, artists, and writers mortified her relatives.24 She described the encounter with Schwimmer as the turning point in her own emancipation and political education.25 Her eventual engagement with and occasional public speaking on behalf of the suffrage movement clearly overstepped the boundaries set for women of her class ‘whose members did not consider feminism a socially acceptable position: in their eyes feminism was a synonym for free love and the demand of suffrage ridiculous as it would strip women of their charm’.26 Károlyi hoped to take advantage of Schwimmer’s extensive connections in Western Europe and the United States – developed during the war – to advance his own behind-the-scenes openings towards peace negotiations with the Allies. Schwimmer’s uncompromisingly pacifist position from the first days of the war may have damaged her position in the international movement and certainly earned her no friends in the conservative Hungarian public. But it helped her make connections in government circles of Entente and neutral countries during the war.27 These were the connections, possibly overestimated by both herself and Károlyi, that the latter was hoping to exploit when he decided to put out feelers for his own peace initiative. From late 1917 the two became close political allies. This was not merely an alliance of convenience but a friendship based on mutually held values, dear to them both.28 From as early as June 1917, alone among parliamentary party leaders, Károlyi publicly endorsed women’s suffrage, and even attended the FE’s general meeting that year.29 This was a change clearly due to his young wife, herself a recent convert to liberal feminism. The liberal daily Pesti Napló described the Count’s appearance at the FE’s meeting where he was welcomed by ‘tremendous clapping

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and cheering’.30 ‘I came here,’ the newspaper quoted Károlyi, ‘with the certainty that I will advance the feminist movement while at the same time serve the cause to which I would like to devote my life, on which I vouch my entire personal and political reputation, and which I can sum up in these words: the struggle for the new, independent, democratic Hungary!’.31 By mid-1917 then, the feminist leader and the leader of the parliamentary opposition allied around the demands of peace and electoral reform, tied to the vision of a new, democratic Hungary. The Electoral Bloc that was formed in June 1917 was not the only political force calling for reform: the new Emperor, Charles IV, himself came to the view that the time was ripe for a degree of electoral reform. The optimism of the FE seemed justified by not only the departure of Tisza but also the willingness of a growing number of deputies to pronounce in favour of including women in the suffrage. The new government entered into negotiations with the Electoral Bloc and named the liberal politician Vilmos Vázsonyi, a long-time proponent of universal suffrage, minister responsible for electoral reform. He submitted his proposal, containing universal male and female suffrage in December 1917 to an ad hoc parliamentary committee.32 With such a clear view of the prize, the FE devoted singular attention to this issue between December 1917 and July 1918 when the House voted on the proposal.33 A list in Schwimmer’s hand – she was a notorious list maker – written on FE stationary counted twenty-eight members of the committee of forty-eight willing to consider female suffrage – granted, with some limitations by income and education.34 Reviving their prewar practice, the feminists sent delegations to members of the committee and also petitioned them individually.35 The organization also launched a countrywide effort to mobilize the membership, which skyrocketed during the last year of the war, especially in small towns previously untapped by the feminist movement.36 It is not possible to determine the dynamic between the growth of their ranks and their renewed electoral campaign – which came first and was there a correlation between the two? But the last campaign provides an opportunity to take a look at the arguments advanced, establishing the relationship of the suffrage and the war. The argument of wartime sacrifice and contribution to the nation’s economic life, well known from other European women’s rights movements, was very much in evidence.37 A letter by the executive of the Association of Feminists on 19 June 1918 called on members ‘to enter the fray for the victory of our cause with all the ammunition of propaganda, with the whole armament of convincing arguments. We should hold a demonstration in each of the 63 counties. In Budapest as in the countryside, we should distribute a hundred thousand flyers and posters’.38 But they also returned to the already

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well-rehearsed wartime argument that it is not a reward they are asking and that women’s political participation would be in everyone’s best interest.39 Less than three months after the first meeting of the Women’s Debating Club, the fight for the suffrage was all over. By June 1918, the parliamentary committee dropped women from the electoral reform proposal. On 1 and 2 June, newspapers reported on the decision with various measures of regret. ‘They voted against women’s suffrage,’ went the surprisingly measured headline of Magyarország, the daily representing Károlyi’s views.40 ‘The reactionary forces had a field day,’ announced the left-liberal Világ,41 and the moderate conservative Magyar Hírlap announced, perhaps with a touch of glee: ‘Women kicked out.’42 Following months of parliamentary debate, on 16 July 1918 the House voted to drop women’s suffrage but endorsed the rest of the proposal. Preserved among Schwimmer’s press cuttings is the report of Világ with the headline: ‘They voted it down. They voted down women’s franchise.’ In the intermittent, almost full century, however, the news failed to make it into the Hungarian history textbooks: standard histories to this day state without fail that Vázsonyi’s original, December 1917 proposal was the one accepted in July 1918.43 This is despite the parliamentary minutes that recorded the repeated, desperate pleas of the liberal minister to keep women in the electoral reform bill.44 The intense campaigning of the liberal feminists, along with the liberal-left Electoral Bloc formed in June 1917, serves as the context and prelude to the Women’s Club. It was called to life exactly in this period, between Vázsonyi’s appointment and proposed bill in December 1917 and the last hurrah of the FE preceding the vote on it in June 1918. Taking a leaf from the book of the FE, the Club was created to extend electoral propaganda for women’s franchise (and, implicitly, universal manhood suffrage) to a segment of the population never involved on politics, let alone electoral politics before: aristocratic women who were members of the political elite but strictly by marriage. The tenor of the times in the fourth year of the war – the general sense that political reform was unavoidable, if for no other reason than to keep popular unrest at bay – might explain the willingness of both aristocratic women and conservative women activists to allow themselves to be drafted to work alongside the liberal feminists. The strictly enforced ‘members only’ policies kept the Club exclusive and largely private, highlighting the limits of political engagement that women of the traditional political elite were willing to entertain. The two co-founders’ efforts to recruit the wives of elite politicians exposed another paradox: while advocating for women’s suffrage, they pursued MPs’ votes and applied pressure on them through the domestic influence of their spouses.

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‘A gathering place of socially useful intercourse’ The Club’s existence straddled two distinct political eras: the last months of the war and the postwar liberal revolution, with the defeat and dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy and the end of Hungary’s imperial rule over its ethnic minorities in between.45 The former brought a sense of imminent (and, from the perspective of the reigning political elite, painful but unavoidable) political reform and half-hearted attempts by the government to extend the vote and keep popular anti-war unrest in check. For the left-liberal opposition, this was to be the last push for electoral reform through parliamentary channels – and Schwimmer’s single-minded focus on women’s suffrage in the last decade and a half explains her determined efforts with the Club and the appreciation of Katinka’s help in recruiting aristocratic women. Schwimmer’s papers provide eloquent testimony to the feverish activity of the feminist leader in the early months of 1918 as she divided her time between leading the feminists’ suffrage campaign and launching the club with Katinka. Unlike Mrs Károlyi’s vague reference to ‘entertaining the idea of a club’,46 Schwimmer’s papers contain crucial evidence pointing to the Club’s inspiration: a receipt for her membership for the year 1912 to The International Women’s Franchise Club in London.47 There can be no doubt that the booklet, attached to the membership card,48 was the template for the ‘by-laws of the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club’, issued in March 1918.49 And the text of the flyer found in the same dossier – ‘[t]here is an obvious need for some central place where supporters of the Enfranchisement of Women, without distinction of race, religion, party, or nationality, may meet in social intercourse’50 – strongly suggests the origin – by way of an awkward translation from English – of the Hungarian Club’s mission statement, cited in the subheading above. The differences between the two locations and time periods were of course equally significant. The establishment of the two clubs may have been separated by only a few years – but what a difference those few years made. As well, the London Club, founded in 1909 (‘for men and women’ – another important distinction),51 emphasized its international aspect and counted among the invited lecturers such luminaries of the international women’s movement at Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Carrie Chapman Catt – the latter was also the Club’s vice-president.52 Budapest, in the last year of the war, was no longer the glittering second capital of the Monarchy or in a position to host foreign guests in style. But when it came to the range of political views, the fledging Hungarian club had the edge.

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We already know the end of the story, the failure of introducing a franchise bill that included women – so if it did not advance the cause of women’s suffrage, what did the Women’s Debating Club accomplish? Was there a genuine attempt on the part of the founders to discuss serious issues and air out differences or merely to create a cover for the real agenda, the suffrage, all along? In the absence of the text of lectures and debates it is impossible to tell anything about the discussions. But a list of the planned debates survives among Schwimmer’s papers and shows that they hit on all the favourite topics at the centre of the women’s rights movements. They deserve to be listed in full: childhood education, suffrage, the central household, pacifism, charitable versus social work, motherhood and work, and political stance.53 The format of discussions, each pairing up a liberal and conservative woman, ensured that the ‘debating’ part in the Club’s name did not remain an empty word. The exception, interestingly, was the topic of the suffrage: for this event, both of the speakers and even the moderator were aristocratic and highly conservative women – strange choice, with so many leading feminists with over a decade of campaigning under their belt present.54 Perhaps it was made to avoid even the appearance of giving too much room to the feminists, or perhaps to stoke the vanity of the neophyte, aristocratic members, new to public speaking. If the intent was to underplay the role of feminist, and especially Jewish members and highlight the membership of aristocratic women, it seems to have worked. A short report, of note mainly because of its author, the brilliant writer Gyula Krúdy, in the satirical Borsszem Jankó called the new club a ‘women’s casino’ – a reference to the exclusive private clubs of Budapest and major cities, reserved for the aristocracy and the gentry, most of them completely excluding Jews.55 What had become of all these ambitious plans? Thankfully, we have the report of Mrs Gyula Andrássy (Katinka’s mother) preserved among Schwimmer’s documents. It is not dated but we can place it to the end of the Club’s first season when it broke for the summer, in May. ‘The president of the committee responsible for organizing the debates’ – as we can see, titles were not unimportant in this crowd of countesses – reported that out of the thirteen debates planned they held nine, postponing three, including the one on ‘Peace and Pacifism’ to the fall session. One would think peace and pacifism were the topics everyone would be most eager to discuss – but of course in the last months of the war this was the touchiest of possible subjects, with the authorities clamping down on anti-militarist activities with a heavy hand. It was in early 1918 that the government stepped up measures against all anti-war activity, closed down the student organization Galileo Circle, and arrested its members for distributing anti-war leaflets. In early March 1918 the police banned the planned public meeting on peace of the FE.56

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An entry in Schwimmer’s day planner from 4 April 1918 highlights the cracks behind the façade of smooth co-operation across political and class lines in the Club, particularly when it came to the sensitive subject of pacifism and antimilitarism. ‘Call from Mrs. Károlyi: Mrs. Andrássy told Mrs Batthyány behind her [Katinka’s] back that if we won’t drop pacifism she will leave. We won’t be able to discuss it anyway, says Mrs. Apponyi, they will shut us down.’57 On the same day, Schwimmer’s note describing yet another call from Mrs Károlyi offers a glimpse into the modus operandi of the Club. It reveals the balancing act of the Countess between Schwimmer – hidden behind the scenes – and her aristocratic peers while also hinting at the intense communication between the two founders. The note very likely referred to the crucial debate, postponed for the fall, on peace and pacifism. ‘Mrs Andrássy is under the weather, we can only meet tomorrow. They had a long talk, compromise, push it to mid-June when nobody’s home any more. By then there will be peace in any case. If Mrs. Andrássy leaves, so will Mrs. Apponyi.’58 As for the predicted ending of the war, it can be interpreted either as wishful thinking in the extreme – as if hostilities would cease just for the sake of the summer holiday – or as a reflection of the common view that the end of the war was very close indeed. War or not, by late May the upper and middle classes went on holiday. Women of the aristocracy spent the summer months at their country estates or visited spas, and even uncompromising feminists took a break from the city. Rosika Schwimmer, having survived a relatively minor spell of the Spanish flu in July,59 spent August at a country retreat frequented by the feminist executive, in the remote Transylvanian mountains.60 Her faithful co-president, Vilma Glücklich, even addressed a postcard to her friends as the ‘Feminist resort’.61

‘Good Hungarian women’ versus the ‘female troops of radicals, feminists, and Jewish intellectuals’ One would expect that after the summer 1918 defeat of the suffrage reform bill, the armistice, the formation of the National Council, the appointment of Count Károlyi as Prime Minister, and the liberal revolution, the history of the Club would come to an end.62 Of its two founders Rosika Schwimmer would be away on a diplomatic mission, delegated by Károlyi, and as for the Countess, as the wife of the Prime Minister, she would have more important functions to attend. And yet, despite all logical expectations, it seems the Club continued to exist at least until January 1919. While in Katinka’s memoirs there is no mention of the Club beyond early 1918, we have another, unpublished testimony that takes the Club’s history well

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into early 1919. It comes from Emma Ritoók (1868–1945), a writer, philosopher, and one of the right-wing women who founded the National Association of Hungarian Women (MANSZ,) the interwar period’s representative, nationalist, right-wing women’s organization in January 1919.63 Ritoók is an important witness for the entire period; and I will describe her path from the progressive counter-culture to the nationalistic, anti-Semitic right in detail in the following chapters. Here I rely on her unpublished memoirs in connection with the Club, because it offers a view from the other side, as it were, one that remained hidden from either Katinka or Schwimmer. In Ritoók’s view the Club was neither a vehicle for suffrage activism, nor a ‘gathering place of socially useful intercourse’ but the site of counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the liberal revolutionary government of Károlyi. She described the furtive, secret meetings of conservative women in December 1918, followed by the takeover of the Club’s executive and the voting out of ‘Mrs. Károlyi’s entire regiment’ by fellow Club members Ritoók calls the ‘good Hungarian’ – that is non-Jewish, Christian – ‘women’.64 The same women would be soon engaged in more direct counter-revolutionary activities – although for the moment these merely consisted of secret meetings and plotting. It seemed to give Ritoók special pleasure that the Countess had not a clue about these developments, while she was hosting the Club’s meetings at her own residence.65 Ritoók’s memoirs also offer important insight into the gendered dynamic of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy, highlighting women’s leading role in it. She insisted that she was the first to articulate the argument – later appropriated by Cécile Tormay, the leader of MANSZ – that it was women who took the initiative and mobilized against the liberal revolution at a time the male political elite was still paralysed or hesitant to act. ‘We must do something. The men do nothing. We ought to organise the women. Unconsciously they are waiting for it. In the Club of Hungarian Ladies there are many who are of our way of thinking.’66 Ritoók’s account also brings into question the initial co-operation across political and social lines in the early days of the Club, in February and March 1918. Right at their first meeting, she writes, there was a confrontation and we already won a partial victory; because they wanted to give the group the name Women’s Club from an internationalist point of view and we voted it down and it became Hungarian Women’s Club. And at every successive step this nationalistic direction won because of the insistence of women, although they mobilized against us the female troops of Radicals, feminists, [and] Jewish intellectuals.67

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A gathering place or the hotbed of counter-revolution? The short life span of the Club – between early 1918 and early 1919 – largely overlapped with the period of this study. The historical events running parallel with the Club’s brief existence and beyond will be treated in much more detail in the coming chapters. Similarly, almost all the actors mentioned in connection with the Club will return in the following chapters in other capacities and examples of female activism. What justifies then to begin with the story of the Club? Doesn’t this decision unnecessarily complicate and duplicate the narrative? Ever since I discovered the existence of the Club and with the further discovery of the treasure trove in the Schwimmer papers explored its hidden history, I was convinced that the Club prefigured and encapsulated much of the history of female activism in the period of this study – in other words it offered the perfect subject for a microhistory. Not only did the Club’s executive and membership include most female politicians or political women of the period but also gathered them in one place, something that had never been accomplished before and would not happen again in the history of Hungarian women’s movements and female activism. Moreover, the Club’s internal history from the initial broad consensus around the suffrage to the polarization between liberal and right-wing nationalist women prefigured the dynamic of politics at large. I was also fascinated by the discrepancies between the testimony offered by the documents in the Schwimmer papers, Katinka’s memoirs, and those of Ritoók, resulting in three fundamentally different versions of the Club’s short history. And the intriguing questions posed by possible narratives did not stop here: there was the matter of Katinka’s account in her memoirs published in the 1960s. Her distortions that overstated her own role and denied Schwimmer her due may have been a necessary ruse at the time they jointly founded the Club, yet her insistence on telling the story in the same way in her memoirs published at the end of her life was puzzling. There was one more, brief reference to the Club in the semi-fictional account of the revolutionary period by Cecile Tormay (1876–1937), the conservative writer, iconic right-wing activist, and leader of MANSZ in the interwar period. She was the one person conspicuously missing from the executive or membership of the Club. In her best-selling An Outlaw’s Diary Tormay briefly mentioned the Club as the Károlyis’ unsuccessful attempt to gain the support of the traditional elite.

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Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of WWI The Club of Hungarian Ladies was founded a few years ago [in fact only a few months before, in February 1918] by a few aristocratic ladies inspired by Countess Michael Károlyi. For that reason I never joined it. Under the publicly proclaimed object of intellectual intercourse I suspected the ultimate political purpose. I had been right. In case of admittance of women to the franchise, this club was required to furnish Michael Károlyi with a ready camp among intellectual women.68

When it came to the Club, it seems Katinka’s lapse of memory was not the exception but the rule. Perhaps with the single exception of Emma Ritoók everyone preferred to forget about the Club as the scene of a temporary suspension of hostilities among classes, political views, Hungarian women’s movements, and female politicians. There is yet another prominent member of the Club’s executive, the wife of Count Rafael Zichy, née Eduardina Pallavicini, who omitted the Club from her curriculum vitae. She had a long, illustrious public career at the head of conservative Catholic women’s organizations. From December 1918, she also played a prominent role in the emerging counter-revolution. No wonder she never mentioned her encounters with Katinka Károlyi or her role as one of the presidents of the Women’s Club in her official biography.69 The 20 February 1919 issue of Hungarian Woman (Magyar Nő), ‘the newspaper of Christian Feminism’, announced the establishment of MANSZ, the National Association of Hungarian Women, on its front page.70 In its mission statement MANSZ vowed to follow a ‘Christian’ and ‘patriotic’ direction and, in anticipation of the elections scheduled for late March 1919, it pledged its members’ vote to Christian and nationalist parties. In the by-then well-established code, this was a clear reference to the right-wing, nationalist, anti-Semitic direction represented by the forces of the emerging counter-revolution. Of the ten-member executive, listed as Emma Desewffy, Edith Farkas, Sarolta Korányi, Flóra Kozma Mrs Perczel, Mrs Sándor Raffay, Dr Emma Ritoók, Mrs Aladár Szegedy-Maszák, Mrs Aladár Szilassy, Cécile Tormay, and Mrs Rafael Zichy, seven were former members of the executive of the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club, and two more were speakers at the Club’s debates.71 Almost exactly eleven months after its first meeting, the Club, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. As if mocking its founders’ intentions, it spawned MANSZ, the first organization that emerged publicly with a clear counter-revolutionary programme under the Károlyi government, many months before the victory of the counter-revolution itself.

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The legacy of the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club – Between the public and the private A much fuller account of MANSZ will be told in the next chapters. But what of the legacy of the Women’s Debating Club – how should it be remembered? As with the brief history of the Club, we can rely on at least two possible narratives in assessing its legacy. Katinka Károlyi’s characterization and Schwimmer’s important input would suggest that it served as an informal institution where in the last months of the war a temporary alliance was struck between liberal feminists, conservative female activists, and newly mobilized aristocratic women, all in the service of the suffrage. The testimonies of Ritoók and Tormay, in contrast, describe the Club as from the start ridden by a deep divide between progressives and conservatives and then, unbeknownst to the hostess, serving as the scene of counter-revolutionary mobilization. The raising of the flag of ‘Christian feminism’, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, seems to confirm the latter assessment. After all, what kind of broad coalition could the Club sustain within its confines when outside of those confines a heated polemic pitted liberal feminists and conservative, Christian, nationalist women activists against each other? Except, to further complicate the picture, several members of the Club represented the very same conservative, Catholic direction, and the two leaders of ‘Christian feminism’ – Sarolta Geőcze and Edith Farkas – were sitting on the executive of the Club.72 It seems that there is not much we can safely say about the history or legacy of the Club. The emergence of MANSZ from within its walls shows that it was clearly not the unconditional success Katinka Andrássy claimed it to be. Yet the continuing presence of women from all sides of the political spectrum throughout the last months of the war and the first months of its aftermath indicates that social interaction between women politicians from diagonally opposing sides was still possible throughout 1918. The founding of MANSZ in January 1919 and the announcement on the front page of Hungarian Woman in February 1919 signalled the end of this short-lived and relatively peaceful co-existence. The nationalist right, publicly represented by MANSZ, took the gloves off, even if its radical nationalistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric was still carefully muted. And the leaders of ‘Christian feminism’ who weeks before were still participating in the Club now clearly aligned themselves with the aristocratic ladies, recruited by Katinka but now themselves siding with the emerging radical nationalistic direction. Beyond the political implications, to be contextualized in the coming chapters, this episode of Hungarian women’s history also points to the continuing

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importance of the in-between area located at the boundaries of the private and the public. The charter of the Club described it as a non-partisan, non-political institution.73 The aristocratic ladies insisted on the complete exclusion of the press from the Club’s activities. All the meetings were members-only, confidential affairs, often described in terms – such as a tea party or dinner – that evoked private social situations much more than public ones.74 The Club’s beginnings at the residence of the Károlyis similarly hinted at the semi-private nature of society parties or receptions. And because many of the aristocratic ‘ladies’ were related to each other and the Károlyis, gatherings of the Club must have hinted at familial and private settings, rather than public ones. With a few exceptions, the aristocratic women who were wooed by Katinka into joining the Club had no political experience. Even those with previous public roles – such as Countess Zichy – belonged to old-style charitable organizations. Clearly, Katinka asked them to join because of their familial position, because of whose wives they were. In anticipation of the decisive vote in Parliament, they were recruited to be converted to the cause of women’s suffrage so that they could influence their husband’s position and help pass the reform bill. For the two feminists who organized the Club, it was clearly a strategic move that compromised their feminist principles – that women should be regarded as the appendages of their husbands. On second thought, they may have shared a wink over their reversal of the old anti-feminist adage that held that women were not able to make political decisions, only those suggested by their husband or priest. In the end, the Club did provide previously apolitical aristocratic women a political education and perhaps even helped re-mobilize conservative, Christian, and nationalist activist women. The liberal revolution granted women the vote in November 1918. As we will see, between November 1918 and March 1919 the space of political activism expanded and launched an unparalleled wave of political activism. While this short period of unprecedented political democracy spurred women’s political participation in the public realm, it did not necessarily stop women’s continuing interactions in the semi-private and private realms. In a paradoxical development, shared by many democracies since, while leftleaning, progressive, and feminist women continued to use their newly acquired democratic rights in legitimate ways, right-wing women took advantage of them to re-mobilize and organize to overthrow the very same democratic political order. Perhaps this paradoxical end to all the efforts of Katinka – and Rosika Schwimmer – was the real reason for Katinka’s curious lapses of memory when it came to the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club.

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Towards peace and revolution – The honeymoon of the Hungarian October – October–December 1918: De-mobilization and mobilization – January–February 1919: Polarization between red and black – Continuing radicalization and the founding of MANSZ – March–July 1919: Women and the Republic of Councils

Towards peace and revolution By October 1918, Katinka Andrássy and Rosika Schwimmer, the two founders of the Hungarian Women’s Club, were already onto bigger things. After its defeat in Parliament, the electoral reform including women’s suffrage was as good as dead. But the inevitable coming of universal suffrage must have been obvious to all politicians, whether they were for or against it. In the wake of the disappointing defeat of the electoral reform bill, the FE pledged to not abandon its campaign and continued to organize rallies.1 In May 1918, their speaker was none other than Katinka Károlyi – she was becoming quite the public speaker. The text of her speech – presumably sent in advance of the event for approval or comments – was preserved among Rosika Schwimmer’s folders chronicling the Club’s history, with the annotation ‘Mrs. Károlyi, 1918’ in Rosika’s hand.2 The last reference to the Club among Schwimmer’s papers noted a phone call on 28 October. It came from the conservative Christian Socialist activist Margit Slachta, who asked for an executive meeting of the Club to discuss ‘their’ (presumably meaning the conservative members of the Club) ideas on women’s suffrage. ‘How could women candidates stand up to other candidates?’ she wondered, displaying a remarkable lack of ability to read the public mood. Perhaps, she suggested, ‘women should [only] vote for women’. Schwimmer recorded that it was Glücklich who took the phone call but did not record her reply – in any case,

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the idea must have been familiar to her, as it was already aired in The Hungarian Woman (A Magyar Nő), published since January 1918 by the Christian Mission Society, publicizing their programme of so-called ‘Christian feminism’.3 None of these women could possibly have imagined the political turmoil of the coming months and its impact on their personal and political lives. With her sharp political instincts, Schwimmer was the most likely to sense the first tremors of the coming political earthquake. She may have even hoped that the space for women’s politics would soon open wide and after two decades of working for women’s rights on the margins she would have a chance to become an elected politician. But even she could not have guessed that when one of them would be elected as the first Hungarian female MP less than a year and a half later, it would be Slachta, who had so little interest in women’s rights. Nor could she imagine that by then she would be a fugitive who would end her life as a stateless exile. As for the Countess, ever since she had married Károlyi in 1914 she nurtured a sense of their joint political destiny. The politically motivated intrigues of the Club and her speaking engagements for the feminist cause throughout 1918 must have looked to her like the beginning of a political role of her own to complement her husband’s increasingly possible appointment as Prime Minister. And while in a matter of weeks Károlyi would indeed become PM, Katinka would have been very surprised that even during a revolutionary regime the wife of the Prime Minister would be confined to old-fashioned, charitable good works. Amidst news of impending peace, last-ditch efforts to hold the AustroHungarian Monarchy’s crumbling edifice together, and a permanent political crisis within and outside Parliament, Károlyi, with his unblemished pacifist record, democratic credentials (at the helm of the left-of-centre Electoral Bloc), and connections to the Western powers was emerging as the best option for Prime Minister. As the former territories of the Monarchy were falling away, the Hungarian political class firmly buried its collective head in the sand, putting their hope on divine intervention – or President Wilson – and perhaps even Count Károlyi, to stop the break-up of multi-ethnic Hungary. Headlines reporting on the front and the erosion of the Empire competed with news on the Spanish flu that proceeded in its deadly path, seemingly immune to preventive measures. On 1 October the Budapest municipal authorities closed all schools and cinemas, but the number of cases kept climbing, to reach 100,000 on 19 October.4 On the same day the number of deaths reached 70 a day and 117 four days later.5 Following the introduction of a 10 p.m. curfew for restaurants and cafés and the closing of theatres and bars, on 22 October the mayor of Budapest finally banned horse races.6 Authorities struggled to ensure the public obeyed the new limitations placed on public transport, aimed at reducing the spread of the disease: standing

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was no longer allowed in the inside compartment of streetcars, and the number of stops was also reduced. As the Pesti Napló reported, drivers and female ticket takers, reinforced by policemen and gendarmes, fought an all-day losing battle with the public, ‘regretfully undisciplined, refusing to acknowledge the new regulations’.7 On 18 October István Tisza, leader of the governing party, declared in Parliament that the Monarchy had lost the war. On the same day Charles IV issued a call to the Habsburg territories to form their respective National Councils. On the night of 25 October leaders of the parties of the former Electoral Bloc – Károlyi’s own Independence and 48 Party, as well as the Bourgeois Radicals, led by Oszkár Jászi, and the Social Democrats – formed a National Council. The dailies, still under heavy censorship, did not report this event until the 29th.8 The 30 October edition, however, covered in detail the ‘battle of the Chain Bridge’, a mass demonstration in support of Károlyi and the National Council that ended with the police and the army firing into the crowd, killing three.9 The liberal Pesti Napló published the call of the National Council to Budapest’s workers to commemorate the victims of the shooting with a work stoppage between 10:00 and 10:30 the next morning. The other headlines announced, in this order, the arrival of the Archduke Joseph; the diplomatic memorandum of the Monarchy’s joint minister of foreign affairs, Gyula Andrássy to President Wilson asking for separate peace; the declaration of Czechoslovakia on the

Figure 3.1 Budapest streetcar, the site of class and gender transgressions at the end of the First World War, with the caption ‘From the era of streetcar misery’. Courtesy of the Hungarian National Museum, Historical Photo Department.

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28th; and the secession of Croatia from Hungary and its joining the South Slav State on the 29th. And these were merely the previous day’s news.10 Already on 30 October, the Police joined the National Council and the MSZDP called for workers to support it.11 On 31 October the Archduke Joseph, the Emperor’s representative in Hungary, named Károlyi PM; the next day, carried by the revolutionary masses and having been excused of his oath to the king, Károlyi took over as the PM of newly independent Hungary.

The honeymoon of the Hungarian October Newspaper reports and surviving newsreels provide a lively sense of what came to be known as the ‘aster’ revolution – named after the traditional flower of All Saints’ Day that was tucked into the caps of soldiers by the people of Budapest, celebrating the end of the war. This rare coming together of the people was remarkably free of violence. The single violent act that could be chalked up to the revolution – and would consequently be used to great effect to tarnish its bloodless nature – was the assassination of István Tisza by soldiers on 31 October, the day the revolution triumphed. While these historical events were playing out, aptly expressed by the headlines of the leading tabloid on 1 November – ‘The Hungarian nation liberated itself; All power in the hands of the National Council’ – Rosika Schwimmer had quietly left for Switzerland.12 This was quite a change of plans from earlier when she was still preparing a lecture tour to Scandinavia, as well as hoping to get permission to travel to the former enemy countries Russia and Finland.13 The trip to Switzerland had an agenda well beyond her personal interests: as her correspondence confirms she left on a confidential diplomatic mission, with precise instructions from Károlyi, to find out about the intentions of the Entente powers towards Hungary as well as prepare peace negotiations.14 Meanwhile, back in Budapest, the dailies reported on ‘The revolutionary Budapest in the morning hours’, with one of their headlines describing the freeing of political prisoners.15 Among them are the two convicted in the well-known trial of the Galileo Circle, for crimes ‘against military interests,’ Ilona Ducsinszka [sic!] and the engineer Tivadar Sugár. As is well known these two were convicted by the military court. The two liberated prisoners, accompanied by the former MP, Dr. György Nagy, this morning made an appearance in front of the National Council where they were received with great ovation.16

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The sensational trial of the two in March 1918 highlighted the role of the Galileo Circle and progressive university students in anti-war activism. It also riveted the public with the youthful romance of the two accused as well as Ducyznska’s gentry origins. The daughter of an impoverished Polish nobleman was related on her maternal side to the conservative, wealthy landowners, the Békássys. Duczynska was quickly elevated into an iconic figure, in the mould of the Russian revolutionary women. In a characteristically venomous remark, the right-wing writer Emma Ritoók mocked the fascination of ‘the pacifist, even revolutionary, that is Jewish youth with this romantic, as all things Russian, idol’.17 The left-of-centre coalition government – composed of the three parties of the National Council – was in essence identical to the Electoral Bloc, formed in the summer of 1917 for electoral reform. There is no doubt that their programme of democratic transformation was much too radical for most in the old political establishment – but there was simply no alternative. And for all his relatively recent ‘radical’ views, as a bona fide member of the aristocracy and the political establishment, Károlyi was acceptable even to the old elite. Having taken power in the moments of Austria-Hungary’s military defeat and the collapse of the Empire, the National Council and Károlyi’s government represented more than a simple change of cabinets – and there had been no precedent or blueprint to direct their course of action. But for the moment, the entire country seemed to line up behind them. Az Est captured again the overwhelming popular sentiment in its 2 November headline: ‘The entire country joined the National Council’.18 Organizations sending rapturously supporting telegrams included the National Alliance of Catholic Clerks and Commercial Employees (Katolikus Tisztviselők és Női Kereskedelmi Alkalmazottak Országos Szövetsége), a conservative women’s organization whose members would have been reluctant to make common cause with the FE before. But on 4 November, swept up in the general spirit of the day they addressed the ‘esteemed executive of the FE’ to announce that ‘every member of our association wants to take part in the task of building the new Hungary’.19 The Catholic women’s association’s letter and use of this term was a sign of the broad support enjoyed by the Károlyi government in its first weeks. The announcement of the Social Mission Society a week later seemed to erase the memory of the previous months’ acrimony between ‘radical’ and ‘Christian’ feminists and complete the national unity among women’s organizations as well.20 This early, massive, almost unanimous support of the Károlyi government and the National Council is a puzzling, and in light of the coming political polarization, interesting phenomenon. There is no doubt that Károlyi’s social standing, prewar political role as leader of the opposition parliamentary party, as well as his familial

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and political ties to the prewar establishment inspired confidence among the prewar social and political establishment. The lack of any other suitable candidate also played a part. The relief over the end of the war and the bloodless nature of the revolution were likely furthering hopes in members of the establishment that Károlyi would not ‘rock the boat’. As his Hungarian biographer summed up, the new Hungarian government’s ‘first tasks were to end the war and restore public order; and in this they enjoyed almost everyone’s support up until early December, including the politicians of the old establishment, the aristocracy, the churches, the officer corps, even the parties of the ethnic minorities’.21 Two women commentators, writing from opposite ends of the political spectrum, insisted on finding a rational explanation for what was likely a matter of highrunning emotions, at least partly explained by the conclusion of the war. Rosika Schwimmer, writing with the hindsight of the defeat of the revolution, insisted that Károlyi was the only logical choice. Despite the mistakes attributed to him later, ‘ at the time and since, and now more than ever, Hungary had no statesman surpassing’ Károlyi’s ‘right perspective on foreign affairs, personal selflessness, and moral courage’.22 From the other side of the political spectrum, the writer Emma Ritoók, an early adversary of Károlyi and his revolution, also reflected on this phenomenon in her memoirs, written years later. What drove all these aristocrats, high-ranking Catholic officials, and right-wing politicians to join the National Council? Projecting her later position as the apologist of the counter-revolution Ritoók argued that they joined only to fight the enemy – the Jew – from within.23 But revolutions tend to run on a course not entirely controlled by their makers. Few could have imagined the scale and speed of political change to come in the next days and weeks, including Károlyi himself. As recently as June 1918 he replied to the writer Ferenc Móra in private whether he expected a revolution: ‘I don’t think so. Maybe. But I can be sure of one thing: I am not going to start a revolution. I know myself enough to say that I’m not cut out to be a revolutionary leader’.24 The decision of the Entente to dissolve the Monarchy and Hungary’s multi-ethnic empire may have been made as early as the summer of 1918 and there was nothing any Hungarian government could have done to change that. The initial hope and expectation placed on Károlyi because of his pacifist record and overestimated connections among Western leaders assured him of no more than a few weeks of reprieve before the beginning of a counter-revolutionary re-mobilization. By then, however, he was set on a revolutionary course, handing down legislation that in the next four and a half months created the framework of a liberal democracy. Károlyi made good on his principles and on the day his government and the National Council took power he announced universal suffrage for men and women.

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No historical account of these events has considered what the sudden opening of public and explicitly political space meant for women. The introduction of universal suffrage and the revolution itself suddenly made the boundaries separating the ‘real’ politics of parties and parliament, the realm of men from women’s politics, limited to small or medium size, often single-issue organizations, much more porous. But the changes went deeper than in those European countries where the extension of the vote to women left the previous political framework of constitutional democracy in place. In contrast, the two successive revolutions of Hungary created two distinct political frameworks. The first, liberal revolution radically expanded the electorate for men and opened it for women, creating a liberal democracy that had existed only nominally or with extreme limitations before. However, it had no time to put its legislation into practice and even less to complete its ambitious agenda of democratic reforms, such as land distribution.25 The second, radical socialist revolution replaced the liberal legislation with the promise of a utopian, egalitarian political framework, in the process excluding many of the recently enfranchised, including women. The women who figure in this chapter all represent unique contributions and individual choices; put together, these illustrate the sudden opening up of the political space and the multiple ways it in turn prompted the mobilization or re-mobilization of female activists. Their cases should also allow us to reflect on the usefulness of the terms ‘mobilization’, ‘de-mobilization’, and ‘re-mobilization’, alongside or in contrast to other terms, such as ‘radicalization’ or ‘polarization’. As every revolutionary period, the October 1918–August 1919 period was extremely fluid. This is perhaps the ultimate challenge of any account that attempts to consider the activism of individuals, organizations, and informal groups, and the issues and dilemmas around which they mobilized. The war, the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and multi-ethnic Hungary, the revolutions, the civil war, and continuing war with the successor states not only opened up new forms of political activism but also shaped women’s everyday lives. This is the underlying social reality of this study that cannot offer a comprehensive social history of Hungarian women; rather, it hopes to open a path to future investigation of the broadly understood political space, emerging models of women’s emancipation, and their impact on female activism.

October–December 1918: De-mobilization and mobilization The arrival of women’s suffrage had the strangely paradoxical effect of not so much mobilizing but almost paralysing the veteran activists of women’s rights.

