Oldal 415 [415]
SIMULACRUM OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
Answering to this guestion about the creation of the simulacrum we must go
further back in time following the suggestion by Tony Judt examining four recent
past". Social democracy as an ideology was conceived by the founding fathers
(and not by mothers) as a response to the problems of men who were employed
reregulating the relationship between the state, capital and citizens. Women’s
movement was founded as an appendix to the “main movement” extending the
argumentation of class struggle to the oppression of women by men stating that
without political, legal, educational emancipation the socialist program can not
prevail. The Hungarian Social Democratic Party in principle demanded equally
suffrage for both men and women. But the fight for women’s rights was not on
the priority list of the male party leaders. Moreover, the party leadership did not
support the women’s separate mobilization following Clara Zetkin, who supported
women’s right to vote but she denied that women’s question as a separate issue
exists. She claimed that women’s issues such as maternal leave, breast feeding
allowances should be demanded by the social democratic movement as a whole.° The
publication of Hungarian social democratic journal: Némunkds (Female worker)
was received with resentment by the male dominated trade union and party. The
former was afraid of the cheaper female workforce snitching paid employment
from men therefore started unionization of women, while the latter saw a threat
in separate women’s movement representing particularism against the unity of
universalist movement. In Némunkds, Laszl6 Rudas, (1885-1950) pointed out as far
as the fight for suffrage is concerned “We, proletarian women (!) it should not be
our aim (the gaining the suffrage A. P.) for us there is no women’s movement, there
is no separate movement, but one movement, the movement of the proletariats,
the socialism”.’ Before WWI the short lived cooperation between the liberals
and the social democratic women was considered as a “bourgeois” influence by
the party leaders. The social democrats argued with equality while liberals (and
conservatives) with difference: in this equality however gender differences were
subordinated to the “main aims” of the movement. Women who became political
agents in the 20th century with the introduction of general suffrage changed how
politics was played forever as sexual difference was introduced into politics.’ The
question is how the introduction of difference changed the universalist social
democratic party aims. I can bring up in lots of other examples from the interwar
° Aranyossi, Magda, Lazadö asszonyok. A magyar nömunkasmozgalom törtenete 1867-1919,
Budapest, Kossuth, 1963, 34.
Rudas, László, Polgári és proletár nőmozgalom, Nőmunkás (1906. április 24.) Idézi Kovács,
M. Mária, A magyar feminizmus korszakfordulója, Café Bábel 4 (1994), 180.
Pető, Andrea — Szapor, Judit, Women and the Alternative Public Sphere: toward a
Redefinition of Women's Activism and the Separate Spheres in East Central Europe, NORA,
Nordic Journal of Women's Studies 12 (2004), 172-182.
+ 413 *