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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 *