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Liberal feminists, and most of all Schwimmer, had a long practice in dusting themselves off after each failed suffrage campaign; but they seemed much less prepared for what a victory would mean for their movement. The revolution instantly lifted the FE into the corridors of power. Before and during the war the feminist leaders could perhaps request a meeting with MPs and parliamentary officers – and at best were politely listened to. Now, along with Social Democratic women activists, they had representatives in the executive of the National Council and close to thirty of them sat in the extended National Council. It is a characteristic example of the blanks of Hungarian historical scholarship that we have no reliable record of such basic historical facts as women’s participation in the National Council, the seat of legislative and executive power between October 1918 and January 1919. Contemporary newspaper reports and recent historical accounts alike offer an unreliable, incomplete account. In the 30 October issue of The Est the list of the executive of the National Council included a single woman, Mrs Ernő Müller, a well-known Social Democratic activist.26 The first press report that announced the forming of the National Council, however, mentioned no women, only that ‘The Council will make sure that all professions and segments of society would be represented’.27 The caption of an oft-published photo, purportedly taken on 31 October, listed another woman, Mrs Groák, president of Nyíregyháza branch of FE.28 Although not one of best-known feminist leaders, Mrs Groák was a regular benefactor: in 1918 she donated the highest amount, 1,000 crowns, to the FE, matched only by Schwimmer, who paid the same into the organizations’ coffers from her speaker’s fees.29 The minutes of the first executive meeting of the FE following the revolution help clarify the events of these first days as they affected the FE.30 ‘The president [Glücklich] reported in details about the forming of the National Council that offered two spots to the Association’.31 And the 25 November 1918 issue of the FE’s official bulletin, A Nő, finally reported that the Executive of the National Council had two FE representatives in its ranks, Schwimmer and Mrs Groák, elected by the Executive of the FE on the night of 30 October, with two alternates, Mrs Meller Eugénia Miskolczy and Mrs Oszkár Szirmay.32 The Executive of the National Council was at the heart of revolutionary action until 15 November, the declaration of the Hungarian People’s Republic. At this point it dissolved itself and announced the formation of the extended National Council, to act as temporary Legislative Assembly. This was the context and explanation for the next item on the FE agenda: the nomination of another 25–30 candidates for the extended National Council. The hastily typed sheet, preserved among the FE’s documents, listed the twenty-six names

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recommended for the expanded 500-strong National Council.33 It represents an important document of the early days of the new Republic of Hungary for it confirmed Károlyi’s commitment to include women in the work of government as well as provided a list of the FE’s leading members. They included Vilma Glücklich, the acting president, Mrs Szirmay, the acting deputy president; Mrs Ágoston, Mrs Major, Mrs Balázs, presidents of the most important branches in towns across the country; Janka Gergely, the NOE’s president; Szidónia Wilhelm, the secretary of NOE; secretaries of the FE Adél Spády, Mrs Lamberger, Mellerné, Mrs Ungár, Melanie Vámbéry; and the editors of, respectively, A Nő, Paula Pogány and Adél Spády, A Nők Lapja. The list also confirmed the existence of the broad coalition that was forged in the last months of the war in the Women’s Club: Mrs Károlyi and Mrs Zipernovszky both represented the recently mobilized aristocrats. The list thus featured the core leadership of the FE, with the exception of Schwimmer – but her standing was such she did not even need to be named. We will revisit this roster in March 1919, to illustrate the erosion of the feminist ranks that reached even the executive and to demonstrate the fluidity of positions among female activists, whether old-stock or recently mobilized. On 16 November 1918 the 500-member National Council assumed legislative powers, declared the Hungary independent and a People’s Republic, and in its first decree introduced universal suffrage, including women, enfranchising all men over the age of twenty-one and women over the age of twenty-four. The decree also set a literacy requirement for women only.34 The liberal feminists did not spend much time celebrating, nor did they rush to express their gratitude to the new government. Rather, they were ready to claim the suffrage as the result of their own long-time activism. As the writer of the lead article of Nőtisztviselők Lapja put it, women would not have gotten the universal suffrage in this country if not for the FE and the NOE. ‘Thus the suffrage is only partly a revolutionary achievement because it is in fact the result and reward of our ceaseless, dogged work. No democratic government could avoid this reform and yet it was more stingy towards women than men’.35 The writer objected to the higher age set for women and particularly the requirement of literacy for women only, noting that because an estimated 62 per cent of women were illiterate, the new law would automatically eliminate more than half of the female population. The Woman Worker, the Social Democratic paper of working women, did not waver from the official party position. It welcomed women’s suffrage as inseparable from universal suffrage, itself claimed as the fruit of the ‘decades-long struggle of the working class’.36 The mild note of disappointment – that even the first decree of the people’s republic came short of granting women equal rights

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by setting more strident age and literacy limits – sounded a little disingenuous from members of the party that during its long struggle for universal manhood suffrage had repeatedly asked women to wait for their turn. More important was the point the Woman Worker kept raising in the following weeks: that the granting of political rights to women was only the first step and the party had an enormous task of educating the great masses of women whose majority were still ‘politically ignorant and unengaged’, and, apart from a small vanguard, ‘still under the yoke of priests’.37 Was such a view not after all the possible reason women were still discriminated against in the new electoral law? Similar attitudes could be detected in other articles of the Social Democratic press,38 combined with the dubious claim that bourgeois parties so far had ignored women and only the social democrats had women’s enlightenment at their heart.39 For the rest of the liberal revolution’s life span, the impending elections, planned and postponed again and again, loomed large. They overshadowed such important developments as the decree concerning equal conditions of women’s admittance to universities and granting of diplomas, another longfought objective of the FE.40 Like the feverish feminist campaign of the last year of the war (from December 1917 to July 1918 and the subject of the previous chapter), this too would turn out to be, in retrospect, obsolete – but the elections set the tone for the next few months. At the time and to this day the Károlyi government has been criticised for not getting around to hold the elections and thereby precipitating the Bolshevik revolution. But there were serious arguments against calling an election, most importantly the fact that large territories were occupied by Romanian, Czechoslovak, and Serbian troops. To what degree did the permanent electoral campaign between November 1918 and March 1919 impact women’s political activism and mobilize women? Both the FE and Social Democratic women’s organizations reported a tremendous increase in members and local branches. The articles of the Woman Worker, addressed to organized – that is, unionized – women, hinted at a palpable concern that the new members would overtake the small, tightknit, well-educated female membership. While the list of newly founded locals filled long pages in every issue of the paper, articles in the same issues urged established members to step up their efforts to educate the newly joined ones. The brochure issued by the Social Democrats, written by Mrs Müller to help the work of Social Democratic activists, provided eloquent illustration of this mildly patronizing attitude: the vote, the seasoned Social Democratic leader explained, was only the first step, to be followed by the bulk of their work,

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to enlighten our fellow women about the way she should handle the electoral right we have achieved for her, after so many years of hard and bloody struggle. … We need to explain every poor and oppressed working woman and young girl that there is but one party that serves her interests, and that is the Social Democratic party.41

Pre-existing women’s rights organizations keenly felt the need to situate themselves in the political landscape. This was especially the case for the FE, the only women’s organization that premised itself on the representation of women’s interests independent of any political party or position. The FE seemed by far the best prepared to adapt to the era of suffrage. After all it represented the politically active, middle-class, educated, professional women, trained in the almost continuous suffrage campaigns of the previous decade and a half. And yet, the rare surviving documents – the minutes of executive meetings, held in November and December and the general members’ meeting in December – belie a surprising hesitation and lack of direction. Instead of enjoying its privileged position in terms of organization, preparation, and personnel, faced with the impending elections the FE seemed to be consumed by the task of defining their position vis-à-vis the political parties. Already the second, 19 November 1918 executive meeting of the FE devoted considerable time to the dilemma: to keep their organization and members above the fray, beyond partisan politics – or to allow members join parties that support female candidates, in order to have more impact on the outcome of elections. About our party affiliation acting president [Glücklich] reports that in the countryside many of our members joined other parties. It would be good to agree on a common policy. The members in the countryside also know that it would be good to keep our interparty status. But she would also like our lessexposed members to sit in every party and party executive. Agreed. Melanie Vámbéry suggests that from here on we should call ourselves not an Association but a Feminist Party. Acting president believes ‘Women’s political alliance’ would be possible.42

After much deliberation, at the 22 December general assembly the FE accepted the proposal to rename the Feminist Association ‘Interparty Alliance of Feminists’.43 A few days later Glücklich opened another meeting of the executive by lamenting that their newly adopted name was much too long and quite unpopular – but that they could not agree on anything more fitting. While the name change seemed to generate much anxiety, the minutes offered more substantial insight into the already significant polarization of the political

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landscape. The fifteen members of the executive decided that for the ‘coming elections’ (a line that was getting a little tired) they would not enter their own candidates but ask the ‘feminist candidates to run for election on the platform of existing and, if possible, revolutionary parties’.44 By revolutionary, they most likely meant the parties that formed the revolutionary government: the Károlyi Party, the Bourgeois Radicals, and the Social Democrats. Even more importantly, the minutes preserved the results of an informal survey in which members of the executive were asked to declare their political allegiance. The answers (the minute taker uses the word ‘confession’) revealed that out of the fifteen members, with Schwimmer still in Switzerland, two declared for Károlyi’s party, two for the Bourgeois Radicals, two for the Social Democrats, two for the Communists (at this point not yet an officially recognized party), and one for Vázsonyi’s Citizen Party. (The seasoned politician and minister responsible for the 1917 reform bill led a moderate liberal party, representing the urban bourgeoisie.) The remaining six had not yet decided. ‘But what is obvious from these “declarations strictly for domestic use,” ’ reads the text of the minutes, ‘is that our Association allows the representatives of all parties to work together in peace’.45 Other women’s organizations, either to the left or right of the FE, did not have the same problem: their respective relationship to the parties was not in question. What is obvious, however, is that the two other largest women’s organizations – the organized working women affiliated with the Social Democratic Party and the various Catholic women’s organizations affiliated with the Catholic Church – also adopted a range of responses to the promise of their direct participation in the political process. In anticipation of the electoral decree the Woman Worker highlighted the importance of socialist propaganda, to counter clerical influence. It also warned of the high illiteracy rates among working women – evidently already aware of the planned literacy requirement, for women only, in the electoral decree.46 Every trade union and party local organization should start literacy courses. We need to convince as many women as possible for these courses. Winter is here, rural working women are for the most part free of chores, and they all need to be recruited so that we can gain more votes and can keep our newly acquired freedom.47

The 1 December 1918 issue devoted its entire front page to the decree. In a separate article the newspaper reported that in the extended, 500-member National Council ‘representatives of organized (in contemporary parlance: socialist,

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unionized) women were also there; as well, the bourgeois parties also delegated women’.48 Lauding the law for its significantly extended scope compared to previous, unrealized reform bills, the author also criticized it for the double standard it still included: men received the vote without any limitations from the age of twentyone while women received it only from age of twenty-four and with a literacy requirement. The author then instantly turned to the most important tasks ahead of the elections: to step up socialist propaganda among the rural working women ‘still shackled by the priests who keep the people in ignorance’ and ‘to spread the Socialist gospel among the masses of working women in the cities’ ‘to line them up along the warriors of our party’.49 Liberal feminists rightly felt the vote was not a gift but a just reward for their long campaigning and that they were short-changed with the few allocated seats on the National Council. They were not blindsided either by the appointment of their leader as ambassador to Switzerland. Her trip to Switzerland at the end of October 1918 made Schwimmer miss the glorious first days of the revolution unfolding on the streets of Budapest. But she was back as soon as 13 November when she gave a thunderous speech at a feminist rally at the Redoute. (The hall was frequently rented for feminist events and was also the scene of the 1913 IWSA Congress.) Given the general chaos accompanying the demobilization and limited means of transportation in the month following the armistice, Schwimmer’s successful return was a near miracle. A few days later, Károlyi announced her appointment as ambassador to Switzerland. (If not for the technicality of never receiving accreditation that would have made Schwimmer, not Alexandra Kollontai, the first female ambassador.) The move was universally applauded by women’s organizations – even socialist women seemed to be willing to bury the hatchet and greeted her mission. The Woman Worker reported on Schwimmer’s appointment in these lines: ‘The Hungarian popular government appointed Rosa Bédy-Schwimmer as ambassador to Switzerland. The first female ambassador. In Switzerland she was received cordially and they assured her of their support’.50 The two newspapers the FE’s The Woman and the Journal of Woman Clerks (Nőtisztviselők Lapja), the bulletin of the organization Schwimmer founded back in 1897, naturally celebrated her appointment but also hinted at difficulties her mission would inevitably face. By February, the same paper filed the failure of her mission as part of a broader phenomenon, under the title of its lead article ‘anti-Feminism everywhere’.51 The main outlines of Schwimmer’s failed mission have been well known, although its details have never been told in full.52 Suffice to say it was a complete

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fiasco: The Swiss government refused to accept her credentials and the staff at the Hungarian embassy refused to serve under her and sabotaged her at every step. And yet, her personal papers also show that she started out with high hopes of being able to influence events. A letter to Károlyi from 5 November 1918 cited her ‘assignment, received from you a week ago’ and reported of her memorandum addressed to the French government ‘in the interest of achieving a more quick and just peace’.53 It also mentioned the possibility of a private meeting with a representative of the French government and her information that the peace treaty in preparation would set less severe conditions for Hungary than expected – clearly an example of wishful, hopelessly naïve thinking. While her appointment provided an opportunity for Social Democratic female activists to demonstrate a momentary Burgfriendspolitik with their feminist sisters, conservatives remained silent, saving their wrath for later. We can, however, safely assume that their immediate reaction to Schwimmer’s appointment was very much like the one expressed by a conservative commentator: ‘To Switzerland, to the consternation of the Swiss government, Károlyi sent a feminist Jewess, Rosa Bédi-Schwimmer, without having asked the Swiss government’s agrément. This lady then, with whom the diplomatic corps refused to work, helplessly lashed out to all directions, creating one mishap after the other’.54 In Hungary, the initial rallying to the Károlyi government and the hope that, because of his good relationship with Entente politicians, he would be able to achieve an honourable peace quickly gave way to disappointment. Already in November Károlyi was forced to sign a series of humiliating terms that effectively reduced Hungary’s territory by more than half. To cite a single day’s news: The 17 December 1918 issue of Pesti Napló reported on its front page the entry of Czech troops into the resource-rich areas of prewar Upper Hungary and the Serbian government sent substantial food shipments from the former Hungarian ‘counties whose rich food supply [the paper dryly noted] was ours not long ago’.55 And Az Est reported on 28 December that because of coal shortages households would only get gas service to heat and cook with for only two and a half hours a day, while public lighting of streets would be still provided, likely to maintain public safety.56 In the absence of a social history of wartime and postwar Budapest, we cannot say with any certainty if these deprivations affected, and to what degree, the views on the revolutionary government of working-class women or middle-class and upper-middle-class women – but the latter were more likely to be able to rely on relatives outside of Budapest or financial reserves.

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Similarly, further studies should be able to determine if the immediate aftermath of the war could have produced a conservative, anti-emancipatory backlash, reversing the trends of strong female mobilization experienced in all segments of society. Although a single piece of evidence is far from convincing, it can still hint at a trend. The Christmas issue of Pesti Napló, the daily close to Károlyi, featured a rare interview with Mrs Károlyi. In it, Katinka, founder of the Women’s Club, aspiring political speaker, and card-carrying feminist, was presented as a model of traditional female virtues. The reporter detailed her motherly duties and good works, from organizing a soup kitchen to her efforts to bring back the prisoners of war – but not a word about her views on anything remotely political. Whether it had to do with the decorum of her husband’s office or was an attempt to present the prime ministerial family as standing above partisan politics is difficult to say. But it was a sharp departure from the ample press coverage Katinka’s public – and highly partisan – appearances had received in the last suffrage campaign only a few months earlier.

January–February 1919: Polarization between red and black The new year did not bring any relief to the external and internal crisis. While the governments discussed such urgent matters as land reform, the distribution of grand estates, and the possible systems (by district or proportional) on which to organize the elections, the French army occupied Szeged and the Czech army under Italian command occupied Pozsony (Bratislava), both well inside Hungary’s prewar territory.57 Part of the dilemma about the best way to hold elections was due to the occupation of large segments of the country’s territories bordering the newly emerging successor states. The opening of the Paris Peace Conference, on 19 January, aggravated the desperate mood, even if the report attempted to strike a sober tone.58 The Schwimmer saga took another turn: the Hungarian government accepted Schwimmer’s resignation and named Gyula Szilassy, a member of the former diplomatic corps, as her successor. Pesti Napló’s Swiss correspondent, previously a supporter of the feminist leader, changed tack when he reported that Swiss governing circles regarded the activities of Schwimmer with much antipathy. The Hungarian government made every effort to make Rosa Schwimmer leave her post before her case turned into a scandal. The diplomatic mission under her command accumulated a debt of 60 thousand francs, the reimbursement of which sum will fall to the Hungarian government.59

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Women activists of all affiliations continued to prepare for the elections. The bulletin of NOE, always the less diplomatic of the two liberal feminist organizations, registered the emerging postwar backlash aimed at reversing the gains in women’s wartime employment. The lead article in the 15 February 1919 Nőtisztviselők Lapja, titled ‘Anti-Feminism everywhere’, described the irony of women, praised throughout the war for their contributions, having to argue, once again, for the right to work. ‘As if we were thrown back by 25 years’.60 The writer cited the post-revolutionary drive to unionize workers and draw up collective agreements, a welcome development. But while women white-collar workers flocked into unions, male unions leaders failed to protect them. As for the collective agreements, those protected the returning soldiers, not the women who had held these jobs during the war. If these trends characterized the whitecollar occupations, the writer also referred sarcastically to working-class unions where a frequent argument – ‘a wolf in the sheepskin of social policy’ – seemed to be the hypocritical ‘Poor women worked so much during the war they deserve a little rest. Let’s send them home, and let us earn enough for the both of us’.61 Another ‘sad’ example cited by the newspaper of NOE was the Schwimmer affair. Her attackers spared no effort to make her job impossible, not because she did not do a good job but simply because they could not accept that a woman could fill an important political position.62 Liberal feminists also kept up their preoccupation with the theoretical and practical implications of the forthcoming elections. The problem of the already substantial erosion of their membership between parties was a perennial topic of the executive meetings. At the February executive Glücklich reported: ‘Károlyi thinks possible that we campaign with a feminist program’.63 Yet developments on the ground clearly suggested that the initial feminist agenda, decided in November, to stay above the fray and not to meddle in party politics was untenable. Adél Spády stated that they should support ‘the parties that nominate feminist female candidates’.64 ‘Mrs. Fáy reported that the [Bourgeois] Radical Party of the 5th district elected Melanie Vámbéri and herself ’65 – presumably standing for election. The minutes do not mention but the feminist leadership must have been aware of a related development: that a large number of their long-standing members joined the Bourgeois Radical Party in a women’s auxiliary.66 According to their electoral flyer, entitled ‘What Do the Radical Women Want?’ the group represented more radical views than the FE in its social and economic programme and articulated a list of reforms along democratic socialist lines. Despite the sharply worded criticism of liberal feminism in the flyer that highlighted the

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differences between their own agenda and that of the FE, personal relations remained cordial. After all, Melanie Vámbéry and others were members of the ‘radical women’ but also present at the FE executive meeting. But polarization was threatening the remaining FE leadership and core membership from other sides as well. One possible direction, already under way, was indicated in the lectures held at the FE headquarters, including a series on ‘Marxism and pacifism’.67 The spectre of Bolshevism was clearly on the horizon. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January 1919 coincided with the already ongoing polarization. The coverage of the murders and the armed conflict between fractions of the German SD party became a cautionary tale for Hungarian socialists and liberal democrats, conjuring up the image of a violent end to the peaceful ‘aster’ revolution. The murders on 15 January 919 were widely reported by the mainstream press. Az Est reported on 17 January the arrest of the two leaders of the Spartacus movement on its second page.68 The next day’s issue reported in more detail of the murders, also publishing the reaction of Berlin newspapers from left to right to give the appearance of impartiality – although the journalist’s comments did not make a secret of the paper’s position that the Spartacist leaders represented extreme views.69 The more right-wing Pesti Hírlap was quicker to the mark and already on the 17th reported on its front page ‘Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg shot to death’.70 It described Luxemburg’s murder as an act of popular lynching and took at face value the reports of right-wing German papers, according to which Luxemburg was killed while attempting to escape. The next day’s issue, however, corrected this version and quoted the paper’s Berlin correspondent to voice the suspicion that their murder was pre-meditated – while also repeating the ‘killed while attempting to escape’ narrative.71 On page 5 it published a short piece under the title ‘Rosa Luxemburg’. In it, the writer related the story of a chance meeting with the revolutionary in 1902 in Warsaw, while shopping for contraband cigarettes. Purportedly sold by Rosa Luxemburg’s brother, the writer described ‘the short, dark-haired Jewish lady of approximately 35–40 years’ answering the door. Leaving the house the writer’s Polish companion mentioned the woman’s name, her likely association with ‘nihilists’ and the prophecy that ‘the excitable spinster will find an unfortunate end’.72 The position taken by Pesti Napló is perhaps the most interesting. Further left than the two other papers cited before, it, however, was more weary of the threat from the extreme left, in the shape of the emerging Party of the Communists of Hungary, gaining traction among the working class. This determined the

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damning and biased report on the murder of the leaders of what the paper characterized an extremist movement – whether in Berlin or Budapest. Reporting in minute detail on the Ebert government’s ‘restoration of law and order’ Pesti Napló also published as fact the rumour that the police found millions of marks in Liebknecht’s apartment.73 On 17 January the Pesti Napló reported on the murders on its front page, with the headlines shouting, ‘Liebknecht shot while attempting to escape; Luxemburg killed by the exasperated crowd; Her body not found; Supposedly thrown into the canal by the people’.74 The front-page lead article condemned in strong words the Spartakist ideals, attributing them mainly to Luxemburg’s political fanaticism, brought with her from Russian-occupied Poland and Russian universities. At the same time, the author, the bourgeois radical Géza Feleky, did not hide his admiration: Luxemburg, he noted ‘was perhaps the most talented female politician of our time. The Spartacus movement lost its intellectual head, true commander with her’.75 The report of the Social Democratic Népszava is particularly interesting. It reflected the solidarity with the victims, iconic leaders of the German brotherly party, but also the Hungarian Social Democratic party’s palpable concern about the spread of Bolshevik ideas and the possible repetition in Budapest of Berlin’s fratricidal bloodshed between moderate and radical socialists. The report, almost hidden at the bottom of page 3 of the 17 January issue, paid homage to ‘the two eminent fighters of the German Social Democracy’, and repeated the narrative – killed while fleeing, by unknown members of the public – of Pesti Napló. Whether as a martyr of the working class or the victim of her own extreme, imported ideas, the body of Luxemburg became a proxy in the ongoing battle – for government and the soul of the Hungarian working class – between the moderate MSZDP leadership and the emerging Hungarian Communist Party. In its 21 January 1919 issue, the Social Democratic paper devoted a slightly more prominent place, the top of page 2, to counter the coverage of the Communist newspaper, the Red News (Vörös Újság), the latter using the murders to underline the counter-revolutionary stance of German moderate Socialists. Conditions are far from ready for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, argued the writer, and Communists are taking advantage of the freedoms created by the Hungarian People’s Republic, achieved by the Social Democrats. By February, the newly formed Party of Communists of Hungary, founded in November by former POWs returning from Russia, had grown into a substantial force and a threat to the fragile democracy and the coalition so far sustaining the

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Károlyi government. It was one thing to flirt with or even briefly consider the ideas they represented – but to apply them to Hungary was clearly incompatible with the view of most even on the left. In the previous month, on 1 January 1919 the Socialist women’s Woman Worker still struck a conciliatory tone when it addressed the question of Bolshevism, emphasizing the continuum, rather than the division between the two movements. ‘There are no differences of principle between the Social Democrats and Bolsheviks’.76 Their fundamental difference, it stated, was not in their ultimate goal, the elimination of private property and the liberation of the working class, but in their methods – anti-democratic and dictatorial, unlike the democratic, electoral path, advocated by Socialists.77 In another sign of fighting to keep the middle ground against a Bolshevik advance, Social Democratic women activists substantially tamed their anti-bourgeois rhetoric of until March 1919. It was very likely following the MSZDP leadership’s line, in view of a hoped-for centre-left coalition government. The writer Vera Singer was a long-time leading Socialist activist. She warned of the possible dire consequences of a Bolshevik takeover: military invasion by the Entente, unlikely to tolerate a socialist government, and, in case of the inevitable collectivization of lands, the animosity of the peasantry that would lead to the downfall of such an experiment. Her words proved prophetic but the voices of sobriety soon fell silent. The dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution was moving inevitably towards polarization – and there is indication that the murder of Rosa Luxemburg contributed to the radicalization of some women both on the Left and Right.

Continuing radicalization and the founding of MANSZ The press representing women’s organizations could not compete with the coverage of the dailies but did its share. Nőtisztviselők Lapja offered a generous three-page eulogy from the long-time FE executive member Szidónia Wilhelm. The published article in the 15 February 1919 issue was the text of a speech given by the feminist activist on 19 January in the offices of the NOE, only four days after the assassinations. In an interesting aside Wilhelm thanked Béla Kun for biographical data on Luxemburg – Kun was the leader of the Hungarian Communists and soon the actual head of the Hungarian Republic of Councils.78 After a cursory overview of Luxemburg’s political activities and ideological contributions to Marxism, Wilhelm, spoken like a true neophyte, ended with a passionate confessional of her own turn to the ideas of communism.

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In at least one other case the murder of Luxemburg proved to be the impetus for the turn to bolshevik ideas. The young journalist Zsófia Dénes saw Budapest in January 1919 as if enveloped in a fog of death: Everywhere I look, hospitals are curing or burying our friends. […] As soon as I arrive in Budapest, our colleague, formerly at Az Est, now an editor of Vörös Újság (Red News, the new daily of the Communist Party appeared from November 1918 and was banned in February 1919) calls on the phone. He tells me that they killed Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the leaders of the Spartakists when they transferred them from prison. Indeed, this is a blow for us as well. We have no other defense but to continue the revolution to its final victory, against all adversaries.79

The following day, Zsófia Dénes learned of the death of Endre Ady, the poet and guiding light of the literary avant-garde.80 Before the First World War Dénes forged a successful career as the Paris correspondent of the liberal dailies Pesti Napló and Világ. In her old age – she lived to be 102 – Dénes’s claim as the last love of the great poet was regarded as a bit of urban legend. But even if taken with a grain of salt, her testimony as the last surviving witness of the early twentieth century’s literary world is valuable. In her account, the death of the two giants of the progressive camp – the social scientist, librarian, and eminence grise of the Social Democrats Ervin Szabó in November 1918 and Ady – as well as the murder of the two Spartakist leaders spurred her and others to ‘go further’.81 A week later, on 20 February, a Communist demonstration in front of the office of the Social Democratic daily Népszava turned violent and ended with the shooting death of four policemen. The government finally decided to rein in left- and rightwing extremism. Leaders of the Communists, including Kun, were arrested. A day later the government moved to intern the suspected leaders of right-wing counterrevolutionary conspiracy. By then, Károlyi was no longer PM but the President of the People’s Republic, elected by the extended National Council on 19 January. The premiership was taken over by the little-known Bourgeois Radical Berinkey, in the hope that he would be more acceptable to the Entente. Cabinet positions were still divided between the three parties of the original National Council coalition: the Károlyi party, the Bourgeois Radicals, and the Social Democrats. The measures included widespread arrests of Communists and a ban on their newspapers – highly unusual because the liberal revolution prided itself on upholding liberal freedoms. But the danger of the Berlin scenario – of right-wing social democrats and radical socialist engaging in fratricidal battle – must have been on everyone’s mind. Nonetheless freedom of the press continued to work: when Az Est broke the news.82 that the Communist leader Béla Kun had been savagely beaten by police

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avenging their colleagues’ death, Károlyi expressed outrage and from then on the Communist leader and his comrades were treated as political prisoners. Their cells in Budapest’s main transit prison became the headquarters from which they organized their revolutionary activities unimpeded. One of the lesser-known victims of the arrests was the venerable secretary of NOE, Szidónia Wilhelm. At the 27 February executive meeting of the FE the president, Vilma Glücklich brought up her arrest ‘for translating an article by Rosa Luxemburg’ and noted that the intervention of Mrs Károlyi resulted in her ‘better treatment’.83 There is additional evidence that the leaders of NOE, until then practically a branch of the FE, were becoming far more radical in their political views than their liberal feminist sisters. Not only did their secretary, Szidónia Wilhelm, get herself arrested for articles celebrating Rosa Luxemburg but there is testimony to the effect that by December 1918 the entire leadership of NOE joined the Communist Party.84 The disappearing moderate middle clearly considered the Left the graver concern of the two extremes. Pesti Napló continued the anti-Bolshevik propaganda with far from subtle means. The day after leaders of the Communist Party were arrested, it warned of the possible consequences of a Bolshevik rule by publishing an article under the sensational heading ‘In Russia women also become communal property’.85 At first sight the article could be taken for a satirical reversal of bourgeois sexual mores – but there can be little doubt that it was meant in all seriousness. ‘The municipal council of Saratov … abolished marriage, declared all women common property and strictly regulated the relationship between men and women by decree’.86 The article continued in this vein, describing the absurd details – ‘according to the decree, from 1st March all women between the ages of 17 and 32 will become common property – with the exception of women with five or more children’ – of a dystopian society where young women were subjected to sexual slavery, family relationships were overtaken by prostitution on a massive level, and children were taken away from their mother to be raised by the state. In its 15 March 1919 issue the Woman Worker replied to the ‘nonsensical idiocy’ served up to the readers of PN.87 Rarely has one the chance to read any more ridiculous nonsense. We would not waste our breath to argue with it, if not for the readiness of the reactionaries to pick up this baseless hoax and use it to agitate among women of the countryside, to keep them away from Social Democracy with the slogan of morals.

The writer was no other than Mrs Müller, the respected Social Democratic organizer and first female member, with Schwimmer, of the National Council. If bourgeois newspapers and priests bring up ‘the collectivization of women’,

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she added, they do so either out of stupidity or to mislead their readers. The objective of these ridiculous lies, she concluded, is ‘to keep masses of women of the countryside in the yoke of priestly influence’.88 But for all its outlandish claims, the article must have addressed genuine fears and rumours about the Bolshevik threat to family and marriage. Radicalization was not confined to the Left. But whereas very few women played any leading roles in the emerging Bolshevik-inspired Communist Party of Hungary, women in the re-energizing, counter-revolutionary right played a prominent role. By this point, as early as December 1918 but certainly by February 1919, Károlyi’s honeymoon was over. The traditional political elite, disappointed by his failure to stop the territorial losses and further alienated by its democratic social and anti-clerical programme, had turned against his government. While it took until the first months of 1919 for the conservative and newly emerging radical counter-revolutionary forces to regroup after the initial shock of the collapse of the Monarchy, the history of the Women’s Club strongly suggests that right-wing women were in the vanguard of this counterrevolutionary mobilization. The women of the Catholic Mission Society and the men behind them, the leading ideologues of the militant Catholic church, Ottokár Prohászka and Béla Bangha, initially also lined up behind Károlyi. For a short while they even seemed to have given up their campaign for a ‘Christian feminism’, directed against the ‘radical feminism’ articulated in the early months of 1918, as described in Chapter 2. As late as December 1918, The Hungarian Woman (A Magyar Nő) spoke positively of female suffrage and stated that female candidates from the ranks of Christian Feminism would stand for election89 – and the fact that they still called themselves feminists and spoke of liberal feminists in a relatively complimentary manner was significant. Then in January 1919 they lined up under the flag of MANSZ, clearly aligning themselves with the broad political movement organizing against Károlyi and his liberal revolution. MANSZ did not emerge from a vacuum: it built on the previous year’s conservative women’s campaign that set out to create a Christian women’s movement (understood both as code for non-Jewish, gentile and as based on pre-existing, denominational women’s organizations). But MANSZ represented a much broader coalition: it included most of the aristocratic women of the Women’s Club, Catholic as well as Protestants, and even some prominent former liberal feminists. The ideological roots and agenda of MANSZ will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. Here we merely point to the trends its founding signalled.

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As we have seen in the previous chapters, the foundations of MANSZ – the Catholic-based ‘Christian feminism’ and the prewar conservative women’s organizations – had been formed well before the revolution. But the groups and individual women who came together to found MANSZ were all mobilized and radicalized during the first months of the Károlyi revolution, after the initial period of national unity. The formation of MANSZ completed the political polarization process and ended the chances of the government representing the moderate, liberal-democratic middle. Importantly, MANSZ preceded men’s counter-revolutionary reorganization. The Károlyi and Berinkey governments were slow to take action against the organizing counter-revolution, and their failure, perhaps driven by old-fashioned gallantry, was even more pronounced in the case of the women of MANSZ. They were allowed to organize and articulate anti-government, counter-revolutionary aims completely uninhibited. When it came to the rise of the radicalizing Right and the emerging counterrevolution, both the government and the democratic Left were caught unawares. In a telling example, when the Social Democratic daily Népszava reported on the new right-wing organizations MOVE and Awakening Hungarians and their anti-Semitic agitation and vandalism, it was still in a light tone, blind to the immediate danger – and public appeal – they represented.90 ‘The “awakening Hungarians,” then roamed the street and cafés, agitating against Jews. One of their bands barged into the Pannónia, Otthon and Mátyás király cafés, insulted the Jews there, broke a few tables and chairs, and for emphasis lifted a few overcoats and silver platters as well’.91

March–July 1919: Women and the Republic of Councils On 18 March 1919, a tired and humiliated Schwimmer arrived home from her Swiss mission. In her absence NOE and FE, the liberal women’s rights organizations to whom she had devoted two decades of her life, had fallen into tatters. A quick look at their most prominent leaders underlines the rapid erosion of even the most committed, core leadership between the two political extremes. Mrs Ágoston, Janka Gergely, Szidónia Wilhelm, Adél Spády, and Paula Pogány all joined the Communist Party. Mrs Zipernovszky was in the executive of the newly founded MANSZ and even Countess Teleki abandoned the feminist flag and joined the Right. In an uncharacteristically disenchanted letter to a close friend Schwimmer related the withdrawal of her candidacy for election and her decision to stay

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away from political activism.92 Three days later the Hungarian Republic of Councils was announced, forestalling the parliamentary elections which, postponed multiple times, had been planned for late March. Unable to bring himself to sign the Entente’s latest, devastating ultimatum, Károlyi resigned and transferred government to what he expected would be a Social Democratic government. But behind the scenes, the left wing of the MSZDP merged with the illegal Communist Party and declared the dictatorship of the proletariat. In its 133 days of rule, the Republic of Councils reorganized the army to engage with the invading successor states. It also launched an ambitious and for the most part ill-advised programme of nationalization. A misguided, rushed collectivization of lands, in some cases affecting land distributed only weeks earlier, alienated the peasantry in no time. The Christian, conservative or moderate middle classes and professionals by and large refused to accept the authority of the new government. Rising anti-Semitism, already more present in public discourse since 1916, found further ammunition in the fact that an overwhelming majority of the new ministers – called commissars, on the Soviet model – were of Jewish origin. The government of the Republic of Councils immediately introduced new legislation, aimed at establishing a political framework overnight. Like their economic policies, these were modelled on the Bolshevik example and did away with the recently introduced liberal democratic legislation. If the Károlyi government, shackled by its own high standards of legality and legitimacy, never got around holding elections, the Hungarian Soviet government did not waste any time. The governing ‘Revolutionary Governing Council’ announced its decree on 2 April93 and declared all working men and women above the age eighteen to be eligible voters. Elections of the delegates to the 500-member Council of Workers and Soldiers took place less than a week later, between 7 and 11 April. With the executive power in the hands of a five-member Political Committee of the Revolutionary Governing Council, the role of an elected body was a foregone conclusion. The process made a mockery of political democracy in other ways as well: while on paper it extended voting rights well beyond the previous, November 1918 decree and nominally included all working men and women, in practice it excluded everyone but party members, organized workers, and workers ‘who were able to provide proof of proletarian status’.94 It allocated less than a week for preparations, and voters cast their votes on lists of candidates prepared the day before the election.95 But the new government was committed to uphold the symbolic importance of elections and the decree explicitly addressed women. ‘Working women have

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electoral rights. Proletarian women can vote. They shall exercise their right and participate without fail in the elections. No working woman should stay away from the polling booth.’96 In the days leading up to the elections the Red News kept reminding women of their double servitude (as workers and wives) under capitalism and their obligation to vote.97 Reports of election day highlighted the celebratory mood and the presence of young women in rather tired clichés. The rare surviving photos seem to confirm the clichés: even if the photos were slightly staged, the young women captured on them radiated pride and an acute sense of the occasion. Those women who did show up at the polling stations were presumably also members of the Social Democratic and, in lesser numbers, the Communist Party. They thus had good reason to be mindful of the significance of their first election as fully enfranchised citizens. The same women, committed supporters of the Republic of Councils and readers of the Red News, were also aware of the other ways the proletarian

Figure 3.2 Election of the Budapest Soviets in April 1919: the second woman from the left standing is Mrs József Kelen, section head in the Commissariat for Education. Courtesy of the Hungarian National Museum, Historical Photo Department.

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dictatorship improved women’s lot and equality. Decree no. XCIX, dated 19 April 1919 – note the number of decrees in less than a month – of the Revolutionary Governing Council introduced new legislation on divorce, making it simple and instant in cases of mutual requests and only slightly more difficult in cases when only one of the parties requested it.98 Previously, on 29 March 1919 the Red News reported that ‘women can also join the Red Army’.99 In the wake of the deprivations of war, diplomatic and economic isolation, and under the threat of immediate military and economic collapse, a strange sort of utopia emerged and conjured up the vision of a more just, more humane society. Along with the decrees and policies that further alienated and antagonized the middle class – catastrophic food shortages, the confiscation of rooms in bourgeois apartments to house working-class families, and the nationalization of private art collections – ambitious cultural and social projects sprang up. Working-class children would receive breakfast at school, be allowed to play on the manicured lawns of Margaret Island, be sent to lakeside resorts for their first holiday. Sweeping public health and education programmes were commissioned, among others, to eradicate tuberculosis and introduce art and music education at elementary schools. And it is these utopian projects that mobilized an unprecedented number of women who filled leadership positions – in areas defined as traditionally feminine, from children’s welfare to public health and education. Who were they? We have already encountered some of them, such as Ilona Duczynska who after a period of convalescence would work in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. They also came from the ranks of liberal feminists: Szidónia Wilhelm, Janka Gergely, Paula Pogány, and Adél Spády all joined the Communist Party in the early days, before it came to power. Mrs Ágoston, the former president of the Nagyvárad branch of the FE, left the feminist organization to join the Social Democrats, along with her husband, the legal scholar Péter Ágoston, who became commissar for justice during the Republic of Councils. Many women working in the makeshift commissariats, hastily organized from the prewar ministries, received their activist training in the Galileo Circle. All of these women were well educated and had previous experience in and commitment to women’s rights and student organizations. Why would they suddenly turn into followers of the Communist Party and its utopian designs? It was likely a combination: the frustration with the postponement of the elections during the liberal revolution, the quick and effective organization of Council elections – even if falling short on democratic principles – and the chance to make a real contribution, in unprecedentedly influential offices, to solutions of burning social problems.

