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

In the aftermath of the First World War, Hungary experienced a liberal revolution, a Communist coup, foreign invasion, a rightist counterrevolution, and the loss of some two-thirds of its former territory via the Treaty of Trianon. Judith Szapor’s book Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of the First World War: From Rights to Revanche is the first to examine the politicization of Hungarian women during this tumultuous period. Szapor concentrates on the issue of women’s suffrage, a story that is often told as a narrative of progress. In Hungary, however, women began to vote just as the state itself renounced the values of liberal citizenship. Before 1914, there were three different strands of women’s activism in Hungary: liberal feminist, socialist, and Catholic (or Christian Socialist). In the prewar period, the only group to agitate for women’s suffrage was the liberal feminists, represented by the Association of Feminists of Hungary (FE). The FE participated in international suffrage activism, and one of its leaders, Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer (known in English as Rosika Schwimmer), was well known in international feminist circles. Like the FE itself, women’s suffrage in prewar Hungary was often considered to be a middle-class and Jewish concern. This would briefly change in 1917, when Schwimmer, together with the aristocrat Katinka Károlyi, brought all three groups together, along with a large contingent of aristocrats and other elite women, in the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club. As Szapor deduces from the archival record, Schwimmer was the real organizing force behind the club, but she kept her role hidden to avoid having the group—and the suffrage cause—be seen as too Jewish. With Countess Károlyi as its face, the Hungarian Women’s Debating Club was able to create a fleeting coalition of women from across the political spectrum in support of women’s right to vote.

Citizenship · Economic history · Elite · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Suffrage · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies