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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. + 416 +