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Zsófia Dénes whose conversion was described earlier in this chapter was able to put her journalistic skills to the cause – and her memoir provides the context to one of the major documents of the period. Her brochure, titled The Woman in Communist Society, was commissioned and published by the Commissariat of Public Education, and, Dénes claims, distributed in a large print run.100 Under the running head ‘Proletarians of the world, Unite!’ and in addition to a lengthy rehashing of the standard socialist position – Dénes was clearly familiar with the works of Engels and Bebel on the subject – she set out to demolish the common misconceptions about the collectivization of women under communism. Calling it a ‘bourgeois hoax’ she quoted Marx and Bebel but also John Stuart Mill to argue that contrary to these accusations, communism will bring the liberation of women from economic and sexual exploitation and the end of prostitution.101 Another illustrated brochure written by an anonymous author was also published by the commissariat. Clearly intended for a less sophisticated readership, the brochure’s subtitle identified it as an ‘educational article on free love and about this and that, the woman folk was well advised to know and indeed should know about’.102 The title ‘Should we collectivize Sophie?’ as well as the populist (and more than slightly patronizing) tone of the brochure was framed as a dialogue between Sophie, a naive peasant woman, and her neighbour. In the first part the two discussed all the rumours circulating about free love, collectivization of women and children, supposedly introduced by the Communist government, with the comical timing and tone of a skit. In the next three sections, the author explained the sheer absurdity of these rumours and accusations against communism and revealed the clergy as the source of these rumours, to keep the poor woman folk of the countryside in medieval darkness. Here as before, we have no way to pronounce on the effectiveness of this counter-propaganda, other than assuming that these rumours (raised back in February 1919 by the respectable Pesti Napló, certainly no mouthpiece of the Catholic church) must have had significant traction, to necessitate the dedication of precious resources. Leaders of the Republic of Councils could spare little time for women’s issues what with the initially successful but unsustainable armed defence of Hungary’s borders, the quickly escalating diplomatic isolation, the hostility of the Entente, looking to stop the spread of Bolshevik disease, and organizing counter-revolution. After the April 1919 elections, the woman question was very rarely addressed in the Red News, at this point virtually the only newspaper still printed on a regular basis. Following the April elections, the last time women received substantial coverage was in June, during the National Women’s Congress held on 15 June

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to showcase the dictatorship’s achievement in women’s rights. Delegates were surprisingly welcoming of recently converted liberal feminists: ‘those comrades who, having been the pathbreakers of the bourgeois women’s movement … despite our differences, today, because of the changing times joined our movement, and with the teachings of Socialism, the education of working women, they try to work on the construction of the Communist social order’.103 As if to illustrate this goodwill, the closing speech of the Congress was given by none other than Adél Spády, as recently as February 1919 still a member of the Executive of the FE. She delivered a rousing endorsement of communism as the only true path to women’s equality.104 The Congress also approved a ‘Resolution’, listing the most important tasks and policies of the dictatorship of the proletariat, from full economic, educational, and legal equality for women, generous maternity leave with full salary, the rehabilitation of prostitutes, the establishment of nursery schools, and, somewhat surprisingly, full prohibition.105 There were, to be fair, a few critical notes as well – not so much questioning the commitment of the government to women’s equality but to point out ‘the nonchalance and in many cases obstructing behaviour of our male comrades’.106 Further criticism was raised about the low ratio of women elected to the Councils. The correspondent of Red News cited the numbers in question: The women complained that they were elected to Councils, Executives, generally leading positions at very few places. Among the delegates of the Party Congress there were eight women, the 500-member Central Revolutionary Council of Workers and Soldiers of Budapest thirty six, and in the 80-member Executive of the Budapest Council only two.107

A rare voice of dissent, albeit expressed only decades later, came from Mrs Müller, former member of the Executive of the National Council who was also elected to the 500-member Central Revolutionary Council of Workers and Soldiers of Budapest. In her memoir published in 1964 in Hungary, Mrs Müller confessed that because of her entrenched, narrow Social Democratic perspective she could not wholeheartedly participate in the propaganda campaigns of the Republic of Councils.108 The postwar revolutions represented a unique period in the history of Hungarian and European female activism. Within the span of nine months established forms of female political activism were made obsolete, and new forms of political engagement and activism were created overnight. Every previously existing women’s organization was tested, their foundational principles and methods re-evaluated, and newly created organizations, built on

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pre-existing ones, measured against previous alliances and animosities. In the extremely fluid international and domestic political situation personal, political, denominational, and class divisions were defined and redefined almost daily, and personal, professional, and familial networks and connections were reexamined at every turn. One possible way to write an account of the period’s history of women’s activism would be by narrating the history of the suffrage: its granting in November 1918 and the planned, postponed, and partially realized elections, until April 1919, when women could finally vote but under strict limitations. But as the evidence of this chapter demonstrates, electoral legislation was merely one of many elements to influence women’s activism. Other potential ways of narrating the period might test and demonstrate the limits of the terms of mobilization, demobilization, and re-mobilization. Each of these terms could be used to good effect to describe individual actors and even groups and organizations of female activism, but they are not sufficient to explain their complex and almost daily changing dynamics. For the purposes of an overview, perhaps a more useful framework could be developed from the two distinct models of women’s emancipation, demonstrated and offered during the revolutionary period: the liberal and radical socialist models. Undergirded by their respective political ideologies, liberalism and the various streams of socialist thought, these models had of course existed as ideological constructs before the revolutions. What was new about the revolutionary period was that they were offered as genuine opportunities for women’s political participation. But because of the very complex geopolitical and other external factors – defeat, dissolution of state and government administration structures, international and diplomatic development, and continuing military activities at almost every border with the successor states – these models were modified by a number of unrelated conditions. Food shortages, warfare, a wartime and postwar economy of shortage, as well as political measures designed to provide temporary relief or solutions by successive governments greatly affected the results of this experiment with political democracy. Additional factors, such as the still raging Spanish flu (whose history in Hungary still awaits its historian), added to this chaotic mix. The offerings were further complicated by the limitations of their practical implementation: the liberal model of women’s emancipation whose single most important element, the suffrage came to be realized in November 1918 and unleashed months of feverish preparations for the upcoming elections, was never realized. In contrast, the radical socialist model offered by the

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Republic of Councils was drawn up entirely by male leaders, and articulated as a Soviet-type political system, government by Councils, with no historical antecedents or reference to Hungarian historical tradition. Furthermore, unlike in Russia, government by Soviets was not based on a spontaneous popular movement and was transplanted onto a Western-type political system. Where it might have had a less problematic fit, with the well-developed network of trade unions, it clashed with the decades-long tradition of grassroots Social Democratic organizations. This political framework was still further complicated by social phenomena such as the postwar backlash against the employment of women. Further studies should establish the extent to which this universal European phenomenon applied to the Hungarian postwar economy. At the end of this chapter we should attempt to draw up a balance sheet between the two revolutionary regimes’ records of providing space and opportunities for female activism. As we have seen, the first revolution granted the suffrage and opened up the space for the first electoral campaigning – but through no fault of its own it failed to deliver on the promise of a democratic election. The second revolution, in contrast, held elections two weeks into its existence – but while it gave working-class women their first taste of full political citizenship, it also made a mockery of parliamentary democracy and excluded large numbers of recently enfranchised men and women from the process. When it came to positions of leadership in government and administration, despite Schwimmer’s appointment and the selection of female members for the National Council, the second revolution clearly had the edge. The Bolshevik revolution elevated a significant number of women into positions of authority – although almost exclusively in fields traditionally deemed feminine, such as education, public health, and welfare. All in all, if not through elections, promised but not delivered by the liberal revolution, limited by a possible postwar backlash and the alienating policies of the Republic of Councils, enough women experienced full citizenship, participated in electoral campaigns, were given important tasks in various levels of government to allow us to conclude a perhaps not resounding but cautious answer to the question of the title of this chapter: Yes, Hungarian women did have a revolution. We will follow the fate of some of the women who figured here: Katinka Károlyi, Rosika Schwimmer, Margit Schlachta, Anna Lesznai, Cecile Tormay, and Emma Ritoók in the months after the failed revolutions. All of the women of the Left who played a role in either revolution had to flee and spent long years, in some cases decades, in exile. Most of them were deeply affected, their personal and family lives,

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friendships, and familial networks disrupted; their professional or artistic careers destroyed; their material possessions and wellbeing lost, never to be recovered. Also lost was the camaraderie among women’s activists of different persuasions, united in the fight for women’s educational, economic, and legal rights during the prewar years and temporarily united in the last suffrage campaign from December 1917 to July 1918. The two revolutions ruined many friendships across the political spectrum and even between women previously positioned on the same side. Rosika Schwimmer, for one, could never forgive the Republic of Councils the travesty of barring her, the icon of the struggle for the suffrage, from the vote. That single act of legislation, more than any other measure, made her an ardent anti-communist. In several articles penned in exile she lamented the failure of liberal democracy, the disappearing middle between the extremes of ‘the red and black reactionaries’, and accused the communist regime with being just as misogynist as the prewar old regime it supplanted.109

4

To Regenerate the Hungarian Family and the Nation ‘A city that had draped itself in red rugs’ – The dynamic of right-wing women’s groups and the birth of MANSZ – ‘Christian feminism’ and anti-Semitism from early 1918 to early 1919 – Two founders of MANSZ: Cecile Tormay, Emma Ritoók – and the rest – The ego-history of MANSZ – The spectre of racial degeneration in the shadow of Trianon – Right-wing women activists and radical anti-Semitism – Right-wing women and violence: Victims or perpetrators? – From violence suffered to violence justified – The violations of daily life: The streetcar – Conclusion: Right-wing women activists between rights and revanche

‘A city that had draped itself in red rugs’ On 16 November 1919, Admiral Miklós Horthy, astride his white horse, led his National Army into the Hungarian capital. The date was the first anniversary of the declaration of the People’s Republic of Hungary by the revolutionary National Council, deliberately chosen to mark the triumph of counterrevolutionary forces. The celebratory events of the day were choreographed with equal care: visual symbols, from Horthy’s white horse to the feathers on the paramilitaries’ caps recalled a mythical ancient Hungarian military glory, while Horthy’s acceptance of the keys to the city conjured up medieval rituals of surrender. Stopping at St. Gellért Square (St. Gerard) to receive the keys of Budapest from the mayor, Horthy spoke briefly. There could be no mistaking the gendered bent of his words: the city, just like a woman, ‘had strayed’, ‘corrupted the nation’, ‘dressed up in red rugs’ – and now required a firm hand, to be brought back into line.1 Throughout the day’s ceremonies, nationalistic and Christian references were woven together, from the choice of St. Gellért Square, named after the medieval martyr murdered by pagan rebels, to the

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blessing of the Hungarian flag and the mass celebrated in front of Parliament, dressed in the national colours.2 Newspapers reported on the ceremonies in minute detail, pushing news of the ongoing, vital peace treaty negotiations to the back pages.3 Newspaper reports and the weekly newsreel prominently featured a procession of sixty-three women, dressed and veiled in mournful black. They stood in for the fifty-three prewar counties of historical Hungary now partially occupied by foreign troops, soon to be drastically reduced or torn away from the nation’s body. One by one, the women ascended the steps of Parliament to offer Horthy their bouquets wrapped in black veil – the size of the veil, varying between full and half, indicating the proportion of occupying foreign forces. Then Cecile Tormay, president of MANSZ, presented Horthy with the national flag, to be blessed by the religious leaders lined up behind the leader.4 The contemporary newsreel offers grainy and silent footage but speaks loudly of the tension between the demure appearance of the women of MANSZ and the brute force of Horthy’s National Army whose units marched through the city, illustrating at once its symbolic and physical conquering. But the contribution of right-wing women was not limited to serving as mere props. The newsreel of the day also showed enthusiastic crowds, including many women who, despite the miserable weather, lined the streets, and littered the pavement with flowers. The 16 November 1919 issue of the newspaper of the Social Mission Society offered more evidence of the meticulous preparations by the right-wing women’s organization, as it published sheet music and a list of meeting points by district.5 Young girls of twelve to fourteen were given a special role to grace the front rows of the procession of women, and their mothers received specific instructions to ensure their presence and proper attire.6 The events of 16 November 1919 figure in all historical accounts of Hungary’s post–First World War period and Horthy’s words about Budapest ‘dressed in red rugs’ have turned into a well-worn cliché. But no historian has explored the events of the day from the perspective of gender, despite the abundant verbal and visual references. They range from the performance of perceived masculine virtues of Horthy and his paramilitaries to the ubiquitous references to women’s and virginal girls’ bodies, and the unmistakable use of the latter in representing the nation and whitewashing the paramilitary violence. Moreover, no historical study of the Horthy era has ever considered the contribution of right-wing women activists to the ceremony – and, more broadly, to the regime’s radical nationalist, illiberal, anti-Semitic ideology.7 Even the most recent histories of the postwar period’s right-wing movements and ideologies fail to devote to leading right-wing women

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politicians as much as a footnote on their own right, apart from the occasional half sentence identifying them as the female auxiliaries of male-led movements.8 How did MANSZ, a women’s organization founded in January 1919, rise to such prominence in less than a year? How had the organization proven itself useful to the counter-revolutionary regime? Who were the leaders of MANSZ? What prompted their radicalization or mobilization? Were they, along with other leading right-wing women activists, simply adapting already existing ideas and slogans for popular consumption or developing their own? To what degree were the leaders of MANSZ doing the new regime’s bidding and representing the interests of Hungarian women – or their own? The following extended look at the ideological and social roots, pillars, and leaders of MANSZ will point to a mutually beneficial partnership between the Horthy regime and the right-wing women’s organization, forged in the early days of the organizing counter-revolution. It also aims to demonstrate right-wing women activists’ substantial contribution to the counter-revolution’s ideology and practice. Right-wing women activists provided original ideas to the counter-revolutionary regime’s ideology of national regeneration and revanche. In the process, they made the regime’s radical anti-Semitism and the violence of its first years palatable to a wide public. What they received in exchange was unparalleled dominance over other women’s movements in the official political sphere. In contrast with the liberal prewar period, whose rich associational life offered an admittedly limited but shared political space for women, and the revolutionary period that suddenly widened the political space for women but also channelled their activities into an electoral campaign whose rules were set by male parties and politicians, in the interwar period’s highly ideological context the right-wing, nationalistic women’s movement had succeeded in pushing all other women’s movements to the margins. When it came to the representation of Hungarian women, they were allowed to set the tone and enjoyed all the perks associated with their cosiness with power. The Horthy regime’s use of MANSZ as its official women’s organization anticipated the practice of Fascist and Nazi regimes. As early as its inaugural 16 November 1919 ceremony, the regime’s display of live female figures went well beyond the symbolic and decorative use of women’s bodies common in nineteenth century and prewar nationalist pageantry.9 Such tableaus were a prominent feature of Hungary’s millennial celebrations in 1896 and prevalent in the prewar period’s nationalist and imperial discourses. On 16 November 1919 the women of MANSZ served not merely as decoration or illustration anymore. They were activists themselves, who volunteered to play the part of the nation’s violated and torn body and signed up to serve the cult of the leader and spread the gospel of national regeneration.

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The dynamic of right-wing women’s groups and the birth of MANSZ In the previous two chapters I traced the beginnings of MANSZ, describing the ‘calling card’ of Christian feminism, in the words of their proponents, by female activists of the militant Christian (Catholic) Social movement in early 1918, and the January 1919 formation of MANSZ. At its founding, MANSZ projected an image of unity, keeping mum about the multiple conservative, militant Catholic, and counterrevolutionary strands that made up its DNA. Publicly, it kept its agenda conveniently vague, reserving its immediate political, counter-revolutionary agenda, the overthrow of the liberal government of the National Council strictly for internal use among the executive. The announcements of MANSZ rarely mentioned its leaders by name – partly to keep them out of sight in case of a government crackdown on counter-revolutionary forces, but also likely to underplay the prominence of aristocratic women among them. However, it always highlighted the feat of uniting women of various religious denominations. A short report in the 22 January 1919 issue of A Magyar Nő characterized MANSZ a few days into its existence as an organization ‘founded, apart from individuals, by the Social Mission Society, the Catholic Women’s Alliance and the Protestant Women’s Alliance’.10 Although the report mentioned Countess Rafael Zichy by name, this would have raised no red flag as she was well known as the president of the wartime charitable organization.11 Another cause that mobilized and united Christian women’s organizations was the protest against the Károlyi government’s plan to discontinue religious education in public schools.12 An article, signed by FE (Edith Farkas, head of the Social Mission Society) on the front page of Magyar Nő, reported on the rally held to protest plan.13 (Incidentally, it was held at the Redoute, the scene of the IWSA conference in 1913 and the last feminist demonstrations during the Spring 1918 suffrage campaign.) ‘It was good to see together the Catholic, Protestant, Greek and Jewish fellow citizens, to defend themselves against the violation of man’s most cherished treasure, his faith’.14 In a wink to the Marxist classic of women’s equal rights, the writer cited August Bebel: ‘Only that cause which women appropriate will be victorious’.15 The event illustrated the nature of MANSZ as a repository for multiple strands of conservative women as the leaders of the Social Mission Society were also executive members of MANSZ. The article mentioned the presence of – presumably conservative – Jewish women. But the commentary – signed with ‘sc’, most likely by Margit Slachta – on the same event struck a different note.16 Its failure to mention Jewish women, emphasis on Christian religious affiliations, exaggerated claim of the religious divisions overcome, and the repeated use

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of ‘Christian Hungarians’ united against ‘destructive trends’ served multiple purposes.17 It successfully deflected attention from equally significant class, educational, and political differences among the women. As well, it underlined the coded references to ‘destructive’, that is Jewish, trends and the ‘Christian’ forces taking up the fight with them, indicating the necessity to use codes established before the war and in the war years frequently forgone. The individuals and groups that came together to found MANSZ represented – and as I will argue, preceded – the coalition that would rule Hungary in the interwar period and until the last year of the Second World War. The leadership of MANSZ, like the interwar male elite, united women from the old-regime establishment and the Christian middle class with women of the re-mobilizing, militant Christian Right. In terms of organization, their coalescence began with the announcement of ‘Christian feminism’ in January 1918. This move was an attempt to mobilize women of the Christian middle classes in the run-up to the granting of female suffrage and to define their agenda against liberal (in their term ‘radical’) feminism. At its founding in January 1919 MANSZ united women of this militant Christian movement with newly mobilized aristocratic women in a counter-revolutionary programme against the liberal revolution’s political and social reforms. While this coalition may have been assembled as early as March 1918, its members – individuals and organizations alike – had gone their separate ways in the intervening year. As already mentioned in the previous chapter, most of the Christian women’s organizations joined the National Council and until early 1919 remained supportive of it. Along with most of the aristocratic women who would become founders of MANSZ, the leading Catholic activist women – most prominently Edith Farkas and Sarolta Geőcze – were also members of the executive of the Women’s Club. Their change of heart and emergence as leaders of the counter-revolutionary re-mobilization was in this sense both a natural reversal to their original opposition to liberal reform (including liberal women’s rights) and a sharp departure from their support of the Károlyi-revolution. In social historical terms, the founders and leaders of MANSZ, with their background in the aristocracy, the gentry, and the Christian middle classes, were no different from – and largely overlapped with – the prewar Conservative women’s movements and charitable organizations. Newly mobilized aristocratic women – a development described in Chapter 2, during the last year of the war, and to a large degree due to the efforts of Katinka Károlyi and Rosika Schwimmer in the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club – had a much higher representation in the conservative, charitable organizations and MANSZ than in the militant

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Catholic women’s organizations, but both these groups experienced a right-wing radicalization at the beginning of 1919. The emergence of MANSZ in the first months of 1919 was thus partly a reaction to the democratic reforms of the revolutionary government, such as the announced measure curtailing the churches’ role in public education. But the mobilization of right-wing women also reflected a number of longer-term developments. The most important of these was the crystallization of a whole set of radical illiberal, nationalistic ideas, in which protection of multi-ethnic Hungary’s prewar borders or the aim of minimizing the territorial and population losses expected from the Paris peace settlements went hand in hand with a programme of national regeneration on Christian foundations, and the planned restriction or exclusion of Jews, representing modernity, in economic and social life. The coalition of Christian-conservative women and MANSZ took shape just as this programme: the defence of Hungary’s territorial integrity, the restoration of prewar political and social system, and the ideal of a Christian family at its core was emerging. Both this broad coalition and the programme around which it organized preceded the corresponding developments within the male political elite – not the least because while male organizations would be considered counter-revolutionary and a threat to the government, women and their organizations flew under the radar, so to speak, and were not considered a threat.

‘Christian feminism’ and anti-Semitism from early 1918 to early 1919 What were the main strands of the broad coalition both within and outside MANSZ? The militant Catholic strand was represented in the executive of MANSZ by Edith Farkas, head of the Catholic Mission Society, while in the broader Catholic women’s movement Margit Schlachta emerged as a leader. But the woman who contributed the most to the programme of national regeneration and rebuilding of Christian family was Sarolta Geőcze. Geőcze was born into a Catholic, educated, middle-class family – her father was a lawyer. Her birthplace in Northern Hungary became part of Czechoslovakia after the First World War.18 Trained as a teacher, by the late nineteenth century Geőcze emerged as a leading activist in the Christian Social women’s movement and she helped found the Maria Dorothea Association of female teachers. She became an internationally recognized expert in women’s primary and secondary education, travelled widely in Europe to research pedagogical methods in religious institutions for women, and served as director of a school for girls and as head of the leading teacher’s college for women in

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Budapest. She was also active in the protection of women workers, including the founding of the Hungarian National Association of Christian Women Workers (Magyar Keresztény Munkásnők Országos Egyesülete). As such she came into conflict with liberal and socialist feminists and their rival organizations. Before the war Geőcze specialized in ‘moral education’, a term deployed by the Catholic Church in its fight against the social ills associated with modernization and urbanization. As early as 1898, Geőcze engaged with socialism – at least what she understood by the term. She penned a short study on the subject as early as 1898, titled ‘Socialism in female perspective’.19 In a 1909 talk at the Hungarian Pedagogical Society, later published under the title ‘Moral education as a Hungarian national problem’,20 Geőcze delivered what was the then standard Catholic view of moral decline threatening the Hungarian nation: pornography, debauchery, adultery, and the single-child family. Her anti-Semitic allusions were unmistakable but coded in turns such as ‘shallow, materialistic worldview’, ‘cynicism’, ‘arrogance’, ‘oversexualized’, and the like.21 Compared to her mentor, Béla Bangha, a leading Catholic cultural commentator of the period, Geőcze’s was a still subtle anti-Semitism. But that was to change: by early 1919 she emerged as a leading female activist of the counter-revolution whose writings advanced a militant anti-Semitism and radical nationalism.22 And yet, in light of her long-time commitment to traditional, Christian values and Hungarian nationalism, her postwar radicalization was neither surprising nor particularly sudden, merely in line with the political divisions accentuated by the two revolutions. A brief look at the respective prewar and 1920 pamphlets of Béla Bangha and Sarolta Geőcze provides insight into Geőcze’s original contribution to the toxic mix of illiberalism and anti-Semitism that emerged after the revolutions.23 In the years before the war, Bangha was designated as the Catholic church’s point man against the ‘Jewish press’. At that time Geőcze invariably coded her anti-Semitic remarks while Bangha’s anti-Semitism was much more explicit. In contrast, in their respective writings published in the aftermath of the revolutions Bangha added the revolutions as the ultimate argument for a Jewish conspiracy to undermine Hungarian national interests. Geőcze also added the same argument but importantly also the ‘Christian family’ as the crucial building block of Hungarian society, if it was to turn back from the edge of the abyss. The immediate postrevolutionary period was the time anti-Semitic rhetoric reached its peak. Even Bangha, whose anti-Semitism can be read as racially based and argued, tempered the violent and vile anti-Semitism of his writings by the late 1920s when he allowed for an accommodation with converted and culturally assimilated Jews.24

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Two founders of MANSZ: Cecile Tormay, Emma Ritoók – and the rest The biographies of two of the founders of MANSZ, the similarities and differences in their respective family backgrounds, education, prewar activities, and the paths that led them into MANSZ reveal the mixed lineage of the organization and provides insight into the reasons for the organizing counterrevolution’s broad social support. Of the two women, Emma Ritoók (1868–1945), the ‘renegade of the Sunday Circle’, had the more unusual intellectual itinerary.25 Born into a Protestant family in Nagyvárad, the multi-ethnic Transylvanian city ceded to Romania after the First World War, she was the daughter of a respected judge. Ritoók’s upbringing reflected the ambivalent relationship of the Hungarian gentry with modernization. She had a fairly conventional education, including a few years of high school completed as a private student – the increasingly common practice of young girls who took the year-end examinations without attending classes. At the same time, her father encouraged her to read widely and even try her hand at translation and writing. Then at age thirty-two, too old to be married off, she made a highly unconventional move and enrolled at the University of Budapest. She spent semesters in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris,26 published two novels, and earned a doctorate in Hungarian literature, all before the war. As a writer and intellectual Ritoók found her home in the Sunday Circle, the period’s most important workshop of Hungarian philosophy. According to her unpublished memoirs, Ritoók had questioned her place in the Circle as early as 1917; by November 1918 she completely broke with her erstwhile closest intellectual friends, citing irreconcilable differences between the Jewish leaders of the Circle and her own intense Hungarian patriotism.27 She identified the Sunday Circle’s anti-war stance as a reflex of their Jewishness, an inability to connect with Hungarian national interests. From then on, Ritoók articulated an increasingly radical and racially defined anti-Semitism.28 By the end of 1918 she became a founding member of MANSZ – in fact, she claimed that the very idea of the organization had been hers.29 The influence of Ritoók’s brother, whose anti-Semitism was, in Ritoók’s view, more staunch and longstanding than her own, cannot be excluded.30 By March 1919, as the Károlyi government was supplanted by the Republic of Councils, Ritoók was already firmly anchored in the opposing camp and she justified her position with an elaborate, racially grounded anti-Semitism. Without a doubt the best-known right-wing activist woman of the period, Cecile Tormay was one of the founders and soon the uncontested leader of MANSZ; in the interwar period she rose to the highest echelons of the counter-revolutionary

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regime. Nothing illustrates her stature more than the prominent role in the ceremonies of 16 November 1919. It is safe to say that she earned this distinction not solely with her social graces and connections (although those certainly helped), but with her crucial contribution to the Horthy regime’s legitimization.

Figure 4.1 Cecile Tormay in the early 1930s. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

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Tormay was born into the Hungarian gentry on her mother’s side and ethnic German professionals on her father’s. Like Geőcze, she was trained as a teacher – her education was thus not exceptional in the prewar period when women were already allowed to attend university – but she was well read, and fluent in German, French, and Italian. In the prewar years Tormay became a best-selling novelist, with her political and literary tastes firmly grounded in the Hungarian nationalist and conservative tradition. In her case, there was no need for a radical conversion (as with Ritoók) or a re-evaluation of Christian principles (as with Geőcze). Yet, there is very little to explain the radical anti-Semitism she seemed to have acquired fully formed by late 1918; only a year earlier she had been still socializing with and currying favours from such prominent representatives of the ‘Jewish press’ as Lajos Hatvany (1880–1961), the benefactor of modernist Hungarian literature and, between 1917 and 1919, the owner of the popular daily, Pesti Napló.31 In her case, the radicalization of a latent, casual, or ‘social’ anti-Semitism, a common phenomenon in the last year of the war,32 combined with a burning political ambition.33 We will return for a more extended look at the complex and conflicted personal relationship of Tormay and Ritoók in Chapter 5 – but what about the rest of the founders? The Yearbook (in Hungarian: Almanach) of MANSZ published at the end of 191934 names most of them, and most of the names would be familiar from the account of the Hungarian Women’s Club in Chapter 2. With few exceptions then they were recently mobilized and even more recently radicalized women who somewhat reluctantly entered the suffrage campaign of early 1918 and turned against some of their fellow Club members, most prominently Katinka Károlyi in early 1919. Throughout, most of them deliberately kept a low profile. In the case of Edith Farkas, the leader of the Social Mission Society, the women’s organization of the Christian Socialist, any openly political activity would have been incompatible with her position. (In 1922 she would be instrumental in ending the political career of Margit Schlachta and forcing her out of the Social Mission Society.35) The aristocratic women who so prominently figured at the birth of MANSZ preferred to keep a low public profile. It was to conform to their social conventions, already seen in the account of the Women’s Club – because in their social circle it was deemed unseemly for women to claim a political role, especially for a cause such as the suffrage. Apart from rare documents of their public appearances in the next two decades, very little can be learned about these aristocratic women as they left no public record or papers behind. In her memoirs Emma Ritoók praised the courage of Antónia Sztankay and

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Mrs Békássy in the counter-revolutionary conspiracy – the latter, ironically, was a close relative of Ilona Duczynska’s, whose trial for anti-military activities, liberation from prison on the first day of the October revolution, and subsequent role in the administration of the Republic of Councils was mentioned in Chapter 3. But all this – the keeping out of the public eye, the conspiratorial air, – would change as soon as the victorious counter-revolution elevated MANSZ into the position of power.

The ego-history of MANSZ In Tormay’s An Outlaw’s Diary, the beginnings of MANSZ were described as a conspiracy, complete with secret, nocturnal meetings and the threat of arrest at any minute.36 In fact, the founders of MANSZ faced no threat of arrest and despite the organization’s openly counter-revolutionary objectives, they operated freely and publicly from January to March 1919, until the replacement of the Károlyi government by the Republic of Councils. Then, recognizing – or, in Emma Ritoók’s view, overestimating – the danger and her own importance,37 Tormay fled to the country estate of her friends. Ritoók, for her part, under suspicion as the author of MANSZ flyers, was taken to a police station for interrogation. In her memoirs she described the episode as a farce, with the hapless policeman easily fooled. ‘I’ve been asked to present myself at the police. I’m waiting … an unattractive, hunchbacked Jewish girl sits at a typewriter. Generally, I have never seen uglier and more typical Jews than those who were coming to and fro in there’.38 After admitting that she was the author of a MANSZ flyer that agitated for religious education and the protection of private property, Ritoók was allowed to go. Even in her own admission, she came to no harm during the months of ‘Red terror’, other than having to suffer food shortages, the need to buy on the black market at exorbitant prices, or the humiliation of being seen while tending to her vegetable plot in her suburban villa.39 When it comes to the important question of female agency in the establishment of MANSZ, two possible views must be signalled here. One was recently advanced by a literary historian, whose insightful essay positions Tormay and her aristocratic co-conspirators at the birth of MANSZ as acting ‘on behalf and with the assistance of the [counter-revolutionary] political elite that came to power in the aftermath of the war’.40 ‘She could not have managed’, the author writes, without such stalwarts of the organizing counter-revolution, as the Catholic leadership or MOVE, the extreme Right organization led by the future Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös (1886–1936).41

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This view contrasts sharply with the testimonies of Tormay and Ritoók who emphasized the motivation of the founders as ‘the spurring on of men’, with multiple references to the wartime emasculinization of the male political elite.42 Ritoók, especially, stressed her ownership of this argument and could barely contain her bitterness over its appropriation by Tormay. She first articulated it in conversation with Tormay in late December 1918. ‘Something needs to be done and we, women still have the energy to do so. The men, it seems, had gotten exhausted in the war, had been spent, they don’t have their old strength, they want to wait it out. But the two of us, we can do it’.43 Years later, revising her diary entry relating the birth of MANSZ, Ritoók revisited this painful topic: The idea that I had used to such effect at the start, that the men lost the will to act, that we women need to use our energy to help the country and society seemed to have found such success that the speakers of MANSZ would start their speeches decades later if they wanted to demonstrate the greatness of Tormay: when the men, etc. Word for word my idea, only with the addition of this: and then C.T. took up the banner, etc. Of course I would not have mentioned any banner because I can proudly say that I would have never used such clichés in my speeches.44

Regardless of the final word on this question – most likely to be settled in between the two extremes – what emerges from these observations is the common pattern of right-wing female agency in the defeated nations in the immediate postwar era. Right-wing women’s argument of men’s wartime emasculinization and women’s role in the re-mobilization of the Right in the postwar context makes the case of MANSZ analogous to that of radical nationalist, right-wing women in Germany who revelled in ‘rapping across the knuckles’ of their male peers, encouraging them to restore their manhood through violent, counter-revolutionary action.45 The first yearbook of MANSZ, issued at the end of 1919 (it would be published every year in the interwar period thereafter), by and large confirms the central points of the narrative of MANSZ as the leader of national rebirth. Cecile Tormay’s welcoming address on the first pages ticked all the boxes: the unity of Christian Hungarians, putting aside their religious and class differences, rising up against the alien, godless race and its forces of destruction, and the leading role of women and MANSZ who first articulated the new, nationalist and Christian gospel that eventually became that of the nation’s.46 As if to underline the illustrious position of MANSZ, the yearbook lined up church leaders from both the Catholic and Protestant camps, along with the leading conservative literary lights, several ministers, and women from the executive of MANSZ. Even the most cursory text analysis of the titles would

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reveal the prevalence of ‘Hungarian’, ‘Christian’, and ‘nation’ – all catchwords of the counter-revolution. All the articles contained the mantra of the strength of Hungarian and Christian tradition, first of all the family in repairing the moral destruction caused by the revolutions and restoring the nation after Trianon. The authors, the poems, and even the illustrations all emphasized women’s maternal role, deemed crucial in preserving the nation in a time of national crisis, and claimed the pernicious influence of liberalism and especially communism on the family. This conservative, illiberal model was only occasionally enlivened, as in the contribution of Kunó Klebelsberg (1875–1932) who, alone among the contributors, advocated a more moderate position – at least when it came to women’s education. Soon to be the minister of culture, responsible for introducing an expansive programme to showcase Hungary’s ‘cultural superiority’ over its neighbours, Klebelsberg showed himself to be an advocate of moderate progress in women’s rights. He was even amenable to allowing women to enter – or keep their positions – in some professions, such as teaching in elementary schools, public health, and social work, but also medicine and pharmacy. Especially illuminating is the yearbook’s account of the 16 November ceremony. Following a description of the spectacle and the speeches of Tormay and Horthy, the final sentence depicted the passing of the flag, the gift of MANSZ to Horthy, to highlight the significance of MANSZ in the counter-revolution but also to restore the traditional gender order. ‘In this significant moment we feel that in the bitter and shameful days of this year that wrecked the nation it was women’s hearts that have preserved the two sanctities: nation and faith – let the hands of men carrying arms defend them from now on!’.47

The spectre of racial degeneration in the shadow of Trianon From early 1919 on, a more and more radical – although still by necessity coded – anti-Semitic discourse and a similarly radical illiberal nationalism were increasingly combined – and influenced – by the newly articulated agenda of defending the territorial integrity of Hungary. The following account ties the three right-wing women activists in a joint enterprise – and also refers back to the account of the Women’s Club in Chapter 2. In Tormay’s semi-fictional account, An Outlaw’s Diary, MANSZ had begun to take shape at the end of 1918, barely a month into the liberal revolution. The idea came up in conversation with Ritoók, during the writing of a collective work, to protest the rumoured intent of the Allies to dismember the prewar territory of Hungary.48 No direct evidence corroborates

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this story but a brochure that corresponds to Tormay’s description does exist. Coauthored by Ritoók and Geőcze, with Tormay, by then president of the officially recognized MANSZ, contributing the Preface to the French edition, The Problem of Hungary: Magyar Women to the Women of the Civilized World, a twenty-fourpage brochure (with additional maps) was published in English and French.49 It comes across as a rush job, judging from the poor quality of the English translation (the version I used for the purposes of this book) and outrageous number of typos. Likely written either while final negotiations over the Trianon Treaty were still taking place or rushed to the presses as soon as the Treaty was signed and published, it reflects a desperate, last-ditch effort to influence the decision about the final placement of Hungary’s borders. The brochure’s immediate objective – to appeal to European and Western public opinion to help revise the – by all accounts – draconian clauses of Trianon by calling on a mostly female readership – makes it highly valuable. Not only did it reveal the authors’ perception of what these Western readers’ values might be but, in a departure from the dominant, liberal Hungarian political discourse of the prewar era, it cast Hungary as not, or not entirely, falling within the Western world. This ambiguity of Hungary’s relationship with the West was of course nothing new, merely a rehashed version of the argument voiced by Hungarian politicians since the fifteenth century when the Kingdom of Hungary stood as the bastion of Christian Europe, protecting the ungrateful West from the Ottomans. The struggle against Bolshevism and the necessity to strike it down by harsh and violent means, the authors seemed to say, replicated that earlier historical experience; and, as in previous centuries, Hungary found itself martyred, ravaged by barbaric, Oriental enemies, and abandoned by the Western allies she had so selflessly protected. The circumstances of the text’s publication clearly identify it as a public relations exercise launched from the very top. In early 1920 the counterrevolutionary Hungarian government battled international condemnation for its White terror. In the run-up to the January 1920 elections international labour unions placed Hungary under embargo to protest the White terror, and its government’s repression of the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party. The text, most likely assembled in June 1920, thus sheds light on the emerging strands of counter-revolutionary rhetoric before they were standardized; it displays them at a moment when the Hungarian government was still hoping to convince the Western powers and Western public opinion of the injustice of Trianon. This accounts for the brochure’s curious mix of conservative and radical nationalistic arguments on the one hand and clumsy appeals to Western civilization and values on the other.

