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ANDREA PETŐ
masculinity. "Although the initial communist project was to change radically
this realm and included hostile attitudes to sex as well as the idea of abolishing
the family as the early days of the Bolsheviks did. Ihis radicalism was guickly
relinguished, and the small bourgeoisie values were adapted by the communist
party and the simulacrum was covering the movement. On the level of official
party ideology: it was assumed that gender eguity has been achieved and womens
problems have been resolved with the help of a well-developed state subsidized
child-care system, paid pregnancy leaves, up to three years infant care, etc. And
the official ideology had its theory of gender ("in so far as women are like men, they
are egual"), the private sphere had its verbalized dichotomous gendered norms
("boys do not cry"). Ihe place where real but unarticulated redefinitions of gender
happened was the workplace which functioned as a nexus of the official and the
private. The emancipated attitudes of women during communism became a matter
of habitual practice learned during paid employment but remained largely without
a language which might have shaped political mobilisation by gender.
The result is a lasting transformation of the “praxis” of femininity which
will play an important role in 1989. If working women did not get very high in
the professional and political hierarchies, they tended to perceive this as their
own choice. This rhetorical strategy as a heritage of the statist feminist period is
acting against addressing structural discrimination even today. From that point
of view, women seem to blend easily in their environment so more difficult to
address them and this partly explains the decrease of women’s membership and
active participation in politics in general and in the social democratic movement
in particular. In Hungary in the transition process of 1989 the historical social
democratic party was also re-founded together with the other “historical” parties.
As a rule, the more the party was historical the fewer women were in there in
(the historical Round Table debate which redefined Hungarian citizenship after
the collapse of communism) and the less sensitive the party was to the issue of
difference.
At the end of the Cold War brought the victorious neo-liberalization of Eastern
Europe which also opened up space for the deep conservatism of the Hungarian
society which survived the 50 years of statist feminism unchanged. In 1989 it was
the former communist party which got into the market of political thoughts with a
group of well-trained female politicians however their presence did not change the
dominant masculine identity politics of the party. As the time passed the successor
party of the communist party, the MSZP (Magyar Szocialista Pärt-Hungarian
* For more on how gender operated during statist socialism see Miglena Nikolchina, The
Seminar: Mode d’emploi Impure Spaces in the Light of Late Totalitarianism, Differences
— a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13 (2002), 96-127.
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