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Ritoók and Geőcze mounted a staunch defence of the nationalities policies of prewar Hungary, to counter the by then well-established Western view of their repressive nature. Exposed by British journalists and minority political leaders before and during the war, assimilationist Hungarian policies towards the ethnic minorities had been widely condemned and contributed to the harsh dictates of the Trianon Treaty. The authors contrasted this, in their view misguided, criticism with a litany of horrors committed by the armies and civilians of the former ethnic minorities, now masters of their own countries. They made clever use of the vocabulary of British and French imperialism to drive home their points about the benign and civilizing influence of prewar Hungarian rule, the professionalism of its public service, the quality education and public-health services it provided, fighting corruption, ignorance, and a general lack of culture amongst non-Hungarian subjects.50 For good measure, Ritoók and Geőcze also provided examples of atrocities allegedly committed against the newly created Hungarian ethnic minorities, now living in the successor states. Rape and torture figured at the top of the list of horrific acts attributed to the newly ruling nations and were described in almost pornographic detail. The victims invariably came from the educated middle class and the upper class, the perpetrators described as uncouth and uneducated – but most of all, alien to Hungarian culture and customs.51 The descriptions of rapes and torture were rich in graphic detail, and they fit seamlessly into the pre-existing – and highly gendered – myth of a martyred Hungary ravaged by invading armies in earlier centuries while the West stood by. To identify the respective contributions of the two authors, The Problem of Hungary could be compared to Geőcze’s 1920 brochure, The Thousand-Year-Old Country.52 A reiteration of a November 1919 lecture by Geőcze53 and The Problem of Hungary, this text was a full-fledged version of the radical nationalistic, antiSemitic rhetoric that would come to dominate the interwar period. It recounts instances of sexual and non-sexual violence committed against women, even pregnant women, by Romanians and Slovaks, ‘wives dishonored in front of their husbands, daughters in front of their mothers and the other way around’.54 In contrast to The Problem of Hungary, in this later work Geőcze highlighted the base morals of leaders of the Commune, ‘with very few exceptions common criminals: thieves, burglars, murderers, cruel sadists … and in the moral field, promoters of free love’.55 She also cited instances of what in her perception amounted to sexual violence, committed by officials of the Republic of Councils. Seemingly innocuous episodes, such as the introduction of sexual education at schools, were not only overly dramatized – ‘Adolescent young girls fainted in

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class’56 – but also presented as resulting in abhorrent consequences: in a few months ‘230 young mother under the age 14’.57 Tormay may have only supplied the introduction to the French edition of The Problem of Hungary, but her fingerprints, so to speak, were all over it. The text reads as a draft for Tormay’s longer, more elaborate version, advanced in An Outlaw’s Diary. The two volumes of Tormay’s book – volume one: The Revolution, volume two: The Commune – were published in Hungarian in 1920 and 1921; English and French editions, printed with government subsidies, followed in 1923 and 1925, respectively. The book became a best-seller and one of the three most influential works of the early 1920s, along with Dezső Szabó’s (1879–1945) novel Az elsodort falu (Swept-away village, 1919) and Gyula Szekfű’s (1883–1955) historical essay Három nemzedék (Three generations, 1920). In her characterization of the leaders of the two revolutions – accused of all imaginable crimes and bearing all known antiSemitic stereotypes – and the imaginative and graphic depiction of the ‘Red terror’, Tormay’s book was not merely a call to arms but, pure and simple, a call to pogrom. In many ways it foreshadowed the worst of Nazi propaganda and contributed to the cleansing of political and intellectual life of Jews, leftists, and liberals. Tormay’s favourite turns, describing the violence of the four months of Communist government, were steeped in gendered terms: ‘Frenzied bloodorgies, hysterical women, degenerates, inquisitors, blood-thirsty gnomes, the utmost limits of bestiality, gangs organized for common wholesale murder and robbery, human brutes, monsters, bestial instinct for plunder and butchery latent within them’,58 etc. Her book reinvented and reshaped a pre-existing Hungarian anti-Semitism. Compared to The Problem of Hungary, there are important differences: the original villains of the brochure – the alleged Romanian, Czech, and Serb perpetrators of ethnic and gendered violence against Hungarians – largely disappeared from Tormay’s book and were replaced by Jews, with the bulk of – and in some cases identical – horrific acts of rape and torture now attributed to them. In The Problem of Hungary, Geőcze’s Thousand-Year-Old Country, and in An Outlaw’s Diary, gender, class, and ethnic divides were presented as illustrative of larger cultural differences: the Hungarian victims invariably middle class or upper-middle class and educated, the perpetrators always lower class, uneducated, barbaric. And in all three texts, middle-class and upper-middleclass women victims came to represent Hungary, ravished by alien, murderous, parasitic races, left to the mercy of her mortal enemies, their sacrifice – as their country’s – unappreciated by Western allies. Lastly, these texts, elements of the counter-revolutionary rhetoric in the making, were shaped by external factors and the attempt to speak to a range of domestic

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and foreign audiences. The Problem of Hungary was written during the crucial months while the Trianon Treaty was being finalized – and with its details still under negotiations, the extent of the counter-revolutionary violence had to appear minimal and justified. By addressing the women of the West, the authors of the brochure appealed to an imagined international solidarity of, if not sisterhood – reserved for liberal feminists – then womanly sympathy. In contrast, An Outlaw’s Diary, despite its English and French editions, was at least originally meant for domestic consumption. In Tormay’s book we find no trace of the earlier rhetoric aimed at Western women; the change of tone, the unapologetic anti-Semitism, and embrace of counter-revolutionary violence reflected the growing disillusionment with the West and the emerging isolationist streak of the Hungarian regime.

Right-wing women activists and radical anti-Semitism A number of specific Hungarian wartime and immediate postwar socio-economic and cultural developments played a crucial role in this seemingly sudden emergence of radical anti-Semitism. Especially significant was the perceived threat of a ‘Jewish takeover’ in the professions, higher education, and the cultural fields. First voiced by conservative and Christian ideologues in the prewar decade, the threat of a ‘Jewish invasion’ of these traditional strongholds of Christian middleand upper-middle classes became a rallying cry of the Right during the last years of the war. As we have seen in Chapter 1, from 1916 on this rhetoric increasingly seeped into public discourse and was further enhanced by the tropes of the Jewish shirker, the Jewish wartime profiteer, and the Galician refugee.59 In university education, the relative overrepresentation of Jews, already noted before the war, became an even more pronounced trend.60 Combined with the spectacular wartime increase in the ratio of female students, this resulted in a significant over-representation of Jewish female students. It is not farfetched to argue that the fear of a ‘Jewish takeover’, especially acutely observed in women’s university enrolment in the war years, became instrumental in the radicalization of these right-wing female activists. Their writings articulate the growing anxieties of the traditional, Christian elite over the erosion of their social privileges, the relative economic deprivations experienced during the war, their sidelining as the hereditary political class during the two revolutions, and the looming threat of a devastating peace treaty. To what degree was the radicalization and mobilization of the three women activists determined by their biography, in particular their ties to the annexed

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territories? It would be tempting to argue that it played a decisive role: after all, they all had their ancestral home in Transylvania and/or Northern Hungary annexed by the successor states after 1920, and they all made frequent references to their lost homeland. And yet one could name an equal number of left-wing activist women with family ties to Transylvania or Northern Hungary who decried the harsh dictates of Trianon but did not take a similar political path. What we see, rather, is a nascent Hungarian version of the ‘blood and soil’ argument applied to the annexed territories and used to great effect by all three writers: as if the family roots in the annexed territories somehow endowed them with an exclusive membership in the national community, lent them a deeper sense of belonging to the nation. Their common socio-economic background may have played an even more significant role in the three women’s radicalization. As members of the uppermiddle class, they had experienced a gradual erosion of their social privileges in the last years of the war and endured a devastating loss of political privileges (held by their male peers, the bona fide political class of the old regime) during the two revolutions. As women educated beyond the standards of their class, they also faced increasing competition from women of the assimilating Jewish middle class, in higher education and the newly opened intellectual fields.61 Against this background, the everyday, relative deprivations of the last war year and the revolutions came to be experienced as violations, violence committed against private property and space, but most of all social status. This may explain why their indignation over food shortages, lack of cabs, and crowded tramway cars turned into vicious anti-Semitism and the justification, even celebration of counter-revolutionary pogroms and terror. Despite the similarities in their socio-economic and family background the three women had ties to distinct intellectual and political traditions, had followed distinct personal and political paths, and contributed distinct elements to the counter-revolutionary ideology. In Ritoók’s turn from her prewar association with liberal cultural circles to counter-revolutionary conspiracy and the founding of MANSZ, disappointments in personal relationships with members of the Sunday Circle may have been at play. Her competition with her relative and literary rival Tormay also ended in defeat, and their personal relationship reached a low point in the early 1920s, just as Tormay’s political career took off. Geőcze, for her part, while relying on a pre-existing, militant Catholic antiSemitism, best represented by Béla Bangha and Ottokár Prohászka, became radicalized sometime at war’s end and during the revolutions. (The turning point must have come around the end of 1918 as in the spring of 1918 she was still willing to cooperate with liberal feminists.62 She was able to reframe the prewar, pro-family,

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pro-Christian arguments in the context of Trianon, directing them not only against ethnic minorities but even more forcefully against Jews and liberals. Yet she was also able to shift between anti-liberal, anti-Jewish, and anti-ethnic minority sentiments when required – as in the months leading up to the signing of the Trianon Treaty. Among the women activists of the Right, Tormay and her An Outlaw’s Diary represented by far the most influential contribution, supplying much of the rhetoric of – and assuring a great deal of public support for – the counterrevolutionary regime. In the book she thoroughly mined the by-then-familiar anti-Semitic trope of Jewish subversives but also reinforced it, not the least with the crude illustrations of the book, offering mug shots of the leaders of the Republic of Councils, complete with their – in some cases made-up – Jewish or Jewish-sounding original family names. All three women built an apocalyptic vision of the period of the Republic of Councils into their arguments but the question whether, and to what degree, their radicalization was due to the second revolution remains open. The founding of MANSZ in January 1919, the continuity of illiberal, anti-Semitic arguments in Geőcze’s works from 1909 on, and the intense preoccupation with the Jewish question in Ritoók’s private musings from 1917 all seem to suggest that the Republic of Councils may have reinforced but did not fundamentally change or shape their views.

Right-wing women and violence: Victims or perpetrators? Hungary’s case in the immediate post–First World War period offers fertile ground to explore the culture of defeat and the corresponding culture of violence. Yet discussions of violence during the postwar revolutions and counter-revolution in Hungary have remained the realm of political historians,63 with the relative extent of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence still a highly charged topic. From the start, political and scholarly discussions of the atrocities committed during the postwar revolutions and counter-revolution had been informed by competing political agendas: first the Horthy regime’s official account was pitched against the émigré narrative, then the post-1945 communist narrative overtook that of the Horthy regime.64 Wrestling for political legitimacy and the control of historical memory, these narratives had also reacted to and borrowed from one another, in many instances mirroring the other’s accusations and tropes of violence. Historical studies of the ‘Red’ and ‘White’ terrors have, for the last century, engaged in a battle over narratives and numbers – and the debate has only been re-energized since the 1989 regime change.65

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The rare articles on the Hungarian revolutions and counter-revolution that have been informed by gender66 used the Hungarian case mainly as a contrast to the better-known German and other Eastern European cases. While these studies remain within the paradigm of women as victims of sexual and non-sexual violence, they have been useful to highlight common trends in the defeated Central European countries. These include the threat of female political emancipation, with the suffrage granted in all Central European countries after 1918, and increased left-wing female activism, both triggering a violent reaction in the form of counter-revolutionary, sexual, and non-sexual violence against women. The focus on revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence is crucial to an understanding of Hungarian right-wing women’s re-mobilization and radicalization. Violence perceived or experienced under the two revolutions gave these women the ammunition to justify counter-revolutionary violence, informed and shaped their rhetoric, and lent it a potent popular appeal. In the following discussion of the three leading right-wing female activists’ contributions to the counter-revolutionary ideology and rhetoric, I focus on ‘violence’, a term that has been successfully applied to the study of the postwar period. But while the few studies that had as their subject women in the Central and East-Central-European context considered violence committed against women, I consider these three right-wing women as the perpetrators of violence. The writings of these prominent female activists demonstrate the crucial role of the experience of war and defeat in the transformation of Christian-conservative views into a racially based anti-Semitism and radical, illiberal nationalism. Their published writings and archival documents point to peculiar elements of their wartime experience, above all the real and perceived erosion of their social and political privileges, as a source of their re-mobilization and radicalization. Geőcze, Tormay, and Ritoók all invoked two kinds of violence: the violence they felt they had suffered during the revolutions and the paramilitary violence during the counter-revolution that they justified and endorsed. Their understanding of the first kind of violence – as a series of transgressions along class, race, and gender lines – can be linked to their mobilization on the side of the counter-revolution. This mobilization included participation in the counter-revolutionary conspiracy, the founding of MANSZ, and enthusiastic support of the counter-revolutionary regime. The justification of paramilitary violence was an important element of the last, and they accomplished that by representing it as merely payback for the – appropriately exaggerated – atrocities of the ‘Red terror’, committed during the Republic of Councils.

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When it came to the violence accompanying the early stage of the counterrevolution, the view of the leaders of MANSZ must have been shaped by the dynamic between the male elite of the Horthy regime and MANSZ. The fact that the women’s organization was born out of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy and developed into the regime’s representative women’s organization,67 and the elevated status of MANSZ as a reward for their role in the re-mobilization and establishment of the counter-revolutionary regime, all became part of their own empowerment and their role in the re-masculinization of the men of their own class. Lastly, violence must have seemed to them as the appropriate response to the humiliations they felt they had suffered under the revolutions.

From violence suffered to violence justified The family and social ties and the shared political convictions between Tormay and Ritoók made for a strong alliance at the time of MANSZ’s founding. As early as November 1919, as Tormay’s rise began, however, their personal relationship became damaged beyond repair. Nevertheless, their shared sense of humiliation suffered during the revolutions, their reaction to the violent events of these months, and their justification of paramilitary violence proved almost identical. In her memoir entries Ritoók confessed to be more moderate in her antiSemitism than Tormay but equally protective of the national colours; she confronted the rumours of the raging ‘White terror’, widely reported in the foreign press, with the usual excuses. Commenting on the pogroms of Kecskemét – the scene of horrendous anti-Jewish violence by one of the paramilitary detachments – she explained: the expression of local sentiment against the Jews was justified because ‘not only did Jewish women receive the occupying Romanian68 troops with flowers, Jews also spied and reported on people to the Romanians’.69 As for the foreign press’s reports on the horrific acts of the paramilitaries, Ritoók fell back on the popular anti-Semitic trope, seeing in them the handiwork of Jews, using their control of the international press.70 The two women’s reactions to revolutionary or counter-revolutionary violence alike reflected indignation over the wartime and revolutionary breakdown of social, class, and gender order. Tormay’s reaction to the most notable violent act of the October 1918 revolution, the assassination of former Prime Minister István Tisza, illustrates this point. Tormay relayed her brother’s telephone call: ‘He is the only victim of the revolution. Soldiers killed him. They penetrated into his house and …

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in the presence of his wife and of Denise Almássy they shot him dead’.71 Tormay’s mother’s remark, reading the newspaper report on the murder – ‘Something must have been omitted from that account. Hungarian soldiers don’t kill in the presence of women’72 – further illustrates Tormay’s view; not only did the murder belie the ‘bloodless’ reputation of the revolution but it ushered in the complete breakdown of society, upending the rules of gallantry and respect for property and social position. Ritoók’s comments on two political murders committed by her own side highlight the same point. Rosa Luxemburg’s murder in January 1919 prompted Ritoók to condemn her as a woman who transgressed gender boundaries: ‘As if they had enough of this terrible rot in Germany as well, they killed Liebknecht and that monster Rosa Luxembourg [sic!]. I cannot feel even a trace of pity. Horrible woman – and with her was destroyed what may be the worst, ugliest trait in a woman, the ugliness of hatred’.73 Unlike the left-wing women discussed in the previous chapter who reacted with shock and for whom Luxemburg’s murder served as a turning point in their own political radicalization, Ritoók’s reaction was more subdued and seemed to confirm her already fully formulated position. The second murder was closer to home: In February 1920 members of the Ostenburg detachment, a paramilitary unit under Horthy’s control, murdered Béla Somogyi (1868–1920) and Béla Bacsó (1891–1920), the editor-in-chief and journalist, respectively, of the Social Democratic daily, Népszava (People’s Voice). The timing of the murder, on the eve of Horthy’s election as head of state and during the final negotiations of the Trianon Treaty, was most inopportune. In this light it is even more striking that the usually well informed Ritoók blamed the victims; her notes on the event took the form of an uncharacteristically incoherent rant: it was the newspaper’s fault, most people would not even consider the murder a crime, the international press was silent when it was ‘our turn’ to be killed, Somogyi was said to be a spy for the foreign ministry, and the socialists and the Jews had the upper hand again because they could spread their lies in – the trope of the Jewish press, once more – the foreign press.74

The violations of daily life: The streetcar Beyond the actual acts of violence – real or perceived, imagined or feared – the two women’s perspective on violence was informed by their everyday experience of the revolutions and the simultaneous collapse of prewar society: as a series of class, gender, and racial transgressions that they understood as a violation of and violence against their former lifestyle and space. Tormay offered countless

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street scenes, most taking place at night, with pages leaping out of Dickens’ London. She described the lack of streetlights, drunken soldiers, shots fired, the dangers lurking at every corner as carefully drawn metaphors for the horrors of revolutions and the breakdown of civilization especially threatening to women.75 Ritoók lamented the disappearance of taxis. Now she had to rely on the streetcar and wondered: Why was it always so crowded? In the olden days, travel was so civilized, so comfortable – where did all these people come from? And while she allowed that people had grown accustomed to women working in offices, she noted the complaints against female ticket controllers who were rude.76 From the two memoirs the streetcar emerged as, next to the street, the site most likely to remind one of the broken social order. To these two women, the daily trial of taking the streetcar equalled the significance of atrocities committed by either side – perhaps because they experienced the former in person. Trivial episodes of minor transgressions of class, gender, and race were presented as violent intrusions and became – alongside the street’s transformation into a fundamentally dangerous space – their quintessential experience of the revolutions. In Tormay’s book her epiphany about the founding of MANSZ took place against the backdrop of a streetcar episode in November 1918. When the electric tram stopped I stepped forward to get off. Somebody knocked me in the back. My feet missed the steps and I fell, face first, into the road. I looked back. It was a fat young man, in brand-new field uniform. His characteristic nose fell like a soft bag over his lips. … That is typical of the streets of Budapest today; in fact that is the only reason I mention it.77

The episode proved significant enough to warrant mention by Ritoók who described her subsequent visit: Tormay ‘was lying in bed and said, some Jew pushed her off the tram’.78 The second streetcar episode was featured on the final pages of Tormay’s book with all the tropes included: crowded train, dark street, no taxis to be had, and a drunken soldier shoving and dragging her off the steps of the street car.79 A few pages later the Bolsheviks take over, the Apocalypse begins – and Tormay flees to the countryside.

Conclusion: Right-wing women activists between rights and revanche The original contribution of right-wing female activists to the counterrevolutionary rhetoric was to link the programme of a Christian-conservative regeneration of the Hungarian family, seen as the bulwark of the nation against

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the perceived liberal-Bolshevik-Jewish threat, to the regeneration of the nation, posited as the primary task after the trauma of Trianon. MANSZ targeted Hungarian middle- and lower-middle-class women, and successfully engaged large numbers of them in this programme that was presented as crucial to the nation’s survival. The aristocratic and upper-middle-class leaders of MANSZ – women with substantial social cachet and accomplishments – were also able to make the violent beginnings of the counter-revolutionary regime palatable for a population traumatized by war, defeat, revolutions, virtual civil war, and foreign occupation. Moreover, they used the anxieties of the Christian middle classes over the threat of losing their social privileges, their experience of wartime and revolutionary social upheaval, and the country’s devastating economic and territorial losses as building blocks for a noxious anti-Semitism that designated liberals and Jews as scapegoats for these disasters. MANSZ, Tormay, and her followers also epitomized the paradox between the social stature and graces associated with upper- and upper-middle-class women and the violent avenging of the ‘Red terror’ endorsed by all three. By legitimizing violence, these female activists and MANSZ broke with the longestablished pacifist tradition of liberal women’s movements in Hungary and undermined the very roles and values – conservative and Christian – they had prescribed for women. Tormay’s An Outlaw’s Diary supplied much of the rhetoric for the counter-revolutionary regime that rode to power on a wave of unprecedented atrocities and lawlessness. The fact that it was presented by an elegant, aristocratic-looking woman from a prominent family added an extra layer of legitimacy to the regime’s venomously anti-Semitic agenda. Similarly paradoxical was the position of MANSZ on women’s educational rights. They advocated a pre-modern family model and an extreme version of maternalist ideology for women at large while at the same time they urged daughters of the Christian middle class to claim a larger role in higher education, to reverse the prewar and wartime trends of ‘Jewish takeover’, especially marked among female university students. This led to the only instance of MANSZ standing up for women’s rights – or at least the rights of a distinct group of women – against the government’s planned restrictions for women’s enrolment in 1923.80 Their encouragement of middle-class Christian women to enter higher education was fundamentally different from the liberal feminist programme; it was not a call to fight for women’s education rights but a patriotic duty, to fight the destructive modernizing forces and trends, and help restore the Christian foundations of the nation. The paradoxical nature of the political message of MANSZ and the multiple  strands of both the right-wing women’s organization and the gendered

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counter- revolutionary ideology it represented can be perhaps best grasped in the changing positions of right-wing women activists on women’s suffrage. After the aborted attempts at holding elections during the liberal revolution and the limited and discriminative elections during the Republic of Councils, in January 1920 women finally got the chance to vote. The supreme irony of the fact that the sole elected female MP, Margit Schlachta, was as recently as October 1918 not a proponent of women’s full electoral right was likely forgotten. Given the fact that most founders of MANSZ as well as the leading Christian-conservative women activists participated in – if reluctantly, as was described in the history of the Women’s Club in Chapter 2 – the last suffrage campaign of the first half of 1918, we can trace their shifting positions from early 1918 to early 1920. What we find is that within less than two years, they changed track more times than one can count. In March 1918, when conservative Christian activists raised the flag of ‘Christian feminism’, they did that because the granting of women’s suffrage seemed imminent and they were determined to fight the liberal feminists on their own turf. Yet they still managed to obfuscate their position by claiming that they agreed women’s right to vote ‘as long as it did not threaten the order and safety of the social order’.81 In November 1918, when the decree of the Károlyi government about universal suffrage was about to be announced, Christian activists still insisted: ‘We want a proportional, general, secret ballot for women, separate from men’s with an age limit of 24, so that women can vote only for women.’82 By December 1918 their position changed once more, telling the readers of Magyar Nő to support the Christian Socialist Party because it was going to nominate women candidates.83 By January 1919 their slogans tilted further away from even the appearance of representing women’s special interests as they announced their electoral slogans: ‘Vote for a Christian program! Territorial integrity! Religious instruction at schools! Welfare program! Representation of women’s interests! Freedom of assembly!’.84 In September 1919, in anticipation of an election under a counter-revolutionary government and with the liberal feminists safely out of the way, Christian activists gave up all pretence of working for women’s interests. They announced: ‘There is no separate women’s interest or men’s interest. As soon as we look more closely, we can see that the two are the same.’85 In fairness, they still advocated for women candidates, if only arguing on a maternalistic basis: because women as mothers were born to take care of their family, so they would take good care of the nation’s many wounds as well.86 And in March 1920, during the nominations for the byelection that followed the January parliamentary elections, describing the fights around the nomination of Margit Schlachta with ‘even members of our own camp’,

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a rare, momentary but unmistakably feminist rhetoric emerged on the pages of Magyar Nő.87 Tormay, as the rare leading female activist who stayed away from the Women’s Club and the previous year’s suffrage campaign, was a newcomer to the debate around the issue of women’s suffrage in the post-revolutionary era. So when in January 1920 she handed down the directive of the MANSZ executive to Hungarian women voting for the first time, nobody could accuse her of being inconsistent. And her newly gained position of authority as leader of MANSZ protected her from any public criticism – although Schwimmer, writing in exile and thus unable to reach the Hungarian public, was quick to point out her complete lack of credentials when it came to representing women’s rights.88 Tormay’s message in the inaugural issue of the MANSZ Yearbook was blunt: Now that Hungarian women had the vote – a right they did not ask for but received with a certain resignation – they needed ‘honest and impartial advice’.89 And who else to provide such advice than MANSZ, the organization formed by the best among Hungarian women? The text that was meant at once to introduce MANSZ to its potential membership and fulfil the much more urgent task of electoral propaganda did make absolutely clear the mandate of the organization: Its ‘aim is to recruit and organize all those Hungarian women and young girls who have the vote, are directed by a Christian feeling and stand on a national basis, so that on the occasion of elections the weight of women’s organizations could be deployed to secure the victory of Christian national spirit, against the anti-Hungarian, destructive direction’.90 Right-wing women activists may have supplied some of the ideas and slogans, and even some of the guts of the counter-revolution. But once Horthy’s National Army took the country and Budapest, stripping the city of the red rugs it had draped itself during the previous year, and in the ceremony of 16 November 1919 assigned women to their proper supporting roles, MANSZ came full circle and gender order was restored. Women who in principle had the vote since November 1918 had the chance to practice it fourteen months later but under completely different conditions. The liberal era and the politics of rights were overtaken by the politics of revanche. Liberal feminists and liberal parties in general were pushed to the margins of political life and despite their political rights so were Hungarian women. There were of course exceptions: Leading right-wing women activists, and especially the leaders of MANSZ, were given unprecedented prominence and they embraced their new roles according to their temperament and taste for public life. Geőcze returned to the fold of a Christian Social movement which after the revolutions would significantly tone

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down the socialist element in its programme – not coincidentally even the name of the movement was changed from Christian Socialist to Christian Social. Tormay took to politics with uninhibited ambition and was elevated to the highest echelons of the establishment. By the time the 1922 parliamentary elections rolled along, electoral rights of men and especially women were seriously curtailed, and gender order in mainstream politics safely restored. Even the arch-conservative Margit Schlachta, the first female MP who acquired a taste for political life, was prohibited by Catholic Church officials to repeat her successful run for Parliament.

5

The Political Is Personal: The Friendships and Fallings-Out of Emma Ritoók Introduction: MANSZ and the Horthy regime – Public images and private lives – Fellow women writers and friends – The problem of the older, unmarried professional woman – Emma Ritoók, Anna Lesznai, and the Sunday Circle – Biographies and transgressions – Memories of one another – Sisters-in-law but comrades-in-arms no longer

Introduction: MANSZ and the Horthy regime With its conservative, gendered rhetoric that tied the nation’s survival to the maternal duty of Hungarian women, MANSZ had become indispensable to the interwar regime. Its message reached wide and deep into Hungarian society; and it provided an easy fit with the conservative idiom of the churches, especially because the Catholic Church retained a dominant role in education. The frontispiece of MANSZ yearbooks bore pictures of young girls, dressed in sixteenth-century costumes, shielding with their body the symbol of preTrianon Hungary and a larger-than-life Mary dispensing bread to a modernday crowd; the pictures referred to older, familiar representations of medieval Hungary, the country of Mary, sacrificed to the barbaric Mongols and Ottomans in defence of Christian Europe.1 Nobody expressed the connection between the old and new nationalistic rhetoric more eloquently than Cecile Tormay in her customary New Year’s message in the MANSZ calendar: ‘Since the beginning of its empire at the foot of the Carpathian mountains the Hungarian nation fell in its grave three times: [it was] slain by the Mongolians along the river Sajó, by the Ottomans on the plain of Mohács, and by the Jews in Budapest.’2 Other crucial elements of this ideology, such as a cult of revanche and an officially sanctioned anti-Semitism, were propagated by right-wing political

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parties, enforced by paramilitary, government-sponsored youth organizations, celebrated in public spectacles, and indoctrinated into young children in daily school rituals.3 Revanchism – both in foreign politics and government propaganda – continued unabated throughout the interwar period and would eventually lead to Hungary’s participation in the Second World War on the side of Germany. Despite the sabre rattling of revanchist official discourse, the Hungarian interwar regime was not a totalitarian one. In 1922 the conservative but pragmatic Prime Minister István Bethlen (1874–1946) came to power and clamped down on paramilitary violence, tempered anti-Semitic public discourse, and introduced moderately modernizing economic policies. At the same time, Kunó Klebelsberg, the minister for culture and education, introduced major investments in representative cultural institutions, scholarships, and educational reforms to showcase Hungary’s ‘cultural supremacy’ over the successor states. Like Bethlen, Klebelberg was an aristocrat, highlighting the continuity of the influence of ancien régime elite in political life; but they both represented a direction more open to reform, although within limits. At the same time, the period’s educational policies were also marked by the numerus clausus law, designed to restrict the enrolment of Jewish students at universities – and although the law’s application was suspended in 1928, it legitimized anti-Jewish discrimination and prepared the public for the antiJewish, racially discriminatory policies of the late 1930s.4 Liberal-bourgeois political parties as well as the Social Democratic Party were represented in Parliament but their influence was mainly limited to the capital. After the bloodletting of the massive post-revolutionary emigration of left-wing intellectuals and artists, pockets of modernist culture survived only on the margins of mainstream cultural life. The continuing gains in women’s employment notwithstanding, the leaders and publications of MANSZ continued to advocate their illiberal message with a pre-modern Hungarian family at its centre. Among others MANSZ had spent much effort, along with large sums, including generous government subsidies, on setting up home-based craft workshops. Countess Rafael Zichy, Tormay’s close friend, headed the programme and encouraged middle-class MANSZ members to wear dresses made from homespun fabrics ‘that are nicer and cheaper than factory-made fabrics’. This was a characteristic example of MANSZ propaganda, advocating a nationalistic project that supposedly transcended class distinctions.5

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Public images and private lives The irony of upper-class women managing a programme that recruited poor rural women to resurrect a mythical, pre-industrial Hungarian economy was inescapable. But no more so than the fact that Hungarian women’s duty to resurrect the nation through motherhood was advocated by women such as Margit Schlachta, the member of a secular Catholic order, or the unmarried Sarolta Geőcze and Emma Ritoók, and Cecile Tormay, similarly single and long rumoured to be a lesbian. In a pre-celebrity age these women’s upper-middle-class and gentry origins and/or affiliation with the Catholic Church (in the case of Schlachta and Geőcze) lent them sufficient social cachet so that their personal lives never came, at least publicly, under scrutiny. Yet family and social background, affiliations, friendships, and other personal relationships were far from inconsequential when it came to women who embarked on a life in academia, the arts, social work, and politics. For the few who did so, the family and social background they were born into and the social and intellectual circles they chose mattered a great deal in how they advanced and how they were judged by the general public. Due to the Catholic institutional culture in which they spent their entire working lives, we know very little about the families, upbringing, and even less of the personal lives of Schlachta and Geőcze. (In the latter’s obituary, published in the literary journal under the editorship of Tormay, not a single private detail was divulged.6) We can only hypothesize the influence their family background and personal lives might have had on their inner lives and political views. We do, however, know substantially more about the family and social networks of Ritoók and Tormay – because of their own autobiographical works and diaries and because they left behind correspondence and characterizations of their contemporaries – and one another. Few were more conscious of the power of family and social connections and had given them more thought than Ritoók did in her memoirs, titled ‘Years and People.’7 And there was possibly no woman writer more self-conscious, as preoccupied with her own successes and failures and those of her contemporaries than Ritoók. Her memoirs, written, annotated, and appended continually throughout the 1920s, nominally start in 1914 and end in 1926. She weaved a loose history of her family and upbringing into the first, longest part that covered the war and the first revolution in 329 pages. The year 1919 was given 261 pages alone, followed by another 236 pages, stretching from 1920 to the end of 1922, with the shortest part, 141 pages dedicated to the four years until 1926. A short, fifty-page section, with the title ‘Family history and me’, was added at a much later date, in 1940, suggesting that at that point Ritoók may have considered publication.

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The chronological narrative is frequently interrupted by comments about two central themes: Ritoók’s successes and failures as a writer and politician and, above all, the Jewish question. The latter was a subject she kept coming back to, like an itch she could not scratch to her satisfaction. Throughout, she enumerated her own social and intellectual assets and reflected on her rank among her fellow women writers and political or public women. In a highly autobiographical novel, The Adventurers of the Spirit, published in 1921, she also provided an alternative memoir of the years 1913–1919, and through her alter ego and other, thinly fictionalized or composite characters grappled with much of the same questions.8 The respective relationships of Ritoók with two fellow women writers, Anna Lesznai and Cecile Tormay, serve as a case in point for demonstrating the bleeding into one another of the personal and the political at a time when political choices came with life-altering consequences. Both relationships transcended the boundaries between the two and both relationships were shaped by the complex interplay between the personal and the political. The friendship with Lesznai represented Ritoók’s past through their shared membership in the Sunday Circle during the war years, while the relationship with Tormay spoke to the more recent, right-wing political direction on which Ritoók embarked in the last year of the war. Yet Tormay also represented the past because of Ritoók’s return to the political camp her family background predestined her.

Fellow women writers and friends Despite the recent reissue of The Adventurers of the Spirit,9 the novelist Ritoók has been largely forgotten.10 But if the legacy of Ritoók the writer is beyond salvaging, as a memoirist she is indispensable. Read alongside one another, the memoirs and the novel shed light on Ritoók’s internal struggle to articulate, analyse, and contextualize her anti-Semitism – and it is this self-reflective investigation of her family and peers from this single vantage point that makes the novel a failure but the memoirs uniquely useful. Unlike the semi-fictional An Outlaw’s Diary by Tormay, discussed in the previous chapter, Ritoók’s memoirs are entirely genuine. Judging from the venom she spent almost evenly on everyone discussed, she did not have publication in mind. The annotations, added later, taped, and folded to align with the neatly typed half-pages, similarly seem to have served the purpose of correcting and clarifying details or points important to Ritoók alone. While The Adventurers of the Spirit, a fictionalized account of the same years, 1914–1920, has been frequently cited by literary scholars, her memoirs have only been read by a select few.

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Ritoók was mindful, to the point of obsession of her place and perceived failure to succeed in the literary world. In an important passage early in the memoirs she offered a comparison of whom she considered – no pretence of false modesty here – ‘the three Hungarian women writers of the prewar period’:11 Cecile Tormay, Margit Kaffka (1880–1918), and herself. In the comparison that followed, she used the categories of talent, culture (in the sense of background), and environment to establish a ranking. Tormay demonstrated the highest degree of talent at mimicry. But ‘had she enough culture, learning, and enough ambition to fulfill her talent, had she not believed all the praise’,12 she might have created more valuable works. Kaffka, says Ritoók, ‘had the most innate talent but exhausted it soon as she did not have enough culture from which to nurture it’.13 And about herself, Ritoók says, she had more original, innate talent than Tormay but less than Kaffka. However, she was raised in a traditional family and environment, left to her own devices. When at age thirty-one she came to Budapest, she was preoccupied with her studies and philosophical questions, finding no time for artistic work.14 Ritoók conveniently left out Kaffka’s own small-town background and financial struggles, and managed to turn her own relatively secure financial background and the opportunity to attend university, including semesters in Paris and Heidelberg, into a disadvantage. Ritoók’s respective friendships and fallings-out with Anna Lesznai and Cecile Tormay are, to a certain degree, mirror images of one another, reflecting and revealing conflicts over personal as well as political choices. The two personal relationships also encapsulate the political choice – of Ritoók and others in the Hungarian social and cultural elite – between progress and nation. The singular merit of Ritoók’s memoirs is the agony of introspection and the depth of insight she offers into the process of what was the typical choice for the Hungarian so-called historical middle-class and cultural elite for the nationalist, illiberal option, already taken as early as 1906 and more definitely in 1916. Both relationships were complex, coloured by family history and allegiances, personal and professional jealousy and competition, personal grudges and slights. The friendship with Lesznai, as contemplated by Ritoók throughout the 1920s, was in many ways limited to the period in her past when she found an intellectual home in the Sunday Circle, among the urban, highly educated, mainly Jewish intellectuals between 1915 and 1918. The friendship with Tormay was at its most intense in the heady, conspiratorial days of the founding of MANSZ in early 1919; and it coincided with the end of Ritoók’s association with the Sunday Circle. Ritoók herself explained and narrated her growing anti-Semitism and turn to the Right in terms of her gradual alienation from the

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Sunday Circle. Interestingly, she failed to see in her alliance with Tormay and role in the founding of MANSZ a return to her family roots and her native social element, the Christian middle class.

The problem of the older, unmarried professional woman Both relationships – with the two fellow women writers Lesznai and Tormay – as well as the larger groups of the men and women of the Sunday Circle and the women of MANSZ – exposed the problems Ritoók faced as an older, single, professional woman. In the Sunday Circle she may have been fully accepted and respected but her age (she was almost a decade older than most of the young bright lights) singled her out. Her family background afforded her a seamless fit into the aristocratic and gentry ladies of MANSZ but her superior education, unmarried status, and moderate means made her stand out. One more reason she has been treated – if not by contemporaries but by posterity – as an exception is that she was virtually the only member of the Sunday Circle who wholeheartedly joined the political Right and thus became a ‘renegade’.15 The few mentions of Ritoók in Hungarian literary scholarship, as well as urban legend, attributed her political change of heart and break with the Circle to a frustrated, unrequited love for members of the Sunday Circle: either to the German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) or the writer and film aesthete Béla Balázs (1884–1949). In his last interviews György Lukács (1885–1971) never missed a chance to mention her unattractiveness.16 The author of her short biographical study goes even further and attributes her intellectual path altogether to this physical trait: ‘Were she slightly more pretty and slightly less intelligent, she most likely would have married and her life would have been filled with social obligations … But her failure of getting married, and her refusal to marry without love channeled her energy, ambition towards a different direction: so she became an intellectual’.17 And there is indication in Ritoók’s memoirs that she may have at some point contemplated a different life: As soon as I grew up, I resigned myself to the fact that I could not entertain too lofty womanly ambitions. If I was not ugly – my eyes, forehead are beautiful, but my large nose and small chin spoiled the shape of my face, my bad posture made me since childhood subject to all sorts of posture-improving torture, but my lovely hands and feet betrayed good breeding … I still often thought about how my life could have turned out, were I beautiful.18

It is also telling that her alter ego, called Héva Bartoldy in her roman à clef, The Adventurers of the Spirit, was spared these thoughts as Ritoók endowed

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her with a husband, conveniently committed to a mental institution before the first appearance of the character. She is described as ‘constantly changing, lacking in harmony, of a restless effect. She was only pretty when very young’.19 Nevertheless, in the novel Héva has no difficulty in taking lovers and is universally loved by the slightly younger women and men of her intellectual circle. Lastly, in her fictional alter ego Ritoók fulfilled her reportedly unrequited love for the male protagonist, modelled after György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, or a combination of the two. It would be more than a little simplistic, not to say sexist, and an affront to her intellectual stature, to reduce Ritoók’s prolonged, agonizing personal and political choices to her lack of good looks or a sentimental slight. There is, however, a trace of a long-held personal grudge in the old Lukács’s characterization of Ritoók as unattractive or ugly. Lukács had good reason to dislike Ritoók – beyond her political turn and disowning her old friends, once the Soviet government fell and Lukács had to go into hiding, Ritoók refused to help a close acquaintance, Lukács’ partner and later wife.20

Emma Ritoók, Anna Lesznai and the Sunday Circle Central to Ritoók’s intense, almost obsessive, preoccupation with the Jewish question and her own growing anti-Semitism was her ongoing reflection on members of the Sunday Circle before 1918. Her relationship with Lesznai thus transcended friendship to encapsulate the changing relationship with the single important intellectual community she belonged to in her entire lifetime. Lesznai was not Ritoók’s closest friend in the Circle, but their respective life courses and works offer enlightening parallels and differences as well as more than the occasional reflections of one another. Ritoók described their chance meeting in December 1918, at the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club (discussed earlier in Chapter 2), as heavy with political meaning. Despite my expectations there are a great many people at the meeting, from the party of Mrs. Károlyi [and] many Jewish women who ‘til now had not participated in the activities of the Club – I’ve known them as Radicals – the Polányis, Mrs. Jászi whom I saw there for the last time (…) many feminists; Mrs. Károlyi showed off her entire regiment. … Only Mrs. Jászi noticed me: ‘I see you are with the countesses now,’ she said somewhat sarcastically. ‘With the good Hungarians,’ I replied and I felt (…) a range of emotions running through me, regret, stupidity, bitterness, betrayal, that I had spent so much time with these people.21

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The Mrs Jászi mentioned here is Anna Lesznai, at this point still married to Oszkár Jászi, minister in the Károlyi government. The fleeting reference to this being their last meeting belied the long history of their friendship. Their acquaintance began around 1910, well before the start of the Sunday Circle sessions in 1915. Both Ritoók and Lesznai were among the founding members of the informal Sunday gatherings, held at the apartment of Béla Balázs and presided over by György Lukács. By late 1918 Balázs, Lukács, and others in the Circle had already joined the Communist Party. March 1919 found them on opposing sides of the barricades – Ritoók among the plotters of MANSZ, Lukács and some of the others from the Circle in the leadership of the Hungarian Republic of Councils. Lukács would eventually be named Deputy Commissar of Education, then Commissar of the Red Army.

Biographies and transgressions The respective diaries of Lesznai and Ritoók provide insight into the development of political division that would create a gulf not only between Ritoók and the rest of the Sunday Circle but across the Hungarian intellectual milieu. Complemented with their respective autobiographical novels, Lesznai’s In the Beginning was the Garden, published in Hungarian in 1966,22 and Ritoók’s The Adventurers of the Spirit, the diaries offered highly conflicting narratives of their shared past and reflected on the broader implications of their diverging paths. The existence of such parallel diaries and romans à clef, written by two women writers with roots in a shared intellectual milieu and ending up in opposing political camps, provides a rare opportunity to observe the articulation of competing memories. It was an unlikely friendship under the best of circumstances: By their social origins, upbringing, and temperament, Emma Ritoók and Anna Lesznai were worlds apart. Ritoók, born in 1868, was rooted in Nagyvárad’s old-stock gentry, Calvinist, moderately modernizing milieu.23 Her upbringing and education was already detailed in Chapter 4. Lesznai, born Amália Moscovitz (she took the pen name Anna Lesznai when she published her first poems), in contrast came from an assimilated but unique Jewish milieu. Her mother was a member of the Hatvany Deutsch clan and a cousin of the press baron Lajos Hatvany. Her father, Geyza Moscovitz (1850–1913), was the son of Mór Moscovitz (1810–1880), physician to the Andrássy family (including Katinka Károlyi’s grandfather). Geyza Moscovitz was well known for his gentry lifestyle. The family’s estate at Körtvélyes in Northern Hungary received a steady stream of visitors from the political and intellectual elite in the summer;

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in the winter, Moscovitz held an open house in Budapest. Oszkár Jászi, the future leader of the Bourgeois Radical Party, attended the salon as a university student and depicted it in his memoirs as a place where liberal politicians and rebels of all shades mingled, illustrating the tolerance of prewar liberalism.24 Lesznai had a freewheeling upbringing in this wealthy and unconventional family. Apart from art training in Budapest and Paris, she received no formal education but experienced early success: Her poems appeared in Nyugat, the period’s leading avant-garde literary magazine, and she exhibited her folkloreinspired paintings and embroideries with the modernist group the Eights. Her artistic endeavours and her transgressions – divorce from her first husband, single motherhood, and love affairs – were eased by her family’s wealth, making her bohemian lifestyle comfortable. Her privileged financial circumstances were forgiven by her genuinely bohemian artist friends because of her warmth and generosity; Balázs and other artist friends enjoyed the Moscovitz family’s hospitality at Körtvélyes and were the beneficiaries of her financial support. Ritoók, by contrast, never married. Apart from her rumoured, unrequited love for Ernst Bloch she lived the life of a spinster. Her comfortable, although by no means extravagant, circumstances changed when her father died in 1905, without leaving a substantial income for his daughters. While Ritoók’s brother, Zsigmond, became a successful physician and likely supported his sisters, from then on money matters figured prominently in Ritoók’s memoirs, with frequent, bitter remarks directed against anyone living more comfortably. Neither Lesznai nor Ritoók were typical products of their milieu. Both of them bridged worlds; Lesznai had a foot in at least four, the first two through her family’s estate in Northern Hungary, where she was a part of her father’s gentry world but also keenly interested in the rural universe of the Slovak peasants of the estate. She was equally at home in the rarefied intellectual milieu of the Sunday Circle, where she was especially close to Balázs and Lukács. She married Jászi in 1913 and had two sons with him (she also had a son from her first marriage) but by 1918 they separated. Her third and last husband, the graphic artist Tibor Gergely (1900–1978), was also a member of the Sunday Circle, and in their shared exile in Vienna and, after 1938, the United States, they made valiant efforts to revive it. Lastly, Lesznai was also accepted into Jászi’s circle, the social scientists of the journal Twentieth Century. As she writes: ‘Ákos [the character, based on Jászi in the novel] stood somehow halfway in between her home world and the world of her other friends.’25 She seemed unconcerned with social conventions of any kind, let alone those of her upper-class milieu, and she had no difficulty accepting the notorious promiscuity of Balázs, her closest friend in the Sunday Circle.

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If in less spectacular ways, Ritoók also straddled worlds: by exchanging her traditional, Protestant, gentry surroundings for the bohemian world of students in Berlin and Paris – a life choice most unusual for a woman in her thirties – then by trying to make it as an independent writer and intellectual. The drive to transgress the boundaries prescribed for a middle-aged, single, upper-middleclass woman was rooted in her literary and intellectual ambitions but limited by financial considerations: From 1912 Ritoók lived in a suburb of Budapest with her unmarried sister and their niece, their younger brother’s daughter, whom they raised as their own. For all her intellectual trailblazing, Ritoók maintained a patriarchal pattern in her relationship with her brother, Zsigmond. He became the head of the family after their father’s death and the sisters acquiesced to his decisions in important family matters. Zsigmond married Cécile Tormay’s younger sister, thereby creating the family connection between Ritoók and the future leader of MANSZ. Well known for his deep anti-Semitic convictions, Zsigmond must also have had an influence in Ritoók’s disavowal of her Sunday friends and turn to the political Right. While Ritoók conspired with Tormay and her aristocratic friends, Lesznai’s life during and after the revolutions was even more tumultuous. She was still married, if only in name, to Jászi, who opposed the Communist government and left for Vienna in May 1919 to work closely with Count Károlyi in their exile. In contrast, Lesznai, like most of her Sunday friends, supported the Republic of Councils and took up a position at the Ministry of Culture, assigned to develop a new art curriculum for elementary schools. After the fall of the Bolshevik experiment, and fearing retribution – with good reason, in her own right as well as in her husband’s, who was among the most hated targets of the counterrevolutionaries – Lesznai escaped. She found a temporary haven in Vienna, then at the family’s residence in Körtvélyes, which by then had become part of the new Czechoslovakia. Continuing the family tradition, Lesznai’s home was always open to artists and writers, and regardless of her much diminished means, she was always ready to support her fellow artists. Lesznai returned to Budapest in 1931, and after the Munich Agreement and the loss of her house in Czechoslovakia she left Europe to settle in the United States, where she died in 1966.

Memories of one another For all their differences, Ritoók and Lesznai had important things in common: they both belonged to the small group of woman pioneers in the literary world

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and as such should have been natural allies in what was still very much a men’s world. But there is not a single expression of trailblazer’s solidarity in their respective diaries, memoirs, or novels. Ritoók’s unpublished memoirs were written after the events they describe, in several instalments between 1920 and 1940, while Lesznai’s diaries were jotted down between 1912 and 1945 – in real time, so to speak. Paradoxically it is Ritoók’s memoir entries that are much more firmly rooted in her times, providing close descriptions of events and people; Lesznai’s genuine diaries, kept between 1912 and 194526 are the more frustrating read for the historian as they reveal very little about the ‘outside life’ of its writer. Ritoók kept revising her memoirs throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, possibly with posterity in her sight, while Lesznai’s diaries were not meant for publication.27 As for the two autobiographical novels, they may belong to the roman à clef genre but – as Csilla Markója remarks in her study of autobiographical novels by three woman writers, Ritoók, Kaffka, and Lesznai – they hold the key to very little indeed.28 This is not the place to explore the novels of Ritoók and Lesznai – and in any case, their exploration would reap little in terms of references to the other woman. Like Ritoók’s, Lesznai’s novel also features a thinly disguised autobiographical female protagonist, placed in the social and intellectual circles of the prewar era that included the Sunday Circle. But while both writers created strong female characters in addition to the female protagonist, they also erased the other from their respective, fictionalized account. Neither Ritoók nor Lesznai created a fictional equivalent, not even a remotely identifiable character drawn on the other. More instructive, for the purposes of this study, is an exploration of the respective memoirs of Ritoók and Lesznai. How do they present the other within the context of the Sunday Circle? Lesznai’s most factual recollection comes from a 1965 interview: It was very interesting. We gathered at the home of Béla Balázs, the villa on Sunhill. I went there for years. The founders were György Lukács, Balázs and his two wives, Edit Hajós and Anna Schlamadiger. They initiated it and Lukács was the main man. Other founding members were Károly Mannheim, Lajos Fülep, Arnold Hauser, Béla Fogarasi, Ernő Lorsy. These were the old ones. At one point Emma Ritoók came as well.29

In light of what we know of the history of the Sunday meetings from the recollections of former members, this was an obvious slight of Ritoók’s important contribution. Not to be outdone, in Ritoók’s account of the Sunday Circle in her memoirs Lesznai did not appear at all. On the many hundreds of pages of the memoirs, the Sunday

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Circle was featured in three generous passages, the first concerning its founding in which, according to her own account, Ritoók played an instrumental role.30 While this fact is well documented, Ritoók’s self-appointed role as the Circle’s intellectual leader – ‘As far as social and ethical questions were concerned, I nearly almost had the final word,’31 – is largely unconfirmed by other testimonies and illustrates Ritoók’s characteristic tendency to overstate her own contribution. Perhaps even more interesting is Ritoók’s comment on the exceptional inclusiveness extended to women in the Sunday Circle, albeit with an antiSemitic twist. ‘These Jewish boys, however, if they were home, did not lose me from their sight; we often debated philosophical and aesthetic questions and they never exhibited the condescension of male thinkers towards the woman – unlike most Christian men’.32 In contrast, the place of women in the Circle was an aspect Lesznai never addressed, likely because it was no different from what she had experienced in her own social and family surroundings.33 To Ritoók, however, the relative gender equality of the Circle represented a fundamental shift from her much more conventional social and family milieu. It was, in a way, the tragedy of her life as an intellectual: the inability to reconcile her intellectual home (the urban, mostly Jewish intellectuals and artists of the Sunday Circle) and her increasingly conservative and anti-Semitic Hungarian upper-middle-class family background to which she reverted in the end. The second instance in Ritoók’s memoirs depicted the Sundays in the early days, in 1915. Written after 1919, her narrative was already marked by an antiSemitism that she inserted into her recollection. She invited along a Swedish woman journalist, visiting wartime Budapest who reportedly asked her: ‘Are there only Jews here one can talk to?’ To which Ritoók replied: ‘Those that are not Jews, are serving at the front’.34 Whether real or invented, the writer’s repartee, written down around 1920, was particularly unjust in light of Balázs’s front service and the heroic death of Lesznai’s brother; and it rehashed the anti-Semitic trope of the supposed shirking of Jews, increasingly popular by the end of 1916.35 The final entry about the Sundays related the last meeting Ritoók attended in November of 1918. She was hoping to hear something comforting, to jolt her out of her dark mood. But her expectation quickly turned into disappointment as she realized that she found herself among the ‘chief spiritual leaders of the [Károlyi] revolution who participated in its preparation at the Astoria’ (the headquarters of the National Council).36 This memory prompted yet another of her countless anti-Semitic rants: Besides, they all seemed to sense that it would be their turn, their rule (…); it was not yet obvious but there was something different in their tone, a kind

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of certainty that filled me with uneasy stirrings; I realized that, with few exceptions, I was surrounded by Jews. (…) These strange, placid, in many ways degenerate and different, foreign – a hundred times foreign people – against our peasants, our middle class, our entire social life, state and internal system.37

When it came to memories of the other, Lesznai’s sparse entries on the Sunday meetings mentioned Ritoók only two or three times; in each instance she cited her contribution to a philosophical discussion in a tone that remained respectful but detached. As for Ritoók, I already cited her pointed description of their last meeting at the Club. But that was not her last word on the subject – Ritoók kept returning to Lesznai, clearly treating the relationship as emblematic of her past and continuing to justify – to herself and perhaps to her prospective readers – the reasons for her rejection of this shared past. An entry from the 1920s invoked the memory of Ritoók’s earlier stay at Körtvélyes. Ritoók enjoyed the Moscovitz family’s hospitality for a few weeks, and recalled the idyllic environment, Lesznai’s gracious and hospitable mother, the writer’s intelligent views on ‘womanly issues’, the masses of books, and the intellectual level of conversation fondly. She also complimented Máli (Lesznai’s nickname) on ‘her multiple talents’, her ability to assimilate to the Hungarian spirit, and her genuine understanding of folklore, reflected in her embroideries. Lesznai’s love of the soil, of nature, added Ritoók, also likened her to Hungarian women as their household resembled that of the Hungarian gentry. Even the area’s Hungarian landowners treated them as one of their own, she remarked, and her appearance did not strike one as Jewish. Yet there were ominous signs, continued Ritoók: ‘Her scope of culture was entirely different from that of Hungarian families, strongly foreign, thus her world view was unlike ours. In intimate conversation she revealed herself to be much more erotic than a Hungarian woman; when she was dressing – a Hungarian woman is much more modest, even in front of another woman’.38 It is damning praise in which genuine admiration for Lesznai’s artistic talents and her family’s gentry lifestyle is tempered with the familiar tropes of antiSemitism: excessive sexuality and the prodigious ability of the Jews to assimilate, only to destroy the host nation from within. Throughout her memoirs, Ritoók returned over and over to the personal relationships with her old Sunday friends, to reflect on them in light of her new-found anti-Semitic convictions, as if to look for the signs that should have forewarned her. To this earlier note on her erstwhile friend Ritoók attached a post-script from the 1920s, further developing the theme of sexual excess:

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Anna Lesznai became a Communist and to this day lives at Körtvélyes, under Czech rule. She must be as good a Czech patriot as she was a Hungarian one. Unless she is still a Communist, for, as I hear from an acquaintance there, a gentry woman with whom she used to socialize, she associates with horrible people, from the Viennese exile camp, and she has become a woman of terrible reputation. Of course her Hungarian acquaintances refuse to see her.39

And a post-script, dated from the 1930s, commented on Lesznai’s reappearance in Budapest, dripping with malice: I must add: how naive of me! … Anna Lesznai simply returned to Hungary in the 1930s – it seems this poor, backward Hungary is still better than her adored Czech country. And here at home she is a celebrated artist – when she is a far worse artist than poet – who exhibits and is embraced by aristocratic ladies as a magical talent.40

Sisters-in-law but comrades-in-arms no longer By the early 1920s Tormay was already the uncontested leader of MANSZ, the celebrated writer of historical novels, published before the war and the bestselling An Outlaw’s Diary; and she would remain the single most prominent female politician of the Horthy era. But this exalted view was certainly not shared by Ritoók, who had an exceptional vantage point: she was related to Tormay through her brother’s marriage, and she was there right at the beginning, when MANSZ began as a semi-clandestine, counter-revolutionary gathering under the Károlyi government. Her memoirs provide a deliberate counter-narrative to Tormay’s An Outlaw’s Diary, combining the story of their family and personal relationship, a chronicle of historical events, and the occasional literary criticism. It is a narrative shot through with ambiguity between the political and the private: their agreement in political views and a vicious, racially articulated anti-Semitism on the one hand and Ritoók’s bitterness over her sidelining by Tormay in MANSZ on the other. In contrast with her relationship with Lesznai, in Tormay’s case there was no doubt that the two remained committed to the same ideas. Their familial ties had also grown stronger in a time of war and political crisis, and they belonged to the same social milieu. But following their close collaboration in late 1918 and early 1919, their friendship and working relationship cooled off as early as November 1919. Ritoók did not make a secret of the reason for the falling out: She was bitterly disappointed with Tormay for taking credit and garnering praise for Ritoók’s ideas and dropping her from

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the inner circle of MANSZ in favour of better-connected, aristocratic friends. Their friendship was highly competitive and ambivalent to begin with; and it diminished in reverse correlation with Tormay’s rise to prominence in the counter-revolutionary establishment. Likely in tandem with her returning to the fold, the political views embraced by her gentry family, and as a symptom of her growing anti-Semitism, Ritoók attributed great value to birth and bloodline – and she saw in Tormay the social climber, the parvenu. After all, ‘the old nobility is entirely missing from the Tormay family, the old man [Cecile’s father] only received nobility at the end of the [nineteenth] century and that is when they changed the original German name, Krenmüller to the one ending with “y”’.41 Tormay successfully combined her literary and social success, and ‘with great determination made a place for herself among the aristocracy abroad as well. It was her Italian countess friend who recommended her novel to [Hugo von] Hofmannsthal and this brought her mildly sentimental novel to Fischer in Berlin. She then visits the old Jew in person and charms him with her beauty and wit’.42 The ultimate betrayal came in 1922 when Tormay announced the founding of the literary journal Napkelet (Sunrise) to serve as the right-wing counterweight to Nyugat (in Hungarian meaning both the West and sundown) in 1923. The name of the former was a deliberate play on the latter, the leading modernist literary journal, published from 1908 and home to all the literary lights of the period. According to Ritoók, she came up with the idea back in 1919 and suggested it to Tormay, to provide emerging Hungarian writers with the option to publish in a Hungarian (i.e. non-Jewish) journal, untainted by Jewish money and influence. She would have been much better equipped to serve as its editor – after all Cecile did not even read, let alone publish in Nyugat.43 The first issue prompted this outburst: ‘So Napkelet came out – with a shamefully weak first issue.’ A friend comes by and exclaims: ‘Did you see the Napkelet? So the Jews can have a field day again!’.44 The sense of betrayal was only aggravated by jealousy: Ritoók commented bitterly on her friend’s rise and growing public stature while eking out a meagre living as librarian at the Budapest Municipal Library.45 One can only imagine her further humiliation when the journal of the conservative literary and academic establishment, Budapesti Szemle (Budapest Review), published reviews of her The Adventurers and Tormay’s Diary in consecutive years. Needless to say, Tormay’s book received a much more favourable judgement, the reviewer hailing it as not only a literary masterpiece but a valuable document of the era46 while Ritoók’s novel was found ‘curious’, a ‘difficult read’; and while it left no doubt of its author’s extraordinary intelligence,

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it was beyond the understanding of general readership and even ‘tiresome for the well educated’.47 Perhaps the greatest value of Ritoók’s memoirs is the opportunity they afford to peek into the mind of an exceptionally intelligent and politically engaged woman and trace the development of her vicious anti-Semitism, articulated through her past and present friendships. One would be hard-pressed to find a single kind word in the memoirs about any female friend or acquaintance, however rightwing: From Margit Schlachta to Edith Farkas, from Countess Zichy to Countess Klebelsberg everyone receives a mean-spirited or gossipy comment. Clearly, Ritoók had no warmer feelings for fellow anti-Semites and right-wing public women than she had for her former progressive friends in the Sunday Circle. Neither did she have much good to say about MANSZ, which she had helped create: From the very start, early in 1919 she found it ‘so like a women’s charity, not counter-revolutionary. … All that talk!’.48 She still attended the meetings of MANSZ until mid-1920 when she wrote a memorandum criticizing Tormay’s authoritarian leadership and offering ideas for renewal. As a result, she was accused of ridiculous slander, ‘that I used to have a Jewish lover in Germany, that I used to be a Communist’.49 Ritoók broke all contact with the MANSZ and attended the meetings of a couple of secret, rabidly anti-Semitic right-wing organizations. But she found that ‘it was completely below standards, all the women telling rumors about Jews … besides, feminine conflicts, competition, making the meetings very unpleasant’.50 Yet the memoirs contain no evidence that Ritoók ever stopped to reflect on what may have attracted her to MANSZ and the other, secret organizations to begin with: that unlike in the Sunday Circle, among these women she was the uncontested intellectual leader. The bitterness, the mean spirit, the disappointments, and jealousies in her memoirs barely conceal an intellectual ambition that never found the right outlet or recognition. Her important contributions to MANSZ that she accused Tormay of taking undue credit for – the argument of women taking the initiative over men, and the idea for a literary journal to counter the influence of Nyugat – were all intellectual in nature. In the end, she chose allegiance to her family, her class, and what she perceived as the interest of her nation at the price of betraying her intellectual peers. But, as the memoirs reveal, she remained forever conflicted and frustrated, the ceaseless struggle to find a rational explanation for her anti-Semitism barely disguising the agony of breaking with the people among whom she had found her intellectual home.

6

A Perfect Storm of Citizenship

First time in front of the ballot box – Hungarian women’s movements on shifting ground – The uses and abuse of international sisterhood – Epilogue: The limits of citizenship

First time in front of the ballot box In the January 1920 elections, all men and women over the age of twentyfour – with a literacy requirement for women only – were required to vote, making this election a first for women and the most inclusive ever for men. The ratio of men rose from approximately 7 per cent of the male population in the last prewar elections to 40 per cent of the general population.1 Despite an electoral law that was even more inclusive than the November 1918 decree of the Károlyi government both the democratic effect of the electoral decree and the auspiciousness of women’s suffrage were greatly compromised – by the counter-revolutionary terror and intimidation that preceded and accompanied the elections. Electoral legislation was just about the only thing that remained little changed: the political landscape had undergone a veritable earthquake. With the counter-revolution firmly in control, the democratic coalition of October 1918 was destroyed: Károlyi and the leader of Bourgeois Radical Party, Oszkár Jászi, went into exile. Both were accused of deliberately handing over power to the Communist Party and, worse, of deliberately driving the country to ruin, of selling it to the enemy. Social Democratic leaders who shared the government with the Communists during the Republic of Councils, if they failed to escape the country, were hunted down, executed, jailed, or interned without trial. A show trial of the commissars – mainly Socialist ministers in the government of the Republic of Councils – had taken place in July 1920 with death and life sentences handed down.2 The elections were preceded by negotiations and mergers among

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the newly formed parties, all representing the emphatically ‘Christian’ right wing and, with their base in the countryside, the peasantry and small landowners. The small liberal parties or independent candidates limited their campaign to the capital. The Social Democrats, after a period of hesitation, opted for a boycott of the elections, citing the large-scale intimidation by paramilitaries. With the elections scheduled for 25 January 1920, as late as 28 December 1919 the Social Democratic daily Népszava announced the party’s three women candidates: one of them was Mrs Müller, the erstwhile member of the National Council during the Károlyi revolution.3 Once the party decided to boycott the elections, it instructed the party faithful to cast invalid ballots – as voting was mandatory they were told to cross out the entire ballot or the name of the candidate.4 According to the final tally, 71,000 of the 340,000 votes cast in Budapest were invalid5 – curiously no historian ever scrutinized this very sizable number, strongly hinting at massive protest vote, rather than accidentally spoiled ballots. Despite the Party’s decision to boycott the elections, Nőmunkás followed up with a report in its post-election issue on the campaign of Mrs Müller, their highest-profile woman candidate.6 The article appeared heavily censored, with the lines referring to Mrs Muller’s arrest after her role in the Republic of Councils deleted. The 1 March 1920 issue appeared again heavily censored, reporting the murder (although none of its well-known details – it was widely known to be committed by paramilitaries close to Horthy) of Béla Somogyi, the popular editor-in-chief of Népszava, the Socialist daily.7 The article highlighted his engagement with the woman question and the fact that he was the translator of Bebel’s classic The Woman and Socialism. Characteristically, the FE archives from this time contain no election material produced by them, only flyers from the MSZDP and the Christian parties. The only sign that the FE was in any way a factor in the election was the letter of the National Democratic Party, the moderate liberal party of Vilmos Vázsonyi, author of the 1917 reform bill. In it the party thanked the endorsement of the FE and, as if consoling the feminists for not being able to freely campaign with their own programme, noted: ‘Our party with its programme is so close to the aims of our party that in fact in the parliamentary struggle feminism has the first opportunity to take the first practical step, when it participates in the electoral campaigning’.8 Two electoral posters illustrate the predominance of Christian parties and the subtle differences between their respective electoral rhetoric. The openly anti-Semitic Christian National Party addressed ‘Christian Hungarian Women’ and served up a generous helping of crude anti-Semitic and anti-communist propaganda:

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Before you step up to the ballot box, take account of your conscience. Every MP siding with the Jews who makes it into Parliament represents a step to the left, towards Communism. The Communist regime makes woman the pariah of society because its laws do not protect the woman! They do not recognize the sanctity of the marriage! The husband can leave his wife whenever he wishes! Mothers! When you vote, think of the angelic, innocent face of your daughters, for you hold their future fate in your hands!9

As for the deceptively similarly named Christian National United Party (KNEP) – soon to be the dominant party of the coalition government – it openly campaigned against women candidates, and specifically against Margit Slachta, the representative of the Christian Female Camp, whose programme did not substantially differ from their own. According to the KNEP poster, the Slachta campaign serves as a blatant example of the extent to which the political fight disturbs the female soul … the extent to which the hysteria of a few female leaders debases political life, and strips its actors of their cherished femininity, the extent to which it drags woman off the altar on which Hungarians have kept their ideal of the Hungarian woman.10

In an electoral year when virtually all parties adopted the Christian moniker (and even the liberal Democratic Party of Vázsonyi added ‘National’ to its name), the Christian Socialist Party of Sándor Giesswein, an old friend and supporter of the FE, represented a moderate voice. It advocated for women candidates – although none of them ended up standing for elections. Giesswein did, however, get elected and went on to represent a reliably moderate position in Parliament – and used none of the vitriolic anti-communist and anti-Semitic slogans so common in the rhetoric of the other parties. Given that none of their candidates ended up nominated, there was no danger of ever being held to their party’s promise, that once ‘women make it into Parliament in sufficient numbers, there will be no more wars, the shortage of housing will end, the problem of food will cease, infant mortality will drop, there will be universal old-age insurance, an improvement of public health, and the fight against the double moral standard will get new energy’.11 As it turned out, after the KNEP obtained the majority, one of its MPs who was elected in multiple districts offered the spot to Margit Slachta who won the seat in the March 1920 by-election.12 The Social Democratic women’s paper proved to be surprisingly gracious when commenting on the election of their old adversary, the president of the Social Mission Society. The brief article pointed out the irony of her facing off five male candidates with virtually identical, Christian, nationalist

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programmes, then treated this as a propitious sign for female candidates: ‘Margit Slachta competed against five male candidates with no perceptible ideological differences and still won. This, we think, will serve as a lesson for all parties’.13 The progressive MP Győző Drózdy expressed best the substance of the 1920 elections: I have never seen such fair, democratic, simple electoral decree. But neither did I see such terroristic elections that those in power managed to orchestrate on the basis of this impeccable decree. … All the good in this democratic electoral decree that was forced upon us by the West was extinguished, circumvented by the extent of unprecedented terror that would create a completely abnormal state of affairs in the country.14

How did women vote? We do not really know for, unlike in Germany or Great Britain, we have no record of Hungarian women’s voting preferences. And neither the Christian parties, nor the newly merged Small Landowners Party, the two partners of the winning coalition, spent a minute more on finding out women’s electoral preferences than they did on appealing for their vote. There was, however, a good overview in the Social Democratic paper; the party may have chosen to boycott the elections but their press was still the only one paying any attention to women. Woman Worker, appearing as a bi-weekly, and after 15 May, only on four pages instead of the previous eight, continued to cover the topic in every single issue up until 1 May. Szeréna Ladányi, wife of the right-wing socialist leader Manó Buchinger, published a two-part article, ‘First time at the ballot box,’ stressing the importance of women’s political education.15 She surveyed the post-election coverage of the press.16 All the newspapers noted the occasion, however briefly: ‘In Hungary – if we don’t count the parody of the elections of the Soviets – women were able to vote for the first time,’17 with the Pesti Hírlap adding: ‘generally it seemed as if the number of women voters surpassed that of the male ones’.18 While admitting that there was no evidence to women’s preferences, the socialist commentator easily slipped into the assumption that women’s votes were crucial for the victory of the Christian parties. After admitting that ‘(We) cannot numerically show the influence of women votes on the performance of representatives but we think’ the author concluded that ‘it was the women’s votes that helped to victory the Christian Socialist Party’.19 For evidence, the author cited the Cologne results of the German general elections where the votes were counted by gender, to show women’s overwhelming preference for right-wing, nationalist parties. Whether the same applied in Hungary was almost beside the question. Echoing the old line of the Social Democrats that women were

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highly susceptible to the influence of the clergy and, in this case, the electoral propaganda of the so-called Christian, nationalist parties, the author concluded with the old Social Democratic prescription: the election results only highlighted the need for more political education for women.20

Hungarian women’s movements on shifting ground The days of the 1913 IWSA Congress in Budapest when many of the women now sitting on the executive of MANSZ had lent their name to the occasion, only a few years before, seemed like an era long gone. The liberal feminists were defenceless against the vicious propaganda of MANSZ: not only did MANSZ advocate, and with massive government support to boot, an illiberal, patriarchal model of family and women’s roles that undercut the FE’s progressive liberal programme of women’s equality, but also spearheaded the attack against the FE. The right-wing, nationalist women’s organization had appropriated the agenda of the so-called Christian feminism, articulated in early 1918 by leading Christian socialist women, but threw overboard its measured tone and sharp but civil critique of the liberal feminist agenda. The anti-Semitic and illiberal agenda had been fully developed at the founding of MANSZ in January 1919 but could not be openly voiced under the liberal democratic government. MANSZ later claimed it was equally persecuted under the two revolutionary regimes but in truth its activities were not in the least restricted during the liberal revolution. The movement’s right-wing rhetoric may have been cautiously tamed during the liberal revolution and its activities suspended during the Republic of Councils. But after the triumph of the counter-revolution MANSZ pulled out all the stops in its agitation against liberal feminists, calling them Jewish in that many words and holding them responsible for many of the Communist policies and slogans of the Republic of Councils. The extreme rhetoric of MANSZ did not distinguish between the liberal Károlyi revolution and the radical Socialist Republic of Councils; both were presented as dictatorships, orchestrated by Jews against Hungarian national interests. There was no pretence of politeness: in her ‘Welcoming address’ in the first edition of the Hungarian Woman’s Almanach, Tormay called the two revolutions ‘the rule of the Jews’ bringing about the ‘death of the Hungarians’ freedom’.21 The revolutions, she continued, threatened by death anyone who would want to ‘openly worship God, to love the homeland, to respect the familial hearth’22 Despite its policy to stay above the fray during the Károlyi revolution and the suspension of most its activities under the Republic of Councils, the FE’s closeness in

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political and personal terms to the two parties of the October revolution (the Károlyi Party and the Bourgeois Radicals) damned it as the handmaiden of Bolshevism. As for its liberal agenda of women’s emancipation, it was made indirectly responsible for the perceived communist attacks on the family. At the founding meeting of the Debrecen branch of MANSZ in 1921 Tormay condemned feminism altogether as incompatible with the ‘Hungarian woman who throughout history never claimed the limelight’.23 Moreover, ‘in Hungary there was no feminism because those who represented it, were not Hungarians but merely a branch of the free masons, just like members of the Galileo Society’.24 The allusion to the free masons, whose supposed conspiracy for Jewish world dominance was a familiar trope of popular anti-Semitic literature in the postwar period, would be perfectly clear to her audience: feminists were Jews, and as such part of the global conspiracy whose attempt to govern in Hungary during the two revolutions was stopped by MANSZ itself. Also notable was Tormay’s sceptical position vis-à-vis the importance of parliament and, by extension, the vote: ‘The fate of Hungary will not be decided in Parliament but in the home, in the children’s room. For the duty of the Hungarian woman is the raising of the new, nation-building generation, not yet poisoned by the people without conscience.’25 In the Conclusion we will further elaborate on the far-reaching consequences of this attitude towards the vote and parliamentary democracy. What could the FE do against such an onslaught of poisonous propaganda? Never a particularly well-funded organization, the FE found itself in dire straits. The publication of the feminist bulletin A Nő was suspended between March and November 1919; only two more issues appeared, in November and December 1919; another, combined but single issue in July 1920 and none until December 1921. As the FE’s correspondence with the IWSA reveals, with three-quarters of their members living now outside of the new borders, the organization was unable to pay even for telephone service in its office.26 In its December 1919 issue Ius Suffragii, the bulletin of the IWSA reproduced the FE’s telegram sent to WILPF, dated from October 1919, a veritable cry for help. It cited the organization’s ‘distressing situation’, inability to communicate directly with its sister organizations and the IWSA, and pleaded for ‘immediate and material help’ from ‘fellow workers in other countries’.27 In the November 1919 issue of The Woman a brief note reported on the organization’s recent public meetings: a single one, organized around the FE’s career service during the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ and only one more during ‘the reign of the white terror’ – note the courageous use of the term while the terror was still raging -, hosting the visiting American feminist, Rose Morgan French.28 On the front page of its final 1919 issue, a month before the elections, A Nő presented a liberal electoral platform, virtually identical to that of the liberal

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revolution – again, as brave a move as it was possible under the circumstances – and offered electoral advice to its membership. Rather than directing its members to a particular party, it instructed them to listen to the campaign speech of all candidates and vote on the merit of each, based on their respective stance on ‘the elimination of privileges on the basis of gender, race, class and ethnicity’,29 as well as equal rights for all citizens. The programme also called for the restoration of law and justice, instead of ‘the medieval regime of vigilantism’30 – as clear a reference to paramilitary violence as was possible at the time. The FE made attempts to distance itself from the Republic of Councils, most emphatically in Schwimmer’s two-part article, ‘The grievances of feminism under the proletarian dictatorship’ that took up more than a page in the eightpage The Woman31 and continued in the December issue. The articles were likely inspired as much by political expediency or self-preservation as genuine conviction. However, at a time when a vehement anti-communist stance was the preamble of any political pronouncement, Schwimmer still stuck to her principles. She made it clear that it was the Hungarian Bolshevik government’s militarism and lack of democracy that made her breed of feminism incompatible with bolshevism. She also pointed out the fundamental misogyny of communism, at least in its Hungarian instance. And her trump card, as it would be from then on in every piece Schwimmer devoted to the subject, was that she, of all women, was not allowed to vote. The correspondence of the FE with the international sister organizations – when postal service was extremely unreliable and letters on occasion took months to reach the addressee – offers further testimony to the tenuous existence of the formerly influential Hungarian women’s rights organization. It seems that because three-quarters of their members and their membership dues were cut off by the newly established borders, it was only with the financial support of the IWSA that the FE was able to continue to operate.32 The yearly report sent to the Ius Suffragii summarized the events of the tumultuous past year and is important enough to be cited at length.33 The report’s first paragraph highlighted the general sense of volatility and violence in the war’s aftermath: Since our last report was sent to Jus Suffragi about a year ago, Hungary has had three governments and now the third regime is in power and we have seen as much history as any three generations may have witnessed more [sic!] in the past centuries. Physical and mental sufferings have ruined our health and our nerves and we have lost our illusions, our hope and almost our faith in humanity.

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When describing the Károlyi-revolution, the FE had to carefully tread between international and domestic sensitivities and not be seen uncritical but also not betraying their strong bond with the failed liberal government. The first revolution and the formation of a republic under Count Károlyi brought us a hope of peace but his regime was marked by fatal weakness in Home and Foreign affairs and the delay of the Entente-powers in sending any official recognition of the government made its continuation impossible, as the confidence of the country could not be won. The general mistrust was aggravated by the publication of the Entente’s conditions of the armistice, which gave the impression of a persecution of the Karolyi’s regime per se. Both clericals and communists, the Black and the Red seized this opportunity to promote their own interests and did all in their power to overthrow the young Republic. A note of the Entente, which ordered the Hungarians to withdraw even beyond the demarcation lines settled by the armistice gave the impression that Hungary was to be ruined. Under these circumstances Count Károlyi felt that he could not bear the responsibility any longer and delivered us to the power to the Social Democrats alone, but who forthwith shared it with the Communists.

When it came to the following, short-lived Republic of Councils, the FE proved to be much less diplomatic – but in their account it is difficult to separate in this account their genuine disappointment with the revolutionary socialist regime and the need to refute the accusations of their right-wing foes to be associated with it. Four months of Proletarian rule proved, that it works with the very same means as the most reactionary militaristic bourgeois governments: with bloodshed, physical force and it was utterly powerless to maintain economic life of the country, much less to reorganize it. During this whole four months regime, starvation and terror were the lot of the population. The Roumanian [sic!] occupation which followed this era was but an excuse for the Roumanians to devastate the whole country and rob it of the goods and food which were still left and finally leave it utterly ruined. During all these months all activity was made impossible for us, as under Bolshevist and Roumanian dictature liberty of speech and press were suppressed. In the former regime we endeavored to help those women, who by the loss of their income or their maintenance were exposed to great need. In our headquarters we had an advisory office where we considered every case individually and directed the same under the applicants’ abilities, and the few ways of gaining a livelihood or training for such. We held also our only meeting all this time for the purpose and we seldom had such crowded meetings and such attentive and grateful audiences as then.

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To demonstrate to the foreign countries the righteousness of their cause the Bolshevists arranged an ‘election’, a parody of anything that could be called such and this was the first (tragicomical) event of the women being ‘allowed’ to vote in Hungary. At this election only those women had the vote, who belonged to the Labor party or to a Trade Union and they were forced to go to the polls as they were controlled from house to house and threatened that they would not get clothes-tickets in case they would not go. In the polling booths they received a list of about 2–300 candidates names, which were put up the preceding night and they were not allowed even time to read this list. There was no other way of ‘electing’ but to cast this list in the box. A few names of women were in these lists but even of these not one became a member of the central Soviet of this most complicated Soviet system. Nor was one woman in any prominent or responsible position in this Hungarian Soviet government. There was not ‘equal pay for equal work’ of men and women under this Soviet rule. But all these wrongs were infinitesimal in comparison to the utter disdain of human life, which was continually endangered and threatened individuals and Red-Guard alike, whose unlucky members were forced into it by physical fear or famine. But the greatest of all the sins of this period was the destruction of the most precious: the human ideal and faith in humanity. We owe a great debt of gratitude to our dear international friends, who even in these most trying days succeeded in visiting and bringing some mitigation to our grief.

Likely due to the politically sensitive nature of its content, no part of the report was published in the IWSA bulletin. Although somewhat more freely phrased than the articles in the FE bulletin, the fear of censorship and potential retribution from the counter-revolutionary government was still evident in the single sentence that, in closing, concerned ‘the political regime which was inaugurated after the departure of the Roumanians’: ‘We regret not to be in the position for reasons of outward and inner politics to report’ on it.34 The letter published in Ius Suffragii was undated but must have been written after the preliminary conditions of the Trianon Treaty had been made public, for the FE also enclosed the text of a telegram they had addressed to the IWSA and the WILPF. In it they protested against the treaty, predicting that it would create the seeds of future ‘conflagration in the whole of Europe’35 and imploring their sisters to bear pressure on their respective governments to change its outline. The telegram also implored the international organizations to raise their voice on behalf of the timely return of the POWs in Russia.36 At this point, the Hungarian Red Cross already worked with MANSZ which, alone of all the women’s organizations, provided assistance in receiving and helping the

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returning POWs. But the FE had something MANSZ at this point still craved: international connections.

The uses and abuse of international sisterhood When the conditions of the Trianon Treaty were first made public in January 1920, they did not only sway the election results towards the nationalist parties but aggravated an already deep-seated sense of bitterness towards the Entente powers and, generally, the West. Any pacifist statement or connection to international women’s and pacifist organizations would be now regarded as treason. A partially preserved correspondence in the FE archives indicates that the well-loved and respected, long-serving president of the FE, Vilma Glücklich, was personally attacked by the Women’s Auxiliary of the League for the Protection of Hungary’s Territorial Integrity – the most prominent extreme nationalist organization tasked to produce, with government support, propaganda against the Trianon Treaty to the outside world – for not endorsing the organization. The reply written by two members of the FE’s executive allows us to reconstruct the vicious anti-Semitic tone of original attack. The reply also referred to the FE’s telegram, its publication in a newspaper (likely in a liberal newspaper as the FE bulletin did not appear between December 1919 and July 1920), and the fact that as a result of the FE’s action, several local organizations of WILPF had made enquiries in the hope of alleviating the harsh conditions of the peace treaty and accelerate the repatriation of the POWs.37 This exchange may have given MANSZ the idea to at least temporarily take advantage of the liberal feminists’ international connections, namely to send a delegation to the June 1920 Congress – the first one organized since the 1913 Budapest one – of the IWSA. To cut a long and complicated story short, a delegation of MANSZ wiggled its way into the Geneva Congress. The FE was represented in Geneva by Schwimmer and Mrs Eugénia Meller; the FE also had the right to recommend the invitation of fraternal delegates – and they recommended Countess Apponyi, president of the prewar, conservative MNE and, incidentally, the wife of the head of the Hungarian delegation at the Paris peace negotiations. The FE also suggested Giesswein, György Lukács, the prewar government minister, and Countess Teleki – all familiar names from the 1913 Budapest Congress. The IWSA also sent an official letter of invitation to Hungary for a government representative to attend. Because of the ongoing railway boycott against Hungary, maintained by international trade unions in protest against the White Terror – or ‘the uncertainty

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of the post to Hungary’38 as Crystal Macmillan, the vice-president of the IWSA put it more delicately in her letter, explaining the mix-up to Glücklich – the IWSA’s letter to the Hungarian government first went unanswered. Finally, after repeated enquiries, the Hungarian government informed the IWSA that ‘the National Association of Hungarian Women delegated Mrs. Szegedy-Maszák and Emma von Dessewfy to the Congress’.39 Faced with fait accompli, the IWSA granted fraternal delegate status to the two MANSZ leaders. They proceeded to make a scene, protesting the fact that they could not vote, then claimed to have obstructed the election of Schwimmer to the executive (to which Schwimmer countered that she had never stood for election). At the same time, Schwimmer was rightly furious and raised a storm that the MANSZ leaders who persecuted the FE in Hungary would invade IWSA territory and personally attack her on her home turf, so to speak.40 Why would the Hungarian government and MANSZ be interested at all in participating at the IWSA’s congress? It is very likely that in the weeks leading up to the signing of the Trianon Treaty they jumped at every opportunity to represent Hungary’s case and protest the peace treaty’s conditions at any international forum. Moreover, they could counter the reports of the still raging White Terror in Hungary. In the event, by the time the Congress opened, the Treaty had been signed and there was nothing to be gained in that regard. But they could still use the chance to discredit the FE – if possible, on its own turf but by all means back in Hungary – by accusing it with undermining Hungarian national interests and conspiring with the country’s enemies. On their return, the MANSZ leaders waged a campaign against the FE, deliberately distorting the facts and accusing the FE to bar them from the Congress. At the general assembly Bédy-Schwimmer and her fellow representative sat at the assigned place for Hungarian women and when we appealed to the executive, the most we could achieve was that by courtesy of the Canadian delegation we would have a seat – although the radical elements of the Congress heatedly protested the participation of MANSZ. This hostile stance was due to Schwimmer’s actions … And her scheming had the result of stopping the representatives of MANSZ, the organization counting half a million members, from speaking at the congress. Instead, it was Bédy-Schwimmer who kept informing the Congress about the Hungarian affairs. … We finally managed to break the neck of the feminist traitor [sic!] as due to our work Bédy-Schwimmer was booted out of the international executive, despite the best efforts of the radical group.41

Under ordinary conditions the whole affair could have been written off as no more than – in the words of the writer of Nőmunkás – a ‘spat between Hungarian

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women’. But these were no ordinary times. While Parliament discussed the fallout of the Treaty, the anti-Semitic violence raging on the street, and the economic boycott launched against the country by the international trade unions, the Women’s Auxiliary of the League for the Protection of Hungary’s Territorial Integrity refocused its efforts to discredit the FE. In a letter addressed to the feminists they claimed: Rosa Bédy-Schwimmer and Eugenie Miskolczy … do not have the right to represent Christian Hungary, not even when it comes to women’s suffrage. Neither has the Association of Feminists this right, until they cleanse themselves of the destructive elements. Until they do that, we have every right to ask: how dare they represent, in any matter whatsoever, Hungarian women.42

Then, to make it absolutely clear what they meant by the coded adjective ‘destructive’, they elaborated: ‘We find it intolerable, that an association that consists mainly not of Hungarians but of immigrant aliens, who to all accounts propagated destructive activities, would dare to represent Hungarian women abroad’.43 In response the FE tried to refute the accusations. In the July 1920 issue of The Woman, they issued a polite rebuttal: ‘As a result of this mistake [the lack of clear communication about the rules concerning fraternal delegates] our delegates, and especially Rózsa Schwimmer was subjected to attacks in the press. As the newspapers would not accept our rebuttal for publication, we have to repeat it here’,44 and, without reacting to the false accusations and innuendo, they proceeded to explain the IWSA rules concerning fraternal delegates.

Epilogue: The limits of citizenship Schwimmer’s international reputation had been damaged since her wartime conflict with Aletta Jacobs and the IWSA, and her Swiss mission on behalf of the Károlyi government was widely regarded as a fiasco even in liberal circles. Not seeing any political future for herself in Hungary and with her continuing presence possibly even harming the cause, she left the country and became an exile for the rest of her life. The affair also brought into sharp focus the inability of the IWSA and other international organizations to grasp the sea change, in politics at large and in the politics among women’s organizations in Hungary. Some of it – for instance Chrystal Macmillan’s enquiry, a month after the Hungarian elections, whether it resulted in any female MPs in Parliament – ‘Have you any women members of

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Parliament now? … If so, is there any you could recommend as a good suffrage speaker?’ – could be explained by spotty communication or oversight.45 As Margit Slachta was elected in a March 1920 by-election, in theory she could have made her way to Geneva in June to address the Congress. Of course it would have been difficult to explain that she was not a particularly ‘good suffrage speaker’. Other instances, such as the IWSA asking the Hungarian government to subsidize the travel of Vilma Glücklich to Switzerland, really spoke of complete ignorance of the Hungarian political situation, the still raging White Terror, condoned by the counter-revolutionary government.46 Nor could the IWSA leaders possibly imagine that when Schwimmer complained after the Geneva affair of MANSZ leaders making ‘things very difficult for the FE’,47 she was not being overly dramatic, despite her reputation. The attacks against the FE were serious and in light of the political atmosphere even potentially dangerous. In time for the 1922 elections a new electoral decree introduced limitations on the voting rights of men, and it raised the age of female voters from twentyfour to thirty, overall reducing the ratio of voters in the general population from 60 to 40 per cent. The decree also introduced – in an unprecedented, undemocratic move – the open ballot, with the exception of Budapest and seven large cities. In a sign of the further erosion of its influence at the 1922 elections, the FE endorsed the Social Democratic candidate, Anna Kéthly. She was elected and throughout the 1920s and 1930s remained the sole female MP. During the interwar period Social Democratic women and the rump FE rekindled their solidarity – it lasted into the post–Second World War period and until the Communist takeover in 1948–1949 when the FE was banned and the MSZDP swallowed by the Communist Party.48 Until more detailed studies fill in the gaps on women’s voting patterns and participation in politics from associational life to trade unions, and student and youth movements, we can only hypothesize about the impact of woman’s suffrage between its introduction in November 1918 and the end of the interwar period. MANSZ enjoyed unprecedented and unparalleled government support and used it to undermine any emerging trust in the parliamentary system. Instead of the vote and party politics as an important tool for women to influence political decisions and their own fate, it pressed on them the crucial significance of their maternal role and the defence of the traditional family against the destructive forces of modernization and liberal women’s emancipation. The elimination of secret ballot in much of the countryside, along with the limitations on women’s (and men’s) political rights in 1922, also contributed to the further erosion of trust in political democracy. Under these circumstances the remaining liberal

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parties and the Social Democrats could spare very few resources for representing women’s interests or organize them within or parallel to their organizations; and the only lesson in political democracy, for women or men, remained the less than five months of the liberal revolution in 1918–1919. That was the only period when they were given a choice whether to organize around feminist issues and organization, to join existing political parties that represented those issues, or form women’s auxiliaries to parties. This lack of political education and the sustained experience of agency in a parliamentary democracy would shape women’s citizenship for the interwar period and for much of the post–Second World War period, with grave consequences – for both political democracy and women’s agency in defending their interests. A brief look at the subsequent path of some of the protagonists mentioned in this study will reveal wildly different patterns. Most of the socialists or left-wing activist women went into exile: some of them, like Katinka Károlyi and Ilona Duczynska, did not return until the 1960s, and then only to visit. Zsófia Dénes, Mrs Müller, and Mrs Ágoston all went into exile but returned after the Second World War, to become respected veterans of the communist cause. Those on the Right had no single pattern: Sarolta Geőcze died in 1928, Cecile Tormay, after many years of adulation as the iconic female politician of the Horthy regime, in 1937. Neither of them lived to see the anti-Jewish legislation of the late 1930s that stripped Hungarian Jews of full citizenship or the Hungarian Holocaust that resulted in their physical elimination from the Hungarian nation – a process to which their anti-Semitic writings had significantly contributed.49 Others on the Right found ways to atone: from the mid-1920s Emma Ritoók held a weekly literary salon. The young writers who gathered in her Budapest apartment included the finest talents but they would not have withstood the scrutiny of the strict anti-Semitic guidelines she had so strenuously proposed in defence of pure Hungarian, Christian talent in the early days after the revolutions.50 She died – reportedly starved to death during the siege of Budapest, at the end of the Second World War – in January 1945. Margit Slachta, the Christian Socialist and first elected female MP, had a very mixed parliamentary record – she was a staunch supporter of the numerus clausus. Then from 1940 she protested against the anti-Jewish laws and discrimination and during the worst period of the Second World War she hid and rescued persecuted Jews, often putting her own life on the line.51 A photo preserved among Rosika Schwimmer’s papers gives some indication of the fate of the women on the FE’s executive: on the picture we see two rows of serious-looking women of all ages sitting and standing behind a desk.52 The

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photo must have been taken in the mid-1920s. On the back are the names, accompanied by short comments: ‘Mrs. Vámbéry, killed; Mrs. Havas, killed; Mrs. Szirmay, still alive in 1951; Vilma Glücklich; Mrs. Meller, killed by Natzis [sic!]; Kunfy Nóra (Mrs. Vámbéry’s daughter, killed); Fekete Gizella; KozmaGlücklich Clara, killed’.53 As for Rosika Schwimmer, she emigrated to the United States in 1921. She lived there until her death in 1948, financially supported by American friends. It must have brought her a small measure of satisfaction to write a scathing review of the English edition of Cecile Tormay’s An Outlaw’s Diary – then again, one imagines her frustration that it could not have been published in a paper with a wider readership than the Chicago B’Nai Brith News.54 Following the failure of her attempts to end the First World War, her fiasco as the first female ambassador to achieve a more just peace for Hungary, the disappointments of the suffrage fight before 1918, and the bitter experience of being excluded from the vote in 1919, her fight for peace and equal citizenship continued even in exile. In 1926–1928 she fought in court the denial of her American citizenship.

Figure 6.1 The executive of the FE in the mid-1920s. From the left, first: Melanie Vámbéry, third: Mrs Szirmay, fifth: Vilma Glücklich, sixth: Mrs Meller. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Figure 6.2 The verso of the same photo, with handwritten annotations that speak for themselves. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

She filed for naturalization in 1926, but as a life-long pacifist she refused to take section of the oath of allegiance that concerned taking up arms in the defence of the country. As the Supreme Court decision against her explained: She answered: ‘I would not take up arms personally.’ She testified that she did not want to remain subject to Hungary, found the United States nearest her ideals of a democratic republic, and that she could whole-heartedly take the oath of allegiance. She said: ‘I cannot see that a woman’s refusal to take up arms is a contradiction to the oath of allegiance’.55

The court case made the headlines and earned her a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize – but, hélas, no citizenship.

Conclusion: The Long Shadow of Cecile Tormay During the period at the focus of this study – the last year of the First World War, the two revolutions and the first year of the counter-revolution – three models of women’s emancipation were introduced into the mainstream. The liberal model was already successfully represented by the FE before the war when it shared a pluralistic public space with conservative Christian and socialist ideas on gender roles and women. By contrast, the interwar period was dominated by an illiberal, patriarchal model of family and gender roles that was advocated by right-wing, nationalistic, and Christian women activists coming together in MANSZ. This model became an important part of the regime’s official ideology. Rhetoric of course would not stop social modernization in its tracks, and after a postwar backlash women increased their participation in the economy and the professions. But the propaganda of MANSZ did succeed in tying the official national project, the revision of the Trianon Treaty, to women’s traditional roles and motherly duties. In the process it also managed to marginalize the liberal feminists and characterize the liberal model of family and gender roles as a destructive force, alien to Hungarians. The third, the communist-inspired model of women’s emancipation was briefly tried out under the Republic of Councils in 1919 and elevated into official policy in 1948, to remain in place until 1989. Equal rights for women in higher education, the professions, and political life – although the last more often than not token – were among the few genuine achievements of Hungary’s state socialist regime. As for women’s strikingly high employment rates and the two-earner family model, shared by all state socialist countries before 1989, they were a legacy of Stalinist industrialization and a tenet of socialist dogma, whose social costs were never given full public scrutiny. After the fall of communism it was widely expected that Hungarian women would embrace the Western, liberal model of women’s emancipation – while keeping such popular features of the state socialist model as equal access to education and the professions, generous maternity benefits, and affordable child care.

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To everyone’s surprise, that is not at all what happened. The family and child benefits of the Hungarian welfare version of state socialism, along with a comprehensive safety net, have eroded in the twenty-seven years since the end of communism. Moreover, Hungarian women seem to have removed themselves from – or, possibly, allowed themselves to be pushed out of – the public sphere. Observers, whether domestic and foreign, have been at a loss to explain the postcommunist period’s dismal statistics on women’s representation in Parliament, the lowest in the European Union, political parties, and public life in general. Conservative family and gender values and overt sexism in the press, corporate as well as cultural life, and society at large are not only tolerated but celebrated and, to all appearances, shared by large numbers of both genders. These values have not only re-entered the mainstream but are today heavily promoted by the governing parties, and so are the patriotic duties of Hungarian mothers to contribute to the nation’s survival. Moreover, their language is eerily reminiscent of the interwar period whose authoritarian, illiberal legacy, not coincidentally, the government frequently invokes. This becomes strikingly evident in the phrasing of the new Hungarian constitution, enacted in 2011: ‘Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the survival of the nation’.1 There are strong indications – not least the continuing, indisputable popularity of the governing coalition – that large swaths of the population of both genders have willingly abandoned the gender egalitarian principles of Hungary’s socialist past. At the same time, political correctness that would entice politicians and public figures to, at the very least, pay lip service to gender equality seems to have eluded Hungary altogether. What could possibly explain the appeal of illiberal, conservative political, family, and gender values, seemingly unaffected by decades of state socialism? Such a turnaround cannot simply be assigned to successful government propaganda. However opportunistically motivated, it clearly struck a chord. Historians have recently argued that the lineage of the Hungarian right today, ranging from the governing Fidesz to the openly racist and anti-Semitic Jobbik, can be traced not to a Western European–type political conservatism but, rather, to the Hungarian interwar period’s nationalism and illiberal, authoritarian political tradition.2 In a recent, important collection a team of historians looked into the ways this right-wing tradition, suppressed between 1945 and 1989, has somehow survived in the genetic material, so to speak, of Hungarian society, to reappear, along with anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism, seemingly unchanged.3

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This study of women’s activism and gender politics between 1918 and 1920 may offer an important, missing piece to our understanding of the persistence and continuing appeal of illiberal views in Hungarian society. From Fascist Italy and Franco’s Spain to Vichy – and very recently, President Trump’s United States – illiberal family and gender values have been part and parcel of every right-wing, nationalistic political creed. But in the Hungarian case the family and gender ideology of the authoritarian, illiberal interwar period may have provided the very element that helped nationalistic, right-wing ideas and sentiments survive decades of Communism and, to a large degree, guarantee their current widespread appeal to Hungarian society. What were the elements and aspects in the interwar regime’s ideology and what were the aspects of political practice and gender politics that planted conservative, illiberal, nationalistic notions of gender and women so deeply and widely in Hungarian society that they would survive decades of Communism into the twenty-first century? We are in dire need of further studies for a definitive answer but can attempt a preliminary one. Despite its beginnings in counter-revolutionary terror (and characterization by Hungarian historians until the early 1960s as such), the Horthy regime was not Fascist, merely authoritarian. It is no accident that historians have long struggled to define its nature, for it was full of paradoxes. It was at once more democratic – with extended suffrage and parliamentary parties representing the peasantry and working class – and less liberal – with official anti-Semitism, censorship, and persecution of political dissent – than prewar Hungary.4 It fashioned itself as the restorer of law and order, but came to power riding on a wave of paramilitary violence. It extended the dominance of the prewar establishment but subverted the prewar liberal framework and replaced its imperial arrogance with a vision of a nation on the brink of extinction. The Horthy era’s combination of deeply running political and social conservatism and its illiberal streak produced phenomena that foreshadowed the fascist regimes. The cult of the leader built around Horthy was in some ways a precursor of the cult of fascist leaders.5 The regime also relied on youth and women’s movements – the boy scouts, the paramilitary levente, the anti-Semitic university fraternities, and MANSZ itself – in ways that were prescient of the use of mass movements by fascist regimes. Yet in its symbolic use of the past, such as in the anachronistic historical costumes of public officials and the political elite, the Horthy regime remained committed to a romanticized historical tradition that should have vanished from political life along with the Habsburgs. Conservatism and illiberalism were expressed in social and cultural policies and

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preferences and a distrust of all forms of social and cultural modernity. And one could not think of a better illustration of the ‘persistence of the Old Regime’ than the Hungarian political elite of the interwar period, maintaining its rule throughout the postwar era. By the same token, MANSZ should not be characterized as proto-fascist, in spite of its illiberal message to Hungarian women, its credible claims to be a mass movement, its leader’s vicious anti-Semitism, and the cult of Cecile Tormay herself. Still, the call to Hungarian women to reject the path of secularization and modernization – along with the strong Christian references – and the important role of militant Catholic male and female activists at the organization’s birth were characteristics that made MANSZ a novel phenomenon and a close precursor to the Spanish Falangist women’s movement. But when it came to the anti-Semitism and aggressive nationalism of MANSZ and the Horthy regime, it is important to keep in mind that these served not so much an ideological but a historically specific and practical purpose, to legitimize and retain political power. Articulated as a reaction – and remedy – to the Trianon Treaty, offered more as rhetoric than ideology, their symptoms were scapegoating, the romanticization of the past, and a tendency to wallow in a sense of victimization. In the event, the regime blamed the disaster of Trianon on the two revolutions, instead of coming to terms with it as the result of military defeat, decades of forced assimilationist policies towards the ethnic minorities, and the denial of democratic rights to vast segments of Hungarian society. As for the Horthy era’s anti-Semitism, it was constructed to discredit not only the two revolutions but the entire liberal political tradition, including the liberal model of women’s emancipation – in other words the project of social and cultural modernization in which Jews had played an important role. Public antiSemitism would be tempered after the first postwar years but one should not make the mistake of thinking that it disappeared or even lost its vital significance to the regime. The continuation of the numerus clausus and the broad social acceptance of discrimination against Jews were evidence to the contrary. Where does all this leave the large-scale postwar extension of male suffrage and the introduction of female suffrage in Hungary? These developments did after all seem to follow the general postwar European trend to extend citizenship rights and thereby make the political process more democratic. Despite the undeniable, significant extension of the vote, the history of electoral rights in Hungary serves as a cautionary tale: citizenship cannot be reduced to and grasped solely in terms of electoral legislation. The content and limits of citizenship cannot be gauged without taking into account the political

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and economic environment, ideological and cultural influences, and broadly defined political life, the last of which includes education, associational, and even family life. In the aftermath of the First World War, the collapse of the multi-ethnic Dual Monarchy and Hungary led to a perfect storm of sorts, fundamentally transforming the content and meaning of citizenship. As a result of AustriaHungary’s military defeat and the dismemberment of multi-ethnic Hungary in the Trianon Treaty, Hungary became an ethnically almost homogenous nationstate. (The territorial annexation of 70 per cent of the country’s prewar territory and 60 per cent of its prewar population solved Hungary’s minority problem but also left 3.5 million ethnic Hungarians outside of the new borders.) The counterrevolutionary government staked its existence on the revision of the Trianon Treaty and throughout the entire interwar period promoted an aggressive nationalism and ethnic hatred against the successor states. This brought the interwar regime into sharp contrast with the preceding, dualist period and the liberal definition of Hungarian citizenship. The Hungarian liberal founding fathers of the 1867 Compromise envisioned a multi-ethnic Hungary where ethnic minorities would enjoy broad cultural and linguistic rights in exchange for their loyalty to the Hungarian state and nation; but by the end of the nineteenth century Hungarian governments had broken this contract and introduced policies of forced Magyarization. Yet they all adhered to the nineteenth-century liberal concept of equal citizenship according to which all inhabitants of Hungary had a claim to equal rights as citizens, without regard for their ethnic, linguistic, or religious affiliations. Jews’ full citizenship rights were guaranteed in 1867 and the Jewish religion became fully recognized in 1895, in the context of the separation of state and church. The assimilation of Jews was the great success story of the Dual Monarchy; and Hungarian Jews, with many of them ennobled and acculturated to the Hungarian gentry, became pillars of the prewar establishment, others eminent members of the Hungarian scientific and academic elite, and yet others in the next generation leading professionals, advocates of social reform, critics of the anti-democratic political and social system, as well as creators and consumers of a new, urban culture. But their rights as equal citizens were never questioned. In the more or less ethnically homogenous post-Trianon Hungary, inundated with ethnic Hungarian refugees from the annexed territories.6 the nineteenthcentury liberal definition of Hungarian citizenship had undergone a radical transformation; it became an exclusive, ethnically, and/or racially defined concept. In other words: up until 1918 anyone who wanted to could become

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Hungarian; the conditions of acceptance may have changed over time but the definition and dynamic of assimilation remained fundamentally liberal and inclusive. After 1919 the definition was no longer subject to individual decision but restricted on ideological and ethnic/racial grounds. At the same time citizenship rights were curtailed in other ways. The liberal principle of equality was seriously breached by the numerus clausus law, introduced in September 1920. The law set the percentage of Jewish students’ admission at universities at 6 per cent, the ratio of Jews in the general population. Nominally driven by the need to protect the interests of professionals and their children from the annexed territories, the law clearly targeted Jews, and used the political argument of Hungarian Jews’ eminent role in the two revolutions as an excuse to reduce their high ratio in certain faculties and professions. Although the application of the law may have been relaxed and the counter-revolution’s militant anti-Semitic rhetoric tempered after the early 1920s, both the practice and the rhetoric of discrimination against Jews became socially accepted in the interwar period. Moreover, once the numerus clausus law’s breach of the liberal principle of equal citizenship became socially acceptable, it paved the way for the openly racial, anti-Jewish legislation of the late 1930s and, eventually, the Hungarian Holocaust.7 For all its historical significance, women’s suffrage, introduced in November 1918 and first practiced in January 1920, was not accompanied by an extension of women’s educational and economic rights. The backlash against women’s wartime employment began immediately after the war, the modest gains in women’s employment in municipal administration under the progressive Budapest mayor István Bárczy was rolled back at the same time, women’s university enrolment was frozen for three years after 1920, and the faculties of law and engineering, opened by a decree during the Károlyi revolution, were closed again, not to be opened until after 1945. Citizenship rights were further compromised in 1922 when by a new decree the ratio of men and women with the right to vote was reduced to 30 per cent and – in an unprecedented, deeply undemocratic move – the open ballot was reintroduced in the entire country, with the exception of Budapest and seven other cities.8 Tormay and MANSZ added a crucial ingredient, a pre-existing but newly reinforced conservative model of family and women’s roles, to the interwar period’s ideology. Ideas about the regeneration of the nation through the family and a renewed emphasis on motherhood in the service of rebuilding the nation were widely observed phenomena in European countries in the aftermath of the First World War. But in the Hungarian case, they were accompanied with an

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aggressive nationalism, revanchism (‘revisionism’) and anti-Semitism, and were elevated to the role of an official ideology to a degree we would see only in the interwar Fascist countries. The illiberal rhetoric of MANSZ and other leading Christian women activists articulated a crucial role for Hungarian women: to preserve and regenerate the nation against the threat of complete annihilation by the successor states from outside, and the liberal, Jewish, and Bolshevik threat against the nation and the family from within. Conservative church leaders and women politicians extolled the virtues of the family as the basic building block of society. The devaluation of the individual fit seamlessly not only with the regime’s violent beginnings and continuing breach of individual freedoms (e.g. internment without due process became widely used throughout the early 1920s, and emergency laws remained in effect for long periods in the 1920s and 1930s) but also with the rejection of the liberal model of women’s emancipation. Women were called on to fulfil a patriotic duty, not their own professional or personal objectives. This offered Hungarian women agency but only as long as they kept to traditional, familial roles as wives and mothers – or as producers of pre-industrial but sufficiently patriotic products as we have seen in Chapter 5. The results were manifold: By assigning a crucial part in the national project to large numbers of women, the violent beginnings of the counter-revolution became more palatable and the project of revisionism more widely supported. At the same time, women who worked in, let alone advocated for, non-traditional or modern fields were sidelined, their accomplishments devalued, and women’s rights generally separated from the nation’s wellbeing. The tenuous but important link between women’s rights and women’s agency was also broken at other junctures. Both MANSZ leaders and Catholic women activists claimed that Hungarian women did not ask for the vote. At the same time, the liberal feminists who most decidedly asked – and fought – for the vote were discredited as aliens, Jews, who did not represent Hungarian interests and could not represent Hungarian women. In the extreme nationalist rhetoric, the meaning of the vote, a basic component of full citizenship, was transformed from a right and a tool to emancipate women and engender change, into a duty to restore the past glory of the nation. The period produced another significant disconnect between political rights and democratic practice. The universal suffrage for men and women, introduced in November 1918 by the liberal revolutionary government, launched a genuinely democratic election campaign. This, in turn, led to a high period of women’s activism, helped articulate a range of positions on women’s political role, and allowed free expression to the programmes of all three models of women’s

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emancipation. But, through no fault of the Károlyi government, the elections never materialized – and under the next two political regimes, women’s political activism would be seriously curtailed and the brief experience of democratic political practice during the liberal revolution remain unmatched. The patriarchal rhetoric that emanated from the writings and speeches of Tormay and other women leaders of MANSZ was further enhanced by the sense of victimhood, the idea that Hungary was betrayed by the West and torn apart by its neighbours. The representation of the nation as a violated, bloodied female body, supported by other women and raised from the ground by Christ used in electoral propaganda by the Christian parties, the exaltation of Horthy and his paramilitaries, and the narrative of MANSZ as carrying the flag of counterrevolution until it could be passed into the strong arms of men – as described in Chapter 5 – all supported a traditional, highly patriarchal world view and reinforced the authoritarian ethos of the interwar regime. In the prewar period, two women’s organizations stood up systematically and consistently for women’s rights: the Social Democratic women represented working-class women’s economic rights and the FE fought for educational, legal, and economic rights of professionals and white-collar workers. The former were often co-opted and their special women’s interests suppressed in favour of the bigger prize: universal manhood suffrage; the latter was often forced into unpalatable compromises that would have limited women’s suffrage by economic and educational conditions. Because of their respective compromises, they also spent a lot of energy fighting and discrediting one another. Neither movement regained its former strength in the interwar period. The Social Democrats did manage to rebuild but lost many of their best leaders and activists, both men and women, to persecution or exile. In the 1922 pact with the government, they also lost the right to organize in the countryside in exchange for maintaining their core organizations in the largest cities. As for the FE, we have followed the tale of their near-annihilation as a political actor in the previous chapter. The denunciation and marginalization of the liberal feminists was the handiwork of MANSZ – and that also meant that when in 1922 and later the government decided to cut into women’s educational, political, or legal rights, the protection of these rights was left to the pro-government, rightwing women. At the parliamentary debate of the 1922 electoral decree and the freeze of women’s enrolment at university faculties in the fall of 1919, they did actually enter the fray and achieve some results. In the first case women’s suffrage was not completely eliminated in 1922, only restricted to women over thirty instead of the previous twenty-four. As for women’s access to universities,

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in 1923, curiously, the FE and MANSZ both petitioned the Ministry of Culture to overrule the faculties of Budapest University and allow women to enrol. While the FE’s petition prompted a characteristically anti-Semitic outburst from the Budapest Medical School, the arguments of MANSZ, appealing to the dire situation of middle-class women, found more sympathy. In 1927 a ministerial decree finally broke the resistance of Budapest University and achieved women’s admission at selected faculties. (Faculties still had the right to apply the numerus clausus and, despite the law’s 1928 suspension, favoured non-Jewish, non-female students.9) Overall, the association between women’s rights and women’s activism, embodied by the vigorous campaigns of the FE, was severed; and the feminists’ oft-repeated claim in the days of the Károlyi revolution – and, on rare occasions, in the interwar period – that the vote granted in November 1918 was neither a gift nor a reward for women’s wartime employment but the result of their consistent, principled fight forgotten. After all, even if MANSZ leaders privately lobbied for middle-class women’s educational and political rights, they told their membership that Hungarian women never wanted nor would ever need the vote. When women’s rights and women’s activism were seared from one another, when political, educational, and legal rights were presented not as the result of women’s agency but as gifts, introduced from above, when women’s familial roles were described as defined or dictated by ideological and political considerations, not individual choices, when the democratic political process was left at the mercy of an authoritarian leader and a single governing party, women paid the price with the loss of their agency at the very least. The previous paragraph could describe either the interwar Horthy regime or the post–Second World War Stalinist regime – and to a lesser degree even the post-Stalinist, state socialist regime. Far from me to downplay the fundamentally opposing nature and ideological, political, and social differences between the prewar and postwar regimes. But beyond all their differences, including their diametrically opposing gender and family policies, there remained one constant: gender policies and women’s roles in public and private life were defined and set from above, without the involvement of the women whose choices these policies were meant to regulate. With the exception of short periods – the liberal revolution between November 1918 and March 1919 and the short years between 1945 and 1947 – Hungarian women – and men – did not have any experience of a working democracy. In a way, then, the resurgence of conservative, illiberal trends when it comes to widely held views on women, gender, and family in post-communist Hungary

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and other countries of the former Eastern Bloc is the cumulative result of two consecutive regimes. Barbara Einhorn described the phenomenon first in her classic study of East Central European women who, after the fall of communism, willingly withdrew from the public sphere and rejected any political role.10 In her careful analysis she attributed the immediate post-communist period’s rejection of gender equality in public and family life to the fact that women’s equal rights under state socialism were not fought for and earned but gifted from above. I have taken her argument one long historical step further back, to the aftermath of the First World War. But if I succeeded in tracing the roots of these views, I still owe an explanation for their survival during the long decades of Stalinism and state socialism. After all, weren’t the interwar period’s political ideology and corresponding rhetoric of family and gender values eradicated from the public sphere after 1945? Deeply rooted right-wing, nationalist, or merely traditional conservative views, however, survived within the family, the very subject and target of the interwar ideology and rhetoric. And even in the worst Stalinist years, it was the family that remained the crucial building block of society and the locus of resistance and a refuge. During the Kádár decades, under the regime’s unwritten social contract, the family’s security was reinstated and, in sharp contrast with the Stalinist period, its privacy guaranteed. Relatively undisturbed, the family could and would preserve deeply ingrained nationalistic, illiberal, and antiSemitic sentiments. It also successfully resisted the doctrines of official ideology whose values of secularism and women’s equality were forced on – rather than internalized by – a reluctant, predominantly conservative Hungarian society. Having been nurtured and protected within the family, after the regime change of 1989–1990 these views and values would burst into public and political life, along with such previously repressed and re-emerging views, long thought extinct, as anti-Semitism, right-wing political extremism, and nationalism. Following 1945 the books of Cecile Tormay and Emma Ritoók were banned and with good reason: after all, in their literary and political works they produced some of the most vicious anti-Semitic propaganda, a crime in Communist Hungary. That was the case until 1989, when a Tormay revival almost immediately followed the regime change. This was not independent from the veritable Horthy renaissance that had been perceptible since 1989 but has turned into government policy since 2010. Some of the examples of this policy that refer to political figures and events mentioned in this study are the recent restoration of Kossuth Square – housing the Parliament building on whose steps Horthy received the flag and bouquets of the ladies of MANSZ – to its pre-1944

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state, the removal of the statue of Mihály Károlyi, and the recently introduced, official celebration of 4 June, the anniversary of the signing of the Trianon Treaty as the ‘Day of National Solidarity.’ Unlike some of her fellow writers and politicians who shared her extreme anti-Semitism and nationalism, Cecile Tormay’s written oeuvre has yet to make it into the national curriculum. But if she has not quite yet reached the heights of her prewar status as an iconic female politician, she has already – and again – become part of the mainstream. Copies of the latest edition of An Outlaw’s Diary are today widely available in major bookstores and public libraries, her bust unveiled in 2012 remains in downtown Budapest, and there is no shortage of laudatory, quasi-scholarly studies dedicated to her legacy as a writer and political figure. But the views on women’s roles, gender, and family that Tormay had helped ingrain so successfully in generations of Hungarian women and men growing up in interwar Hungary reach far deeper and further in Hungarian society. And rather than her novels, or even her Outlaw’s Diary, that is the true legacy of Cecile Tormay.

Notes Introduction 1 VII. International Woman Suffrage Congress Program, 15–20 June 1913, in VIII. International Woman Suffrage Congress (Budapest: Grafikai Intézet, 1913), 13. 2 ‘Horthy bevonulása Budapestre VIII. – a magyar nők követeivel’, Filmhíradók Online, accessed 9 January 2017, http://filmhiradokonline.hu/watch.php?id=5329. 3 György Litván and László Remete, A szociológia első magyar műhelye (Budapest: Gondolat 1973); Péter Hanák, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 4 Françoise Thébaud, ‘The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division’, in A History of Women, vol. 5. Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Françoise Thébaud (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 21–75. 5 Anne Cova, ed. Comparative Women’s History: New Approaches (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2006); Anne Cova, ‘International Feminisms in Historical Comparative Perspective: France, Italy and Portugal, 1880s–1930s’, Women’s History Review 19 (2010): 595–612. 6 Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 48. 7 Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, ‘Introduction’, in Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, ed. Sharp and Stibbe (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 4–8. 8 Pat Thane, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make?’ in Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present, ed. Amanda Vickery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Pat Thane, ‘Women and Political Participation in England, 1918–1970’, in Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the 20th Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make?, ed. Esther Breitenbach and Pat Thane (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2010), 11–28; Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye, introduction to The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918–1945 (London: Palgrave, 2013). 9 György Litván, Magyar gondolat – szabad gondolat (Budapest: Magvető, 1978). 10 Péter Bihari, Lövészárkok a hátországban. Középosztály, zsidókérdés, antiszemitizmus az első világháború Magyarországán (Budapest: Napvilág, 2008); Miklós Szabó, Az újkonzervativizmus és a jobboldali radikalizmus története (1967–1918) (Budapest: Uj Mandátum, 2003); Rudolf Paksa, ‘Szélsőjobboldal és antiszemitizmus’, in A

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megértés mint hivatás. Köszöntő kötet Erdélyi Ágnes 70. születésnapjára, ed. Bárány Tibor, Gáspár Zsuzsa, Margócsy István, Reich Orsolya, and Vér Ádám (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2014), 364–377; János Gyurgyák, Ezzé lett magyar hazátok; A magyar nemzeteszme és nacionalizmus története (Budapest: Osiris, 2007); János Gyurgyák, Magyar fajvédők: Eszmetörténeti tanulmány (Budapest: Osiris, 2012). Deborah Simonton, ‘Writing Women in(to) Modern Europe’, in The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700, ed. Deborah Simonton (London: Routledge, 2007), 1–13, esp. 5–7. Mária M. Kovács, ‘Hungary’, in Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945, ed. Kevin Passmore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 79–90. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, eds. War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Sharp and Stibbe, ‘Introduction’, 1–25. Krisztián Ungváry, A Horthy-rendszer mérlege; Diszkrimináció, szociálpolitika és antiszemitizmus Magyarországon 1919–1944 (Budapest: Jelenkor, 2012), 18. Claudia Koonz, ‘The Fascist Solution to the Women Question in Italy and Germany’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 499–534; Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992); Gisela Bock, ‘Challenging Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women’s History’, in Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives, ed. Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall (Basingstoke: Indiana University Press, 1991), 18–39. Kevin Passmore, ed. Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, eds. Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (London: Routledge, 2002), especially the chapters by Julie V. Gottlieb, ‘Female “Fanatics”: Women’s Sphere in the British Union of Fascists’, and Victoria L. Enders, ‘“And We Ate Up the World”: Memories of the Seccion Femenina’); Julie Gottliebed., ‘Special Issue: Women, Fascism and the Far-Right, 1918–2010’, Politics, Religion & Ideology 13/2 (June 2012); Christiane Streubel, ‘Raps across the Knuckles: The Extension of War Culture by Radical Nationalist Women Journalists in Post-1918 Germany’, in Sharp and Stibbe, ed. Aftermaths of War, 69–88; Raffael Scheck, Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Daniela Rossini, ‘Feminism and Nationalism: The National Council of Italian Women, the World War, and the Rise of Fascism, 1911–1922’, Journal of Women’s History 26 (2014): 36–58; Andrea Pető, ‘Who Is Afraid of the “Ugly Women”? Problems of Writing Biographies of Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block’, Journal of Women’s History 21 (2009): 147–151; Perry Willson, ‘Empire, Gender and the “Home Front” in Fascist Italy’, Women’s History Review 16 (2007): 487–500; Immaculada Blasco Herranz, ‘Citizenship and Female Catholic Militancy in 1920s Spain’, trans. Jeremy Roe, Gender & History 19 (2007): 441–466;

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22 23

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Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2006). Streubel, ‘Raps across the Knuckles’. Kirsten Heinsohn, ‘Germany’, in Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945, ed. Passmore, 40; Scheck, Mothers of the Nation, 90. Heinsohn, ‘Germany’, 44–45; Raffael Scheck, ‘German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the Early Weimar Republic’, German History 15 (1997): 34–55. Sharp and Stibbe, Aftermaths of War; Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds. Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Susan Zimmermann, ‘The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women’s Movement: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Development of Feminist Inter/National Politics’, Journal of Women’s History 17 (2005): 87–117. Passmore, Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945. Feinberg, Elusive Equality; Susan Zimmerman, ‘In and Out of the Cage: Women’s and Gender History Written in Hungary in the State-Socialist Period’, Aspasia 8 (2014): 125–149; Wingfield and Bucur, Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe; Francisca de Haan, Krasimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds. A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006). Jenő Gergely, ‘Keresztényszocialisták az 1918-as magyarországi polgári demokratikus forradalomban’, Történelmi Szemle 12 (1969): 26–65; Jenő Gergely, A keresztényszocializmus Magyarországon, 1903–1923 (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1977); Miklós Lackó, Válságok, választások: Történeti tanulmányok a két háború közötti Magyarországról (Budapest: Gondolat, 1975). Ignác Romsics, ed. A magyar jobboldali hagyomány 1900–1948 (Budapest: Osiris, 2009). Among others, Balázs Ablonczy, Teleki Pál (Budapest: Osiris, 2000); Ungváry, A Horthy-rendszer mérlege; János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon (Budapest: Osiris, 2001); Gyurgyák, Ezzé lett magyar hazátok; Róbert Kerepeszki, A Turul Szövetség 1919–1945 (Máriabesnyő: Attraktor Kiadó, 2012); Dávid Turbucz, Horthy Miklós (Budapest: Napvilág, 2011); Rudof Paksa, A magyar szélsőjobboldal (Budapest: Napvilág, 2013). Béla Bodó, ‘“White Terror, the Hungarian Press, and the Evolution of Hungarian Anti-Semitism after World War I’, Yad Vasem Studies 34 (2006): 45–86; Béla Bodó, ‘“Do Not Lead Us into (Fascist) Temptation”: The Catholic Church in Interwar Hungary’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (2007): 413–431; Béla Bodó, ‘Hungarian Aristocracy and the White Terror’, Journal of Contemporary History 45 (2010): 703–724; Béla Bodó, Pál Prónay: Paramilitary Violence and AntiSemitism in Hungary, 1919–1921 (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2011); Paul Hanebrink, ‘“Christian Europe” and National Identity in

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37 38

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Inter-War Hungary’, in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Marsha Rozenblit and Pieter Judson (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), 192–202; Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Paul Hanebrink, ‘Transnational Culture War: Christianity, Nation, and the Judeo-Bolshevik Myth in Hungary, 1890–1920’, The Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 55–80. Judit Acsády, ‘In a Different Voice: Responses of Hungarian Feminism to the First World War’, in The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–1919, ed. Alison Fell and Ingrid Sharp (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Susan Zimmermann, Die bessere Hälfte? Frauenbewegungen in Ungarn der Habsburgmonarchie, 1848 bis 1918 (Wien: Promedia Verlag, 1999) and Ann Taylor Allen, ‘Feminist Modernism and National Tradition: Britain, the United States, Hungary, India’, Journal of Women’s History 14 (2002): 172–181. Orsolya Keresztély, ‘A Great Endeavor: The Creation of the Hungarian Feminist Journal A Nő és a Társadalom (Women and Society) and Its Role in the Women’s Movement, 1907–1913’, Aspasia 7 (2013): 92–107; Dóra Czeferner, ‘Feminista szervezkedés az első világháború előtt’, Újkor.hu, http://ujkor.hu/content/ feminista-szervezkedes-videken-az-elso-vilaghaboru-elott. Katalin Nagyné Szegvári and Andor Ladányi, Nők az egyetemeken (Budapest: Felsőoktatási Pedagógiai Kutatóközpont, 1976); Katalin Nagyné Szegvári, Numerus clausus intézkedések az ellenforradalmi Magyarországon (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1988). Orsolya Keresztély, Nőnevelés és nemzetépités Magyarországon 1867–1918 (Budapest: Novum-Eco, 2010). Irén Simándi, Küzdelem a nők parlamenti választójogáért Magyarországon 1848– 1938 (Budapest: Gondolat, 2009). Pető, ‘Who Is Afraid of the “Ugly Women”?’ Péterné Ágoston, A magyar szocialista nőmozgalom története (Budapest: Népszava Könyvkereskedés, 1947). See also Zimmerman, ‘In and Out of the Cage’, 125–149, lamenting the same. Margit Balogh, ‘Slachta Margit, a “keresztény” feminista’, in Asszonysorsok a 20. században, ed. Margit Balogh and Katalin S. Nagy (Budapest: BME Szociológia és Kommunikáció Tanszék, 2000); Ilona Mona, Slachta Margit (Budapest: Corvinus, 1997). András Lengyel, ‘A Vasárnapi Kör “renegátja”’, in Utak és csapdák; Irodalomésművelődéstörténeti tanulmányok (Budapest: Tekintet, 1994), 7–76. Judit Kádár, ‘A Fasiszta biznisz felvirágzása – Tormay Cécile Bujdosó könyvének legfrissebb kiadásáról’, Magyar Narancs 30 (23 July 2009); Judit Kádár, Engedelmes lázadók (Pécs: Jelenkor, 2014). Krisztina Kollarits, Egy bújdosó írónő. Tormay Cécile (Vasszilvágy : Magyar Nyugat, 2010); Krisztina Kollarits, ed. ‘Csak szétszórt őrszemek vagyunk…’, in Tanulmányok a Napkeletről (Budapest: Magyar Nyugat Könyvkiadó, 2013); Krisztina Kollarits,

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ed. ‘Nem csak a magam terhét hordom…’, in Tormay Cécile és a Napkelet (Budapest: Orpheusz Kiadó, 2013). Anna Borgos and Judit Szilágyi, eds. Nőírók és írónők; Irodalmi és női szerepek a Nyugatban (Budapest: Noran, 2011); Petra Török, ed. Sorsával tetováltan önmaga; Válogatás Lesznai Anna naplójegyzeteiből (Budapest: Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum és Hatvany Lajos Múzeum, 2007). Rosika Schwimmer Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, The New York Public Library. Collection of Feministák Egyesülete (FE), National Archives of Hungary (OL), fond P999; Collection of Mrs Oszkár Szirmay, OL, fond 987. Mineke Bosch, ed. Politics and Friendship. Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–1942 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990). Ibid., 27. Ibid., 25. Robert Gerwarth, ‘Sexual and Nonsexual Violence Against “Politicized Women” in Central Europe after the Great War’, in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, ed. Elizabeth D. Heineman (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 122–136; Eliza Ablovatski, ‘Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919’, in Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, ed. Wingfield and Bucur.

Chapter 1 1 “Happier days” referred to both the Congress and peace time Postcard, signed by Rosika Schwimmer and Paula Pogány to Mrs Szirmay from Stockholm peace conference, 24 April 1916, OL, Collection of Mrs Oszkár Szirmay, fond P987, box 1, folder 3. 2 VII. International Woman Suffrage Congress, 15. 3 Mihály Szécsényi, ‘Nőkongresszus Budapesten, anno’, Budapest 36, no. 7 (July 2013): 2. The author does not indicate his source for this information. 4 ‘Report of the FE, submitted for approval to the general meeting’, A Nő 1, 5 April 1914, 12. 5 This overview benefited from my own chapter, ‘The Shifting Front Lines of the Hungarian Women’s movements, 1896–1918’, in Women’s Emancipation Movements in the 19th Century; A European Perspective, ed. Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 189–205; see also Kornélia Burucs, ‘Nők az egyesületekben’, História 15, no. 2 (1993/2): 15–18. 6 Pesti Izraelita Nőegylet, OL, fond 1866. 7 Burucs, ‘Nők az egyesületekben’, 16.

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8 Katalin Pik, ‘Egy századeleji vita margójára’, Esély, 1998/5, 63. 9 Judith Szapor, “Feministák és ‘radikális asszonyok;’ Női politikusok az 1918-os demokratikus forradalomban,” in Nők a moderizálódó magyar társadalomban, ed. Gábor Gyáni and Nagy Beáta (Debrecen: Csokonai, 2001), 254–277; and Burucs, ‘Nők az egyesületekben’. 10 Péterné Ágoston, ‘Feministák’, Papers of Péter Ágoston and Ágoston Péterné, Politikatörténeti és Szakszervezeti Levéltár (PTIL), fond 689, unit 18. 11 Ibid. In fact it was the dean of the faculty of law of Budapest University who called feminists ‘female monsters’, and demanded the restoration of the ‘traditional Hungarian type of woman’. Papers of Mariska Gárdos, PTIL, fond 940, unit 11, p. 248. 12 Between 1907 and 1913 the paper appeared as a monthly. From 1914 it appeared under the title The Woman (A Nő) as a bi-weekly. 13 Mrs Szirmay was responsible for much of the FE’s wartime welfare activities. As the last survivor of the founding generation – she died in 1959 – she preserved a significant collection of documents and photos, deposited in a separate collection in the National Archives of Hungary (OL), under fond no. P987. 14 Gergely, A keresztényszocializmus Magyarországon, 1903–1923, 12–13. 15 Ibid., 13. 16 Ibid., 15–16. 17 Borbála Juhász, Dorottya Szikra, and Eszter Varsa, ‘The History of Social Work and Gender in Hungary, 1900–1960’, Sweep Project, 24, http://www.sweep.uni-siegen.de/ content/Results/Final_Reports_PDFs/FinalReportHun.pdf. 18 Borbála Juhász, ‘The Unfinished History of Social Work in Hungary’, in History of Social Work in Europe (1900–1960), ed. Sabine Haring and Berteke Waaldijk (Oplande: Leske and Budrich, 2003), 119. 19 Béla Bangha, A kereszténység és a zsidók (Budapest: Mária-kongregáció, 1912); Sarolta Geőcze, ‘Az erkölcsi nevelés, mint magyar nemzeti probléma’ (Budapest: Franklin, 1909). 20 Ágostonné, A magyar szocialista nőmozgalom története, 5–6. 21 Lecture of Katalin Zalai, Institute of Political History, Budapest, 28 September 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUq3Zcn8nxo&feature=youtube. 22 Ágostonné, A magyar szocialista nőmozgalom története, 7–10. 23 Sz. G., ‘A feminista mozgalom’, Huszadik Század 14, no. 2 (July–December 1913): 66–74. Written on the occasion of the suffrage congress, the writer of the Huszadik Század criticized the Social Democrats and the liberal feminists for their respective compromises in the fight for women’s suffrage. 24 The first woman doctor who graduated in Hungary, Sarolta Steinberger, remembered that both Rosa Schwimmer and Mariska Gárdos, the leading Social Democratic activists, recruited her for lectures – she eventually joined the FE. Péterné Ágoston, ‘Feministák’, Papers of Péter Ágoston and Ágoston Péterné, PTIL, fond 689.

Notes 25 26 27 28

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

165

Letter of women of Balmazújváros to FE, 14 July 1908, OL, fond P999, box 5, folder 6. Ibid. Letter of Mrs Bordás to FE, no date, OL, fond P999, ibid. Rózsa Schwimmer, ‘Az éjjeli munka kérdése’, A Nő és a Társadalom, March 1911, Rosika Schimmer papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library; Mariska Gárdos, ‘Feminista mozgalom Magyarországon’, Papers of Mariska Gárdos, PTIL, fond 940, unit 11, 254–255. The Christian Socialist educator Sarolta Geőcze described the ‘moral decline, in public as well as private life; shallow, materialistic world view; the signs of arrogance, cinicism and consequent debaucherie alien from the Hungarian national character’ and attributed them to Jewish influence in the press and public life. ‘Az erkölcsi nevelés, mint magyar nemzeti probléma’, 1. Janka Gergely, untitled history of the FE, dated 1909, Collection of FE, OL, fond P999, box 17, folder 14; Papers of Mariska Gárdos, PTIL, fond 940, 247, PTIL. Papers of Mariska Gárdos, PTIL, fond 940, 248. Ibid., 251. Susan Zimmermann, ‘Frauenbestrebungen und Frauenbewegungen in Ungarn; Zur Organisationsgeschichte del Jahre 1848 bis 1918’, in Szerep és alkotás; Női szerepek a társadalomban és az alkotóművészetben, ed. Beáta Nagy and Margit S. Sárdi (Debrecen: Csokonai, 1997), 202. Collection of FE, OL, P999, box 23, folder 32, 1912–1922. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. and Czeferner, ‘Feminista szervezkedés az első világháború előtt’. Collection of FE, OL, P999, box 23, folder 32, 1912–1922; and Béla Barabás, ‘A nők választójoga’, Függetlenség, 6 May 1917, 2. Ágostonné, A magyar szocialista nőmozgalom története, 11. Gábor Gyáni, ‘Női munka és a család Magyarországon (1900–1930)’, Történelmi Szemle 3 (1987–1988): 367. Szécsényi, ‘Nőkongresszus Budapesten, anno’. General assembly, 31 July 1914, Collection of Feministák Egyesülete, OL, fond P999, box 1, folder 2/b, OL. Letter of István Bárczy to FE, 1 September 2014, Collection of FE, OL, fond P999, box 3, folder 5. FE to Central Aid Committee of Budapest, ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Collection of FE, OL, fond P999, box 1, folder 2/a. A Nő 1, vol. 1, no. 15 (1 August 1914): 1. Ibid.

166

Notes

51 A Nő 2, vol. 2, no. 6 (5 June 1915): 100. (If more than one digit, page numbers refer to the digital version of the newspaper, accessed at the Digital Archive of Hungarian Social Sciences, mtdapotal.extra.hu.) 52 Szeged FE branch to FE executive, OL, P999, box 3, folder 5. 53 Nagyváradi feministák egyesülete to the FE, OL, fond P999, ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Hungarian Feminist Committee of Permanent Peace, membership form, OL, P 999, box 10, folder 11/b. 56 Letter of deputy police chief to FE, OL, P999, box 3, folder 5. 57 Ibid. 58 Letter of Rosika Schwimmer to Mrs Fawcett, 5 August 1914, IWSA Archives, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, IWSA/12/103. 59 Bosch, ed. Politics and Friendship, 135–141. 60 Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London and Boston: Pandora, 1985) is still the best account of the Ford mission. 61 Bosch, Politics and Friendship, 295–296, notes 11 and 12. 62 A Nő, 18 December 1915, 2. 63 Ibid., 3. 64 A Nő, 20 August, 28 September and 28 October 1914. 65 A Nő, 5 April 1915, 52. 66 A Nő, 10 May 1915, 73–75. 67 A Nő, 5 July 1915, 106–107. Schwimmer’s picture is on the front page. 68 A Nő, December 1917, 195. 69 Ibid., 196. In fact, Schwimmer’s travel ban lasted only a few months, until the fall of 1917. 70 FE to National Party of Work, 14 April 1917, Collection of FE, OL, P999, box 15, folder 16. 71 Nők Lapja, 15 March 1916, Schwimmer Papers, New York Public Library. 72 A magyarországi nőmunkások országos szervezőbizottsága, Papers of Manó Buchinger and Ladányi Szeréna, PTIL, fond 696, unit 68. 73 Nagyné Szegvári and Ladányi, Nők az egyetemeken, 56 and on. 74 Collection of FE, OL P 999, box 23, folder 32. 75 Collection of Galilei Kör, PTIL, fond 684. 76 Ibid., unit 1. 77 Ibid. 78 György Dalos, A cselekvés szerelmese (Budapest: Kossuth, 1984), 39–84 describes in detail the anti-war activities of the Galileists and the following trial. 79 Bihari, Lövészárkok a hátországban, 201–222. 80 Emma Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 1914–March 1919, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár (OSZK), Manuscript Division, fond 473, 69.

Notes

167

81 Attila Pók, ‘The Politics of Hatred: Scapegoating in Interwar Hungary’, in Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940, ed. Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling (Budapest: Central European University, 2006), 375–388. 82 A Nő, December 1917, front page. 83 Papers of Jolán Fehér, PTIL, fond 686, unit 312; Collection of Józsefné Kelen, PTIL, fond 859. 84 A Nő, December 1917, 196.

Chapter 2 1 ‘Egy vándor, aki el nem fárad’, A Nő, 5 October 1916, 1. The article titled ‘The Wanderer Who Never Tires’ greeted Rosika Schwimmer returning to Hungary. 2 A Nő, 25 May 1918, 71. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Magyar Nő, March 1918 and 15 March 1918, 34–35. 6 A Nő, February 1918. 7 ‘Egy vándor’, A Nő, 5 October 1916, 1. 8 Ibid. 9 A Nő, 10 March 1917, 11. 10 Mihályné Károlyi, Együtt a forradalomban (Budapest: Európa, [1967] 1985), 229 and 239–240. Katinka Károlyi née Andrássy used her maiden and married name interchangeably and often referred to her own and her husband’s aristocratic rank, if only to highlight the political distance they both travelled from their feudal background to the Socialist Left. 11 Ibid., 229. 12 Ibid., 228. 13 This was a view widely shared by contemporaries. For instance, the liberal daily Pesti Napló, reporting on Schwimmer’s talk in April 1917, noted: ‘There is no doubt that after Mrs. Perkins-Gilman she is the most outstanding orator of today’s feminism.’ Rosika Schwimmer Papers, The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, Manuscripts and Archives Division, series VIII, personal press clippings, box 539, 1897–1972, 1917–1919. 14 Károlyiné, Együtt, 228. In the English edition, A Life Together, The Memoirs of Katinka Károlyi (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966) the passages relating to the Club were not included. 15 Ibid., 228. Although the highest-profile leaders of the FE did fit this description, it does seem exaggerated. However, Katinka’s statement does reflect the contemporary view. 16 Ibid., 284.

168

Notes

17 Typewritten invitation, Schwimmer Papers, box 97, General Correspondence, folder 16 February 1918. 18 Ibid. 19 Rosika Schwimmer to Mrs Károlyi, Schwimmer Papers, box 97, General Correspondence, folder 11–18 March 1918. A typed list containing the same names in alphabetical order is included in the same folder, dated 11 March 1918. 20 Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds. A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006), 26. 21 János Jemnitz and György Litván, Szerette az igazságot (Budapest: Gondolat, 1977), 116. Both Károlyi and Schwimmer participated at the November 1917 Bern pacifist congress. Ibid., 120. 22 Károlyiné, Együtt, especially, 158–163. 23 For Károlyi’s early life, see Jemnitz and Litván, Szerette az igazságot; Tibor Hajdú, Ki volt Károlyi Mihály? (Budapest: Napvilág, 2012); and Mihály Károlyi, Hit, illúziók nélkül (Budapest: Magvető, 1977), originally published as Memoir of Michael Károlyi, Faith Without Illusion (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956). 24 Károlyiné, Együtt, 224. 25 Ibid., 228–230. 26 Ibid., 230. 27 Her 1914 interview with President Wilson made its way into major newspapers. 28 Jemnitz and Litván, Szerette az igazságot, 111–123. 29 A Nő, 15 July 1917, 104–105. 30 Pesti Napló, 17 June 1917, 3 and Schwimmer Papers, series VIII, personal press clippings 1897–1972 Box 539, 1917–1919. 31 Ibid. 32 A magyar nőmozgalom történeti kialakulása, Schwimmer Papers, box 97, folder 1–9 April 1918; Mária M. Kovács, ‘Ambiguities of Emancipation: Women and the Ethnic Question in Hungary’, Women’s History Review 5, no. 4 (1996): 487–495, draws out the important connections between gender and ethnicity in the debate over electoral reform but is vague on the history and distinctions between women’s movements; Irén Simándi, ‘A nők parlamenti választójogának története Magyarországon 1919–1945’, Rubicon 4 (2009), http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar/ oldalak/a_nok_parlamenti_valasztojoganak_tortenete_magyarorszagon_1919_1945/ magyarorszagon_1919_1945/ (accessed on 20 January 2017), is a reliable source on the exact details of Vázsonyi’s proposal as it concerned women. 33 Simándi, ‘A nők parlamenti választójogának története Magyarországon 1919–1945’. 34 Schwimmer Papers, 25 February 1918, box 97, General Correspondence, folder 5 February–17 May 1918. 35 Minutes of the 11 March 1918 general assembly, ibid. 36 A flyer of the FE cites tens of thousands of members. Collection of FE, P999, box 24, folder 42, OL.

Notes

169

37 ‘A magyar társadalomhoz!’ dated in Schwimmer’s hand, 18 June 1918, flyer of FE, Schwimmer Papers, box 98, General Correspondence, folder 18 May–2 August 1918. 38 Letter of Vilma Glücklich to members of the FE, dated 19 June 1918, ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Magyarország, 1 June 1918, in Schwimmer Papers, series VIII, personal press clippings 1897–1972, box 539, 1917–1919. 41 Világ, 1 June 1918. 42 Magyar Hírlap, 2 June 1918. Incidentally, the founder of this daily was the respected elder statesman Albert Apponyi, the husband of Mrs Apponyi, vice-president of the conservative MNOSZ (Alliance of Hungarian Women’s Associations) and one of the Club’s presidents. 43 Simándi, ‘A nők parlamenti választójogának története Magyarországon 1919–1945’, notes correctly that the franchise bill introduced in August 1918 did not include women. 44 Vilmos Vázsonyi, cited in Simándi. 45 Magyar Nők Klubja alapszabályai, Schwimmer Papers, box 97, General Correspondence, folder 15–28 February 1918. 46 Károlyiné, Együtt, 229. 47 ‘Receipt no. C 389 of The International Women’s Franchise Club Limited’, Schwimmer Papers, box 498, Series VII: Women and peace organizations, 1910– 1983. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., my italics. 51 Ibid., list of lecturers – autumn session 1912 and 1913. 52 IW’s Franchise Club Ltd. Membership flyer, ibid. 53 Schwimmer Papers, box 97, folder 15 February–17 May 1918, 19 March 1918. 54 Ibid. 55 Gyula Krúdy, ‘Asszony-klub’, Borsszem Jankó, 9 March 1918, in Schwimmer Papers, series VIII, personal press clippings Box 539. See also the announcement in Magyar Nő [Hungarian Woman], March 1919, 4, the monthly bulletin of the Social Mission Society – it listed only the conservative members of the executive. 56 Handwritten note by Schwimmer on 2 March 1918 ‘League for Peace meeting banned’, box 97, folder 1–10 March 1918. 57 Schwimmer Papers, box 97, 15 February–17 May 1918. 58 Ibid. 59 Copy of Schwimmer’s temperature chart from 6 July 1918, Schwimmer Papers, box 98, General Correspondence, folder 1–21 July 1918. 60 Letter from Schwimmer to Mien Palthe, Rahó, Schwimmer Papers, box 99, General Correspondence, folder 3–18 August 1918: ‘Here we are – [Paula] Pogány, Franzi [Franciska Schwimmer, Rosika’s sister], [Adél] Spády and I since the first of this month’.

170

Notes

61 Vilma Glücklich, postcard to members of the FE resort, Schwimmer Papers, box 99, General Correspondence, folder 3–18 August 1918. 62 The expressions are from the unpublished memoirs of Emma Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 1914–1919, 160 and 293. 63 Ibid., 292–293. 64 Ibid., 293–294. 65 Ibid., 293. 66 Ibid., 294. 67 Ibid., 297. 68 Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. I, 145. 69 ‘Zichy Rafaelné önéletrajza’, Documents of Magyar Katholikus Nőegyletek Szövetségének iratai (Alliance of Hungarian Catholic Women’s Associations), fond P1650, OL. Mrs Zichy was president of the National Alliance of Catholic Women’s Associations and founder of the wartime charity Catholic Caritas. What was also, understandably, omitted from Mrs Zichy’s official biography is her part in an infamous libel case. In 1925 her husband filed for divorce, citing her homosexual relationship with Tormay as the reason. Tormay countersued and won. Anita Kurimay, ‘Interrogating the Historical Revisionism of the Hungarian Right: The Queer Case of Cécile Tormay’, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 30, no. 1 (2016): 13–14. 70 ‘The bulletin of the Social Mission Society, the organization of social work controlled by the Catholic Church’, Magyar Nő, 1919, 1. 71 See the list of the executive, 19 March 1918, Schwimmer Papers, box 97, folder 11–18 March 1918. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Flyer of FE, OL, fond P999, box 24, folder 42. Schwimmer Papers, box 498, folder 3. A Magyar Nő, 15 January 1918, 1. Az Est, 19 October 1918, 2. Ibid., 4. Pesti Napló, 22 October 1918, 9. Ibid. Az Est, 29 October 1918, 8. Az Est, 30 October 1918, 3. Pesti Napló, 29 October 1918, 1.

Notes

171

11 Az Est, 31 October 1918, 6. 12 Az Est, 1 November 1918, front page. 13 Schwimmer to Károlyi, 10 September 1918, Schwimmer Papers, box 99, folder 19. In her day planner she noted on 18 September: ‘pass to Switzerland only’. 14 Ibid. 15 Pesti Napló, 1 November 1918, 2. 16 Az Est, 1 November 1918, 3. 17 Ritoók, ‘Évek és emberek’, OSZK, fond 473, part 1, 177. 18 Az Est, 2 November 1918, front page. 19 The ‘new Hungary’ was the catchword of the democratic opposition before and during the war, demanding universal suffrage and land reform. 20 Magyar Nő, 1 November 1918, 1. 21 Hajdú, Ki volt Károlyi Mihály?, 100. 22 A Nő, 10 November 1919, 1. 23 Ritoók, ‘Évek és emberek’, part 1, 119. 24 Hajdú, Ki volt Károlyi Mihály?, 85. 25 In March 1919, in one of the most generous gestures of twentieth-century Hungarian history, Károlyi, himself the heir to one of the largest landholdings, distributed his land among the landless rural laborers in March 1919. 26 Az Est, 30 October 1919, 3. 27 Pesti Napló, 29 October 1919, 5. 28 https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyar_Nemzeti_Tan%C3%A1cs#/media/ File:Nemzeti_Tan%C3%A1csII.jpg 29 A Nő, 15 March 1918, 42. 30 OL, fond P999, box 2, folder 3. 31 Ibid. 32 A Nő, 25 November 1918, 142. 33 OL, fond P999, box 2, folder 3. 34 ‘A Jogalkotás a két világháború között’, Magyarország a XX. Században, Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár, http://mek.oszk.hu/02100/02185/html/93.html (accessed 22 January 2017). 35 Nőtisztviselők Lapja, 8 December 1918, 76. 36 Nőmunkás, 1 December 1918, 1. 37 Ibid. 38 E.g. Antal Szakasits, ‘Women in the revolution’, Nőmunkás, 15 November 1918, 6–7. 39 Mrs Buchinger [Szeréna Ladányi, wife of one of party leaders], ‘The political education of women’, Nőmunkás, 15 December 1918, 2–3. 40 Decree no. 206626/1918 of the Ministry of Religion and Public Education, cited in Nagyné Szegvári and Ladányi, Nők az egyetemeken, 83. 41 Ernőné Müller, A nők és a politika (Budapest: Népszava Könyvkereskedés, 1919), 15. 42 Minutes of the Executive, 19 November 1918, OL, fond P999, box 2, folder 3.

172 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Notes

Minutes of the Executive, 22 December 1918, ibid. Minutes of the Executive, 27 December 1918, ibid. Ibid. Nőmunkás, 15 November 1918, 1. Ibid., 3. Nőmunkás, 1 December 1918, 6. Ibid., 1–2. Nőmunkás, 1 December 1918, 6. Nőtisztviselők Lapja, February 1919, 1. Peter Pastor, ‘The Diplomatic Fiasco of the Modern World’s First Woman Ambassador, Roza Bedy-Schwimmer’, East European Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1974): 273–282. Károlyi’s most recent, short biography, Hajdu, Ki volt Károlyi Mihály? mentions Schwimmer’s name only once, on page 107. Typewritten draft of Schwimmer’s letter to Károlyi, 5–6 November 1918, Schwimmer Papers, box 101, folder November 1918. Gusztáv Gratz, A forradalmak kora. Magyarország története 1918–1920 (Budapest: Magyar Szemle Társaság, 1935), 154–157. Pesti Napló, 17 December 1918, 2. Az Est, 28 December 1918, 3. Pesti Napló, 2 January 1919, 1. Ibid. Pesti Napló, 19 January 1919, 2. Nőtisztviselők Lapja, 15 February 1919, 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid. Minutes of the 27 Feb 1919 executive meeting, OL, fond P999, box 2, folder 3. Ibid. Ibid. Judith Szapor, ‘Feministák és “radikális asszonyok;” Női politikusok az 1918-os demokratikus forradalomban’, in Nők a moderizálódó magyar társadalomban, ed. Gábor Gyáni and Nagy Beáta (Debrecen: Csokonai, 2001), 254–277. Minutes of 27 Feb 1919 executive meeting, OL, P999, box 2, folder 3. Az Est, 17 January 1919, 2. Az Est, 18 January 1919, 3. Pesti Hírlap, 17 January 1919, front page. Pesti Hírlap, 18 January 1919, 3. Ibid., 5. Pesti Napló, 15 January 1919, 5. Pesti Napló, 17 January 1919, 1. Ibid., front page. Nőmunkás, 1 January 1919, 2.

Notes 77 78 79 80 81

173

Ibid. Nőtisztviselők Lapja, 15 February 1919, 9. Zsófia Dénes, El ne lopd a léniát (Budapest: Gondolat, 1978), 82. Ibid., 83. In the light of her subsequent activities during the Republic of Councils, it is somewhat surprising that Dénes published her article commemorating Rosa Luxemburg in the feminist The Woman. Zsófia Dénes, ‘Rosa Luxemburg’, A Nő, 25 January 1919, 4–5. 82 Az Est, 22 February 1919. 83 Minutes of the executive meeting of 27 February 1919, OL, fond P999, box 2, folder 3. 84 Letter of Mrs Hevesi, 25 February 1956, PTIL, fond 686/312. 85 Pesti Napló, 22 February 1919, 6. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 3. 88 Ibid., 4. 89 Magyar Nő, 31 December 1918. 90 Népszava, 21 January 1919, 6. 91 Ibid. 92 Schwimmer to Mien Palthe, 2 March 1919, Schwimmer Papers, box 117, folder March 1919. 93 Decree no. XXXII of the Revolutionary Governing Council, PTIL, fond 866, unit 1. 94 Vörös Újság, 9 April 1919, 3. 95 Vörös Újság, 6 April 1919, 1. 96 Vörös Újság, 6 April 1919, PTIL, fond 866, unit 10. 97 ‘A kommunizmus a nő felszabadítója’, Vörös Újság, 5 April 1919, 3, and ‘Dolgozó nők az urnák előtt’, Vörös Újság, 7 April 1919, 2. 98 Vörös Újság, 20 May 1919, 2. 99 Vörös Újság, 29 March 1919, 6. We have no evidence to determine whether there were any women who heeded the call to arms. 100 Zsófia Dénes, A nő a kommunista társadalomban (Budapest: Közoktatási Népbiztosság, 1919). 101 Ibid., 24–30. 102 Anonymus, Kommunizáljuk-e Zsófit? (Budapest: Közoktatási Népbiztosság, 1919). 103 Vörös Újság, 17 June 1919, 5. 104 Ibid., 6. 105 Resolution of Women’s Congress, PTIL, fond 696, unit 56. 106 Nőmunkás, 14 June 1919, 1. 107 Vörös Újság, 17 June 1919, 13. 108 Ernőné Müller, Eszmélés (Budapest: Kossuth, 1964), 317–318. 109 E.g. ‘Anti-Feminism of the Hungarian Bolshevik Regime’, 1925, Schwimmer Papers, box 479, folder 8.

174

Notes

Chapter 4 1 The speeches of Horthy and the mayor were preserved on newsreel and recorded by the dailies. Corvin híradó no. 1, ‘Horthy bevonulása Budapestre, tetemrehívás’ [The entry of Horthy into Budapest, The call to ordeal], 16 November 1919, Filmhíradók Online, http://filmhiradokonline.hu/watch.php?id=5322 (accessed 31 January 2016); Budapesti Hírlap, 18 November 1919, 4; Magyarország, 18 November 1919, 3. The expression ‘call to ordeal’ referred to the title of a popular ballad by the nineteenthcentury poet János Arany about a young woman who drove an innocent young nobleman to suicide. 2 In an insightful, short article Boldizsár Vörös emphasized the Christian, sacral elements of the celebrations. Boldizsár Vörös, ‘ Térfoglalás Budapesten – térfoglalás a történelemben? A Nemzeti Hadsereg budapesti bevonulási ünnepsége 1919. Nov. 16-án’, in Ünnep – hétköznap – emlékezet. Társadalomés kultúrtörténet határmezsgyéjén: A Hajnal István Kör Társadalomtörténeti Egyesület konferenciája, ed. Cecília Pásztor (Salgótarján: Nógrád Megyei Levéltár, 2002), 181–186. 3 Budapesti Hírlap, 18 November 1919, 2–7; Magyarország, 18 November 1919, 1–6. 4 Budapesti Hírlap, 18 November 1919, 6; Magyarország, 18 November 1919, 5; ‘Horthy bevonulása Budapestre VIII. – a magyar nők követeivel’, November 1919, Filmhíradók Online, http://filmhiradokonline.hu/watch.php?id=5329 (accessed 10 February 2016). 5 Magyar Nő 2, no. 11 (16 November 1919), front page. 6 ‘Hogyan ünnepelünk a Nemzeti Hadsereg bevonulásakor?’ ibid. 7 In János Gyurgyák’s monumental study of Hungarian anti-Semitism, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon, two of the subjects of this article, Sarolta Geőcze and Emma Ritoók are not mentioned at all, while Tormay makes only the most perfunctory appearance. 8 Paksa, A magyar szélsőjobboldal, 45; Gyurgyák, Magyar fajvédők, 205. 9 Jitka Malečková, ‘Gender, History and “Small Europe”’, European History Quarterly 40 (2010): 685–700; ‘Feminism and Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century: A Cross-Cultural Perspective’, Journal of Women’s History 7 (1995): 82–94. About the crucial connection between nationalism and gender see also the classic studies of Nira Yuval-Davis, among others, Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Gender and Nation’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 16, no. 4 (October 1993): 621–632. 10 ‘A Magyar Nők Nemzeti Szövetsége az amerikai bizottságnál’, Magyar Nő, 22 January 1919, front page. 11 Countess Zichy was president of the National Alliance of Catholic Women’s Associations and founder of the wartime charity Catholic Caritas. 12 Paksa, A magyar szélsőjobboldal, 65–66, attributes the radicalization and founding of almost all right-wing, counter-revolutionary organizations to this planned reform. 13 Magyar Nő, 22 January 1919, 1.

Notes

175

14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 ‘Mi a tanulsága a Vigadóban tartott demonstrativ gyűlésnek?’ Magyar Nő 22, January 1919, front page. 17 Ibid. 18 Most of this biographical information is based on the entry by Anna Loutfi in A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms, ed. de Haan et al., 153–157. 19 Sarolta Geőcze, ‘A szocializmus női megvilágításban’, in Magyar Gazdák Szemléje 1898. áprilisi füzetében (Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap nyomdája, 1898). 20 Sarolta Geőcze, ‘Erkölcsi nevelés, mint magyar nemzeti probléma’, Felolvasás a Magyar Pedagógiai Társaság 1909 November havi ülésén (Budapest: Franklin, 1909). 21 Ibid., 1, 2, and 15. 22 Sarolta Geőcze, Az ezeréves ország (Budapest, 1920). 23 Bangha, A kereszténység és a zsidók; Béla Bangha, Magyarország újjáépítése és a kereszténység (Budapest: Szt. István Társulat, 1920); Geőcze,‘Az erkölcsi nevelés, mint magyar nemzeti probléma’; Geőcze, Az ezeréves ország. 24 Paksa, A magyar szélsőjobboldal and ‘Szélsőjobboldal és antiszemitizmus’; Gyurgyák, Magyar fajvédők, 80. 25 This is the title of András Lengyel’s study, ‘A Vasárnapi Kör “renegátja.” A gondolkodó Ritoók Emmáról’, in Utak és csapdák (Budapest: Tekintet, 1994), 7–76. 26 The biographical information is based on Emma Ritoók’s unpublished memoirs, Évek és emberek and Lengyel, ‘A Vasárnapi Kör “renegátja.”’ 27 Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part I (1914–March 1919), 226 and 239. Translations from the Hungarian of Ritoók’s memoirs are all mine. 28 Emma Ritoók, A szellem kalandorai (Budapest, 1921), reprint (Budapest: Pesti Szalon Könyvek, 1993), and Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 30, 69, and 103–104. 29 Even Tormay, not known to willingly grant credit to others, recognized as much. An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. I, 145. 30 Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 11 and 16/b. Zsigmond Ritoók, a physician, married Cecile Tormay’s sister, Mária, thus making Ritoók and Tormay sisters-in-law. 31 Three letters of Cecile Tormay to Lajos Hatvany, no dates (most likely 1917), Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Manuscript and Autograph Collections, Ms 392, 54–55. 32 See ‘Mi a tanulsága a Vigadóban tartott demonstrativ gyűlésnek?’ Magyar Nő 22, January 1919, front page. 33 Judit Kádár’s brief chapter, ‘Tormay Cecile (1875–1937): A Horthy-korszak ünnepelt írónője’ [Cecile Tormay (1875–1937), the celebrated woman writer of the Horthy era], in Engedelmes lázadók [Malleable rebels], 57–82 is the best portrait of Tormay to date by a literary historian. 34 Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége Almanach, 1920–1926.

176 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

Notes

Gergely, A keresztényszocializmus Magyarországon, 1903–1923, 166. Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. I, 182–185. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 245. Ibid., part 2 (March 1919–December 1919), 47. Ibid., 6. Kádár, Engedelmes lázadók, 70. Ibid., 70–71. Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. I, 118 and 145. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 257. Ibid., 259. Streubel, ‘Raps across the Knuckles’. See also Scheck, Mothers of the Nation. Cecile Tormay, ‘Beköszöntő’, in Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége Almanach, 16–18. Mrs Géza Ágoston, ‘Magyar asszonyok ünnepe’, in Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége Almanach, 104. Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. I, 145. Charlotte Geőcze and Emma Ritoók, The Problem of Hungary: Magyar Women to the Women of the Civilized World (Budapest: Pfeifer, 1920). Copy in the Hungarian National Széchényi Library. Ibid., 10–14. Ibid., 15–16. Geőcze, Az ezeréves ország. Sarolta Geőcze, A nemzeti megújhodás erkölcsi feltételeiről [About the moral conditions of national regeneration] (Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 1920), 20. The publication was based on a November 1919 lecture. Ibid., 80 and 82. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 85. Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. 2, The Commune. Bihari, Lövészárkok a hátországban, 201. Ibid., 133 cites the increase in women’s enrolment: from 10.5 per cent in 1914 to 27.5 per cent in 1917 in the faculty of medicine, from 32.5 per cent in 1914 to 48 per cent in 1917 in the faculty of arts. On page 157 he also notes the rise of the overall ratios of Jewish students, 35.4 per cent in all faculties in 1917–1918, and the combined effect of the two trends. See Magyar Nő, 22 January 1919. Geőcze was not only a member but also the general secretary of the Hungarian Women’s Club between February and May 1918. The statement of Maria Bucur and Nancy Wingfield about the close association of world war studies in Eastern Europe with ‘traditional diplomatic-military questions’

Notes

64

65

66

67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80

177

and the continuing marginality of gender analysis emphatically applies to Hungary in the aftermath of the First World War. Introduction to Bucur and Wingfield, eds. Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, 2. The line between political commentary and scholarly studies had been blurred from the beginning: Elemér Mályusz, the eminent medievalist penned a passionate defence of the atrocities of the early counter-revolutionary period in 1931. A vörös emigráció (Budapest, 1931). Péter Konok, ‘Az erőszak kérdései 1919-20-ban. Vörösterror – fehérterror’, Múltunk 55 (2010): 72–91; Gergely Bödők, ‘Vörös és fehér – Terror, retorzió és számonkérés Magyarországon 1919–1921’, Kommentár 3 (2011): 15–31. Béla Bodó, ‘Paramilitary Violence in Hungary after the First World War’, East European Quarterly 38 (2004): 129–172, is a rare dispassionate addition to this debate. Konok, ‘Az erőszak kérdései 1919-20-ban’, 5 refers to this aspect of the debate as ‘the battle of numbers’, in Hungarian a pun on the children’s game ‘capture the flag’. Ablovatski, ‘Cleansing the Red Nest’ and ‘Between Red Army and White Guard’; Gerwarth, ‘Sexual and Nonsexual Violence Against “Politicized Women” in Central Europe after the Great War’, in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones, ed. Heineman, 122–136. The author of Tormay’s laudation in 1939 claimed a membership of a million, clearly an exaggeration but an indication of MANSZ’s reach. János Hankiss, Tormay Cecile (Budapest, 1939), cited by Kádár, Engedelmes lázadók, 73. Ritoók used the derogatory ‘Oláh’ instead of Romanian throughout. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 2, 155. Ibid. Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. I, 20. Ibid., 24. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 304. Ibid., part 4 (January 1920–Christmas 1920), 14. Vera Bácskai, Gábor Gyáni, and András Kubinyi, Budapest története a kezdetektől 1945-ig (Budapest Főváros Levéltára, 2000), 209–214. For a comparison with the wartime streetscape of other European capitals, see Emmanuelle Cronier, ‘The Street’, in Capital Cities at War; Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, volume 2: A Cultural History, ed. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57–104. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 125–126. Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. I, 134. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 257. Tormay, An Outlaw’s Diary, vol. I, 285. Katalin Nagyné Szegvári, Numerus Clausus rendelkezések az ellenforradalmi Magyarországon (Buddapest: Akadémiai, 1988), 153.

178 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90

Notes

Magyar Nő, March 1918, front page. Magyar Nő 1 (6), no. 17 (9 November 1918), 2. Magyar Nő 1 (6), no. 20 (31 December 1918), front page. Magyar Nő 2 (7), no. 1 (1 January 1919), front page. Magyar Nő 2, no. 7 (16 September 1919), 1. Ibid. They also wildly misrepresented their previous position when they claimed credit for the granting of the vote to women in November 1918. Magyar Nő, March 20, 1919, 1. Ibid. Rosika Schwimmer, ‘The Perverse Psychology of the Reactionary’, B’nai B’rith News, November 1923, 147. Cecile Tormay, ‘MANSZ’, Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége Almanach, 1920, 50. Ibid.

Chapter 5 1 Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége Almanach, for the year 1926 (Budapest: MANSZ, 1925), front page. 2 Ibid., 21. 3 From 1920 on a prayer was recited in Hungarian elementary schools daily, invoking God’s help to ‘resurrect Hungary’. 4 By overturning the liberal principle of the equality before the law, the numerus clausus prepared the ground for the so-called Jewish laws of the late 1930s that stripped Jewish citizens of equal economic and legal rights. Mária M. Kovács, Törvénytől sújtva; A Numerus Clausus Magyarországon, 1920–1945 (Budapest: Napvilag, 2012). 5 Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége Almanach, 1926, 35. 6 István Havas, ‘Sarolta Geőcze’, Napkelet 6, no. 21 (1 November 1928): 701–702. 7 Ritoók’s extensive memoirs were already cited in the previous chapters. Ritoók, Évek és emberek. 8 Ritoók, A szellem kalandorai. 9 Ibid. 10 The author of a recent study characterized her oeuvre as consisting ‘of works that are, for the most part ephemeral, and merely deserve attention as the documents of her era’. Lengyel, ‘A Vasárnapi Kör “renegátja” ’, 9. 11 Ritook, Évek és emberek, part 1, 30/a. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Hence the title of A. Lengyel’s study in note 10 above.

Notes 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

179

Lengyel, ‘A Vasárnapi Kör “renegátja”’, 7. Ibid., 8. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 2, 5. Ritoók, A szellem kalandorai, 136. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 2, 5. Ibid., part 1, 292–293. Anna Lesznai, Kezdetben volt a kert, vols. 1–2 (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1966). Lengyel, ‘A Vasárnapi Kör “renegátja”’, 10–11. Oszkár Jászi, ‘Emlékiratok’, in Jászi Oszkár publicisztikája, ed. György Litván and János F. Varga (Budapest: Magvető, 1982), 557–558. Lesznai, Kezdetben volt a kert, 290. Török, ed. Sorsával tetováltan önmaga. Petra Török, ‘ “…Csak szeglet, fény és töredék. Mint ez a napló;” Lesznai Anna naplójegyzeteiről’, Enigma XIV, no. 51 (2007): 50. Csilla Markója, ‘Három kulcsregény és három sorsába zárt “vasárnapos” – Lesznai Anna, Ritoók Emma és Kaffka Margit találkozása a válaszúton’, Enigma 52 (2007): 67–108, 83. Éva Karádi and Erzsébet Vezér, eds. A Vasárnapi Kör (Budapest: Gondolat, 1980), 54. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 109. Ibid., 109–110. Ibid., 110. Among historians of the Sunday Circle, only Mary Gluck raised the issue of gender inclusiveness and the role of women in the Sunday Circle, in her monograph of the young Lukács. Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 37–42. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, 122. Bihari, Lövészárkok a hátországban, 201–215. See also ch. 1. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, 224a. Ibid., 225–226. Ibid., 173–174. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 248. In the Hungarian the ‘y’ at the end of a family name was customarily reserved for nobles. Ibid., 249. S. Fischer, the famed Berlin publisher, published Tormay’s novels in German. Ibid., part 2, 107. Ibid., part 4, 230. Ibid., 32. A(lbert) B(erzeviczy), ‘Bujdosó könyv’, Budapesti Szemle 49, no. 185 (1921): 90–92.

180

Notes

47 R.R., ‘A magyarok útja a bolsevizmus felé’, Budapesti Szemle 50, no. 191 (1922): 76–78. 48 Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 1, 322. 49 Ibid., part 4, 98. 50 Ibid., 51.

Chapter 6 1 For the decrees regulating the 1920 elections and a list of inclusions and exclusions, see György Földes and László Hubai, Parlamenti választások Magyarországon, 1920–2010, third, revised edition (Budapest: Napvilág, 2010), 50–53. 2 The convicted commissars were eventually exchanged for prisoners of war with Soviet Russia. 3 Népszava, 28 December 1919. 4 Flyer of MSZDP, OL, P999, box 24. 5 Földes and Hubai, Parlamenti választások, 76. 6 Nőmunkás, 1 February 1920, 3. 7 Nőmunkás, 5 March 1920, 1–2. 8 Letter of NDP to the FE, 27 December 1919, OL, P999, box 24, folder 43. 9 Electoral flyer of Christian National Party, ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Magyar Nő’ reported on the details in its 20 March 1920 issue, on the front page. 13 Nőmunkás, 1 April 1920, 4. 14 Földes and Hubai, Parlamenti választások, 82. 15 Nőmunkás, 1 and 15 February 1920, 1–2. 16 ‘Először az urnák előtt’, Nőmunkás, 1 February 1920, 1–2. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., italics in original. 20 Nőmunkás, 15 February 1920, 2. 21 Cecile Tormay, ‘Beköszöntő’, in MANSZ Almanach az 1920-as évre (Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 1919), 1. 22 Ibid. A good characterization of the obscuring of the distinction between the two revolutions is by Gwendolyn Jones, Chicago of the Balkans; Budapest in Hungarian Literature 1900–1939 (Oxford: Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2013), 78. 23 ‘Asszonyok munkája az országban’, Magyar Asszony, October 1921, 29. 24 Ibid.

Notes

181

25 Ibid. 26 Report of Melanie Vámbéry to Ius Suffragii, OL, P999, box 17, folder 14/b. There was no evidence in the official correspondence of the FE or the IWSA of the possible means of financial help. 27 Ius Suffragii, December 1919, 40. 28 A Nő, 10 November 1919, 5. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 A Nő, December 1919, 4. 32 Report of Melanie Vámbéry to Ius Suffragii, OL P999, box 17, folder 14/b. 33 Ibid. I corrected the typos but otherwise left the original text intact. 34 Ibid. 35 Ius Suffragii, December 1919, 40. 36 Ibid. 37 FE to WILPF, OL, fond P999, box 17, folder 14/b. 38 Chrystal Macmillan to Glücklich, 25 November 1920, OL, P999, box 9. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. According to Emily Balch, Schwimmer was ‘greatly grieved’ over the matter. 41 Nőmunkás, 15 July 1920, 3–4. 42 Women’s Auxiliary of League to FE, 30 July 1920, OL, P999, box 4, folder 5, italics in the original. 43 Ibid. 44 A Nő, July 1920, 1. In 1920 the four issues of the paper appeared on eight pages in total. 45 Chrystal Macmillan to Glücklich, 24 February 1920, OL, P999, box 12, folder 12. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Andrea Pető, Hungarian Women in Politics, 1945–1951 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2003), 83–91. 49 In post-communist Hungary where the legacy of Cecile Tormay, Ottokár Prohászka, and other anti-Semitic writers and ideologues of the early twentieth century has been resurrected and their works reissued, their apologists argue that they could not foresee the lethal consequences of their ideas. 50 The list of guests of her literary salon included writers, poets, and artists. Ritoók, Évek és emberek, part 5, 105. 51 Margit Slachta was elected to Parliament between 1945 and 1949. She emigrated to the United States and after her death received a tree at Yad Vashem. She died at age ninety in 1974. ‘Slachta Margit’, Az 1956-os Magyar Forradalom Történetének Dokumentációs és Kutatóintézete Közalapítvány, http://www.rev.hu/sulinet45/ szerviz/kislex/biograf/schlachta_m.htm 52 The New York Public Library Digital Collections, The Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection, 1852–1980, photo ID 1537219.

182

Notes

53 Ibid. The handwritten comments were made by Schwimmer’s friend, Edith Wynner, who took care of the papers before – and even after – they were deposited at the New York Public Library. 54 B’Nai Brith News, November 1923, Schwimmer Papers, box 470 (1924), folder 8. I am grateful to Dagmar Wernitzig for bringing this article to my attention. 55 For the decision of the Supreme Court against Schwimmer in The United States v. Schwimmer, see: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/279/644 .

Conclusion 1 Article L of the Constitution of Hungary, http://www.kormany.hu/ download/e/02/00000/The%20New%20Fundamental%20Law%20of%20Hungary .pdf (accessed 8 January 2017). 2 Report of HVG, 25 March 2015, http://hvg.hu/itthon/20150325_A_magyar _ jobboldalt_a_haboru_elotti_nacio (accessed 7 January 2017). 3 János M. Rainer, ed. Búvópatakok, vol. 1: A feltárás (Budapest: Országos Széchényi Könyvtár–1956-os Intézet Alapítvány, 2012), vol. 2: Széttekintés (Budapest: Országos Széchényi Könyvtár–1956-os Intézet Alapítvány, 2013), Krisztián Ungváry, ed. vol. 3: A jobboldal és az állambiztonság (Budapest: Országos Széchényi Könyvtár–1956-os Intézet Alapítvány, 2014), J.M. Rainer, ed. vol. 4: Mélyfúrások (Budapest: Országos Széchényi Könyvtár–1956-os Intézet Alapítvány,,2015). 4 László Kontler, A History of Hungary: Millennium in Central Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 345. 5 Dávid Turbucz, ‘A Horthy-kultusz kezdetei’, Múltunk, no. 4 (2009): 156–199. 6 Their numbers have been estimated as high as 350,000. Balázs Ablonczy, ‘Trianon árvái’, http://mta.hu/mta_hirei/trianon-arvai-106742. 7 Kovács, Törvénytől sújtva. 8 Földes and Hubai, op. cit., 93. 9 Szegvári, Numerus clausus rendelkezések, especially 105–113. 10 Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (London: Verso, 1993).

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Index Note: Page references with letter ‘n’ refer to notes. Adventurers of the Spirit, The (Ritoók) 118–21 Ady, Endre 74 Ágoston, Péter 80 Ágoston, Péterné 18, 22, 27–8, 63, 77, 80, 144 alcoholism 18 Almássy, Denise 108 Andrássy, Gyula, Jr 44 Andrássy, Gyula (Katinka’s grandfather) 26, 44, 122 Andrássy, Katinka 36, 37–9, 41, 43, 44, 47, 50, 52, 53–6, 69, 84, 91, 96, 122, 144, 167 n.10 Andrássy, Mrs Gyula (Katinka’s mother) 48, 49 anti-Bolshevik propaganda 75–6 anti-communism 85, 132–3, 137 anti-liberalism 21, 105 anti-modernization 22 anti-Semitism 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 21, 28, 33–4, 40, 50, 52, 53, 77, 78, 87–113, 115–16, 118–21, 124, 126–30, 132–3, 135–6, 140, 142, 144, 148–50, 152–3, 155–7, 181 n.49 Apponyi, Albert 35, 42, 169 n.42 Apponyi, Mrs 35, 42, 49, 140, 169 n.42 armistice 49, 67, 138 art and music education 80 assimilation 24, 27, 93, 101, 104, 122, 127, 150, 151–2 Association for the Care of the Poor (Szegénygondozó Egyesület) 21 Association of the Home for Cultivated Women (Művelt Nők Otthona Egyesület) 17 Association of Working Women of Hungary (Magyarországi Munkásnő Egyesület) 22 ‘aster’ revolution. See October revolution Ausgleich,1867 44

Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, defeat and dissolution of 4, 5, 7, 44, 56, 58, 61, 151 avant-garde 5, 6, 74, 123 Az elsodort falu (Swept-away village) (Szabó) 102 Az Est (newspaper) 59, 62, 68, 71, 74–5 Bacsó, Béla 108 Balázs, Béla 63, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126 Balmazújváros women 24–5, 165 n.25 Bangha, Béla 22, 76, 93, 104, 164 n.19 Bárczy, István 1, 2, 16, 28, 152 Bebel, August 81, 90, 132 Békássy, Mrs 59, 97 Berinkey, Dénes 74, 77 Bethlen, István 116 Bloch, Ernst 120, 121, 123 B’Nai Brith News 145 Bolshevik revolution 3, 4, 5, 64, 72–6, 78, 81, 84, 109–10, 124, 137, 153 Bordás, Mrs 165 n.27 Borsszem Jankó (newspaper) 48 Bosch, Mineke 13–14 Bourgeois Radicals 7, 24, 26, 57, 66, 70, 72, 74, 123, 131, 136 Buchinger, Manó 134 Bucur, Maria 177 n.63 Budapest 1, 3, 4, 5, 11, 13, 15–16, 25–32, 36–7, 42, 45, 47–8, 56–8, 67–8, 72, 74–5, 79, 82, 87, 88, 93–4, 109, 112, 115, 119, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 132, 135, 140, 143, 144, 152, 157 Budapesti Szemle (Budapest Review) 129 Budapest Medical School 155 Budapest University 42, 94, 155, 164 n.11 Bulletin (Értesítő) (journal) 21 Burgfriendspolitik 68 capitalism 22, 79 Catholic Caritas 170 n.69, 174 n.11

202

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Catholic Mission Society 36, 76, 92 Catholicism/Catholic Church 17, 21–2, 23, 36, 42, 52–3, 59–60, 66, 76–7, 81, 90–3, 97–8, 104, 113, 115, 117, 150, 153 Catt, Carrie Chapman 16, 47 censorship 32, 33, 37, 57, 132, 139, 149 Central Aid Committee of Budapest 28 Central Revolutionary Council of Workers and Soldiers of Budapest 82 charitable women’s organizations 12, 17, 21, 23, 29–30, 32, 43, 48, 54, 56, 90, 91–2, 130, 170 n.69, 175 n.11 Charles IV 34, 45, 57 children child care 30, 33, 147–8 child protection 29, 30, 42, 152 homes for destitute 21 rights of illegitimate 18, 26 welfare policy 14, 75, 80, 147–8 Christian Female Camp 133 Christian feminism 36, 52–3, 56, 59, 76–7, 87, 90, 91, 92–4, 111–12, 135 Christian Mission Society 56 Christian National United Party (KNEP) 133 Christian Socialism 13, 15, 21–2, 24, 26, 40, 42, 43, 55, 96, 111, 113, 133, 134, 135, 144, 165 n.29 Citizen Party 66 citizenship 3, 4, 9, 79, 84, 90, 131–46, 150–3 Clara, Kozma-Glücklich 145 collectivization 73, 75, 78, 81 Communists 3, 4, 9, 12, 22, 29, 66, 71–82, 85, 99, 102, 105, 122, 124, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 155–6 conservatives 3, 6, 8, 14, 16, 21, 24, 29–30, 33, 34–6, 40, 41, 42–4, 46, 48, 50–5, 59, 68–9, 76–8, 90–2, 96, 98–100, 103, 106, 109–11, 113, 115–16, 126, 129, 140, 147–9, 152–3, 155–6. See also MNOSZ Council of Workers and Soldiers 78, 82 counter-revolution 1–2, 3, 4–5, 7–9, 11, 35–54, 60, 72, 76–7, 81, 87–113, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 139, 143, 147, 149, 152, 153, 175 n.12, 177 n.64

Croatia, secession of 58 cultural supremacy 116 Czechoslovakia declaration of independence 57–8 and Körtvélyes 124, 128 and Northern Hungary 92 as perpetrators of violence against Hungarians 102 troops in Hungary 64, 68, 69 Debrecen 136 Dénes, Zsófia 74, 81, 144, 173 n.81 Dessewfy, Emma von 141 Dienes, Valéria 42 Dirnfeld, Janka 19 divorce 18, 80, 123, 170 n.69 Drózdy, Győző 134 Duczynska, Ilona 33, 58–9, 80, 97, 144 early women’s organizations 17–18 East-Central Europe 6, 7, 10, 21, 106 Eastern Bloc 156 Eastern Europe 106, 177 n.63 Ebert, Friedrich 72 economic collapse 80, 110, 117, 142 education access to 11, 18, 33, 147 art and music 80 Horthy regime policies 116 increase in female enrolment 24, 33–4, 103, 147 ‘moral’/religious 93, 97 new art curriculum 124 political 37, 44, 54, 134–5, 144, 155 programmes 80 sexual 26, 101–2 working women 80, 82 Einhorn, Barbara 156 election, postwar first 7 elections 1906 26 1919 52, 81–3, 111 1920 7, 100, 111, 131–5, 140–3, 180 n.1 1922 113, 143 Electoral Bloc 34, 37, 43, 45, 46, 56, 57, 59 employment 17–18, 21–2, 27–30, 33, 59, 70, 84, 116, 147, 152, 155 Engels, Friedrich 80

Index equal rights 4, 16, 18, 26, 63–4, 80, 82, 87, 90–1, 126, 135, 137, 139, 145, 147, 148, 151, 152, 156 European Union 148 Falangist movement, Spain 150 Farkas, Edith 21, 42, 52, 53, 90, 91, 92, 96, 130 Fascism 9, 10–12, 89, 149, 150, 153 Fáy, Mrs 70 FE. See Feminist Association of Hungary (FE) Feleky, Géza 72 feminism Christian 36, 52–3, 56, 59, 76–7, 87, 90, 91, 92–4, 111–12, 135 liberal 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 22–4, 26, 28, 34, 36, 37, 40–4, 46, 53, 62–3, 67, 70, 75–6, 80, 82, 103–4, 110–12, 135, 140, 147, 153–4, 164 n.23 Feminist Association of Hungary (FE) advocacy for peace 30–1 constituencies 27, 34 founding 16–17, 22 and IWSA 19 leaders 18–21, 31 members/membership 21, 27, 33, 64 and MNE 18–19, 24 and MNOSZ 35 name change issue 65–6 peasant activists 25–6 and Republic of Councils 135–40 revolutions 55–85 suffrage/suffrage campaign 26, 35–54 wartime changes 27–30 Fidesz 148 fin de siècle 5, 7, 18 Finland 58 ‘first-wave’ women’s movements 6–7 First World War, outbreak of 1, 4 Fischer, S. 180 n.42 food shortages 80, 83, 97, 104, 133 France 6, 21, 68, 69, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103 freedom of the press 74–5 French, Rose Morgan 136 Galicia (Poland) 15, 34, 103 Galileo Circle 33, 48, 58–9, 80, 136 Gárdos, Mariska 164–5 n.24

203

Geőcze, Sarolta 22, 42, 53, 91–3, 96, 100–2, 104–6, 112, 117, 144, 165 n.29, 174 n.7, 177 n.62 Gergely, Janka 63, 77, 80 Gergely, Tibor 123 Germany 9–10, 15, 21, 22, 29, 71–2, 96, 98, 106, 108, 116, 120, 129, 130, 134 Giesswein, Sándor 133, 140 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 47 Gizella, Fekete 145 Gluck, Mary 179 n.33 Glücklich, Vilma 18, 19, 20–1, 29, 41–2, 49, 55, 62, 63, 65, 70, 75, 140–1, 143, 145, 170 n.61 Gömbös, Gyula 97 Gosztonyi, Mária 42 grand estates, distribution of 69 Great Britain 15, 134 Groák, Mrs 62 Habsburg monarchy 17, 47, 57, 149 Három nemzedék (Three generations) (Szekfű) 102 Hatvany, Lajos 42, 96, 122 Havas, Mrs 145 Hermina, Archduchess 17 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 129 homosexuality 170 n.69 Horthy, Miklós 1, 2, 4–5, 7, 10–11, 14, 87–9, 95, 99, 105, 107, 108, 112, 115–16, 128, 132, 144, 149–50, 154, 155, 156, 174 n.1 Hungarian Association of Women Clerks (MNE) 13, 17, 18–19, 24, 26, 140 Hungarian Feminist Committee of Permanent Peace 30, 34 Hungarian Holocaust 144, 152 Hungarian People’s Republic, declaration of 62, 63, 72 Hungarian Woman (Magyar Nő) (daily) 13, 36, 52, 53, 56, 76, 90, 111–12, 127, 133, 135, 136 Hungarian Woman’s Almanach 135 Hungarian Women’s Debating Club 35–54, 55, 56, 63, 69, 76, 91, 96, 99, 111–12, 121, 127, 167 n.14, 169 n.42, 177 n.62

204

Index

In the Beginning was the Garden (Lesznai) 122 industrialization 17, 21, 22, 25, 31, 147 Institute of Political History 12–13 International Council of Women 15, 19 International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) 1908 Congress 25, 26 1913 Congress 1, 2, 4, 6, 15–16, 19, 25–6, 31, 67, 90, 135, 140 founding 15, 19 membership 15 Israelite Women’s Association of Pest 17 Ius Suffragii (journal) 136, 137, 139 IWSA. See International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) Jacobs, Aletta 31, 142 Jászi, Oszkár 57, 121–4, 131 Jewish press 22, 93, 96, 108 Jews/Jewish women’s organizations and activists 4, 12, 19, 22, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 39–40, 42, 48–50, 59, 60, 68, 71, 76–8, 90–4, 97, 102–5, 107–10, 115–16, 118–19, 121–2, 126–7, 129–30, 133, 135–6, 144, 150–3, 165 n.29, 178 n.4 Jobbik 148 Jóltevő Asszonyok (women doing good) 17 Joseph, Archduke 57, 58 Joseph, Francis 34 Journal of Female Clerks (Nőtisztviselők Lapja) 13, 19, 63, 67, 70, 73 Justh, Gyula 26 Kádár, János 156 Kaffka, Margit 119, 125 Károlyi, Countess Michael 52 Károlyi, Katinka. See Andrássy, Katinka Károlyi, Mihály 4, 31, 37, 39, 41–6, 49–50, 52, 54, 56–60, 63–4, 66, 69, 73–8, 90, 91, 94, 97, 111, 122, 124, 126, 128, 131–2, 135–8, 142, 152, 154–5, 157 Kecskemét pogroms 107 Kelen, József 79 Kéthly, Anna 143 Klebelsberg, Kunó 99, 116, 130 KNEP. See Christian National United Party (KNEP) Kollontai, Alexandra 67 Kossuth Square, restoration of 156–7

Kozma, Perczel Flóra 42, 52 Krúdy, Gyula 48 Kun, Béla 73, 74–5 Labour party 139 Ladányi, Szeréna 134, 171 n.39 Lamberger, Mrs 63 land ownership 24 land reform 69, 171 n.19 Lesznai, Anna (born Amália Moscovitz) 84, 115, 118, 119–28 liberal feminism 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 22–4, 26, 28, 34, 36, 37, 40–4, 46, 53, 62–3, 67, 70, 75–6, 80, 82, 103–4, 110–12, 135, 140, 147, 153–4, 164 n.23 liberal revolution 3–5, 35–54, 61, 64, 74, 76, 80, 84, 91, 99, 111, 135, 144, 153–5 Liebknecht murder 71–2, 74, 108 London Club 47 Lukács, György 120–3, 125, 140 Luxemburg murder 71–5, 108, 173 n.81 Macmillan, Crystal 141, 142 Magyar Hírlap (daily) 46 Magyarország (daily) 46 Major, Mrs 63 male-dominated occupations, women in 22, 23, 28, 70, 89, 92, 107, 133–4 Mályusz, Elemér 177 n.64 MANSZ. See National Association of Hungarian Women (MANSZ) Maria-Dorothea Association (MáriaDorothea Egyesület) 17 Marxism 7, 71, 73, 81, 90 Mátyás király 77 Mellerné, Mrs 63 Mill, John Stuart 81 Ministry of Culture 124, 155 Ministry of Interior 22 Miskolczy, Meller Eugénia 21, 62, 142 missionary(ies) 21 MNE (Magyar Nőtisztviselők Egyesülete). See Hungarian Association of Women Clerks (MNE) MNOSZ (Magyarországi Nőegyesületek Országos Szövetsége). See National Alliance of Women’s Associations of Hungary

Index modernization 3, 4, 18, 21–3, 27, 92–4, 96, 110, 116, 122–3, 129, 143, 147, 150 Móra, Ferenc 60 Moscovitz, Amália. See Lesznai, Anna Moscovitz, Geyza 122 Moscovitz, Mór 122 mother and child protection service 18, 23, 29–30, 32, 42, 152 MOVE 77, 97 MSZDP. See Social Democratic Party (MSZDP) Müller, Ernő 62, 64, 75–6, 82, 132, 144 Munich Agreement 124 Nagy, György 58 Nagyvárad 22, 27–8, 30, 80, 94, 122 Napkelet (Sunrise) (journal) 129 National Alliance of Catholic Clerks and Commercial Employees (Katolikus Tisztviselők és Női Kereskedelmi Alkalmazottak Országos Szövetsége) 59 National Alliance of Catholic Women’s Associations 170 n.69, 175 n.11 National Alliance of Women’s Associations of Hungary (MNOSZ) 16, 33, 35, 42, 169 n.42 National Archives, Budapest 13, 164 n.13 National Army 1, 87, 88, 112 National Association of Hungarian Women (MANSZ) 1, 52 counter-revolution 87–113 founding 73–7, 90–2 founding members/leaders 92, 94–7, 115–30 and Horthy regime 115–16 racial degeneration 99–103 and Sunday Circle 121–2 National Association of Industry 28 National Catholic Association for the Protection of Women 17 National Council 36, 49, 57–63, 66, 67, 74, 75, 82, 84, 87, 90, 91, 126, 132 National Solidarity Day (4 June) 157 nationalism 3, 10, 14, 93, 99, 106, 148, 150, 151, 153, 156, 157 Nazis 9, 89, 102 Népszava (People’s Voice) (newspaper) 72, 74, 77, 108, 132 New York Public Library 40

205

Nő, A (newspaper) 12–13, 62, 63, 136–7 Nobel Peace Prize 146 NOE 63, 70, 73, 75, 77 Nők Lapja, A (newspaper) 63 Nóra, Kunfy 145 Nyíregyháza 27, 62 October revolution 55–85, 97, 107, 111, 131, 136 Ostenburg detachment 108 Otthon 77 Ottomans 100, 115 Outlaw’s Diary, An (Tormay) 51–2, 97, 99, 102–3, 105, 110, 118, 128, 129–30, 145, 157 pacifism 4, 6, 15, 30–1, 33, 36, 40, 44, 48–9, 56, 59–60, 71, 110, 140, 146 Pannónia 77 paramilitary violence 88, 106–8, 116, 132, 137, 149, 154 Paris Peace Conference 69, 92, 140 Parliament 5, 7, 18, 23–4, 26, 31, 34, 54–7, 88, 113, 116, 133, 136, 142–4, 148, 156, 182 n.15 patriotism 30, 52, 94, 110, 148, 153 Pesti Hírlap 71, 134 Pesti Napló (daily) 44–5, 57, 68, 69, 71–2, 74, 75, 81, 96 Pető, Andrea 12 Pogány, Paula 19, 21, 29, 31, 63, 77, 80 Poland 15, 72 Portugal 6, 15 post-communism 9, 148, 155–6, 181 n.49 Pozsony (Bratislava) 69 prisoners of war (POWs) 69, 72–3, 139–40, 180 n.2 Problem of Hungary: Magyar Women to the Women of the Civilized World (Ritoók and Geőcze) 100, 101–3 Prohászka, Ottokár 21, 22, 76, 104, 181 n.49 proletariat 25, 72, 78, 80–2 prostitution 3, 18, 42, 75, 81, 82 Protestant 12, 17, 76, 90, 94, 98, 124 public health 80, 84, 99, 101, 133 Red Army 80, 122 Red Cross, Hungarian 139–40 Red News (Vörös Újság) (newspaper) 72, 74, 79–80, 81, 82

206 ‘Red terror’ 97, 102, 105, 106, 110 Redoute Hall 67, 90 Republic of Councils 5, 55, 73, 77–85, 94, 97, 101, 105, 106, 111, 122, 124, 131–2, 135–8, 147, 173 n.81 revolution Bolshevik 3, 4, 5, 64, 72–6, 78, 81, 84, 109–10, 124, 137, 153 liberal 3–5, 35–54, 61, 64, 74, 76, 80, 84, 91, 99, 111, 135, 144, 153–5 Revolutionary Governing Council 78, 80 revolutionary period, October 1918–August 1919 de-mobilization and mobilization (October–December 1918) 61–9 and founding of MANSZ 73–7 red–black polarization (January– February 1919) 69–73 and Republic of Councils (March–July 1919) 77–85 right-wing women and politics of rights and revanchism 109–13 and radical anti-Semitism 103–5, 147–57 and violence 105–9 Ritoók, Emma 12, 13, 50–3, 59–60, 84, 87, 94–101, 104–9, 115–30, 144, 156 Ritoók, Zsigmond 123, 124, 175 n.30 Romania 15, 64, 94, 101, 102, 107, 177 n.68 Rosenberg, Auguszta 16, 42 Russia 34, 58–9, 72, 75, 84, 139 Schlachta, Margit 84, 92, 96, 111–13, 117, 130 Schwimmer, Franciska 19, 170 n.60 Schwimmer, Rosika 12, 15, 18–21, 26, 31–7, 39–70, 75, 77–8, 84–5, 91–2, 112, 137, 140–5, 163 n.1, 164 n.24 ‘second-wave’ women’s movements 6–7 secularization 150, 156 sewing workshops 28 sexual education 26, 101–2 Singer, Vera 73 Slachta, Margit 42, 55, 56, 90, 133–4, 143, 144 Small Landowners Party 132, 134

Index Social Democrats (MSZDP) 5, 7, 12, 22–6, 32–3, 57–8, 62–6, 68, 72–80, 82, 84, 100, 108, 116, 131–5, 138, 143–4, 154, 164 n.23 Social Mission Society (Szociális Missziótársulat) 21–2, 42, 59, 88, 90, 96, 133–4 social work 17, 21, 42, 48, 99, 117 socialist women’s organizations 3, 4, 7, 8, 11–14, 18, 22–6, 28, 40, 61, 66–7, 70–4, 81–3, 93, 96, 108, 113, 131, 132, 134–5, 138, 144, 147–8, 155–6 Society of Social Sciences (Társadalomtudományi Társaság) 24 Somogyi, Béla 108, 132 soup kitchens 21, 33, 69 Spády, Adél 21, 29, 63, 70, 77, 80, 82, 170 n.60 Spanish flu 49, 56–7, 83 Spartacus movement 71–2, 74 St. Gellért Square (St. Gerard) 87–8 Stalinism 147, 155, 156 Steinberger, Sarolta 42 Stockholm peace conference 163 n.1 student activism 33–4, 48, 59, 80, 94, 103, 110, 143, 155 Sugár, Tivadar 33, 58 Sunday Circle 94, 104, 115, 118–26, 130, 179 n.33 Supreme Court, US 146, 182 n.55 Switzerland 58, 66–8, 69, 77, 142–3 Szabó, Dezső 102 Szabó, Ervin 74 Szeged 27, 30, 69 Szegedy-Maszák, Aladár 52, 141 Szekfű, Gyula 102 Szilassy, Aladár 52 Szilassy, Gyula 69 Szirmay, Oszkár 21, 30, 41–2, 62–3, 145 Sztankay, Antónia 96–7 Teleki, Countess 2, 16, 19, 21, 77, 140 Thousand-Year-Old Country, The (Geőcze) 101, 102 Tisza, István 34, 37, 45, 57, 58, 107 Together in the Revolution (Andrássy, Katinka) 37 Tormay, Cecile 2, 12, 14, 50–3, 84, 87, 88, 94–100, 102–13, 116–20, 124, 128–30, 135–6, 144–5, 147–57

Index trade unions 22, 66, 84, 100, 139, 140–3 Transylvania 22, 49, 94, 104 Trianon Treaty 4–5, 87, 99–105, 108, 110, 115, 139–41, 147, 150–1, 157 Trump, Donald 137, 149 Twentieth Century (Huszadik Század) (journal) 7, 24, 123–4, 164 n.23 Ungár, Mrs 63 United States 15, 31, 44, 123, 124, 145–6, 149, 182 n.51 universal suffrage 5, 8, 18, 26, 34, 37, 43, 45, 55, 60–1, 63, 111, 153, 171 n.19 urbanization 3, 24, 93 Vámbéry, Melanie 21, 41, 63, 65, 71, 145 Vázsonyi, Vilmos 26, 34, 45, 46, 66, 132, 133, 168 n.32 Vienna 123, 124 Világ 46, 74 violence counter-revolutionary 4, 87–113 revolutionary 55–85 war orphans 21 Warsaw 71 wartime emasculinization 98 Washington 16 Wekerle, Sándor 26 welfare programs 21, 23, 29, 31, 80, 84, 111, 148, 164 n.13 Wernitzig, Dagmar 182 n.55 Western Europe 6, 17, 21, 44, 148

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white-collar workers 17, 18, 70, 154 White Terror 100, 105, 107, 136, 140–1, 143 Wilhelm, Szidónia 21, 63, 73, 75, 77, 80 WILPF. See Women’s International Committee for Peace (WILPF) Wilson, Woodrow 56, 57–8, 168 n.27 Wingfield, Nancy 177 n.63 Woman and Socialism, The (Bebel) 132 Woman and Society, The (A Nő és a Társadalom) (newspaper) 19, 20, 22, 35–6, 37 Woman Worker (Nőmunkás) (journal) 13, 22, 63–4, 66, 67, 73, 75, 132, 134, 141–2 Women’s Auxiliary of the League for the Protection of Hungary’s Territorial Integrity 140, 142 Women’s International Committee for Peace (WILPF) 31, 136, 139–40 Women’s Journal 32 working-class women 24, 26, 35, 68, 70, 80, 84, 154 Wynner, Edith 182 n.55 ‘Years and People’ memoir (Ritoók) 117–18 Zichy, Eduardina Pallavicini 52, see Zichy, Mrs Rafael 52, 54, 90, 116, 130, 170 n.69, 175 n.11 Zipernovszky, Mrs 63, 77 Zsuzsanna Lorántffy Association 17