Working Difference: Women's Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945-1995
222
Working Difference: Women's Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945-1995
222Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Fodor brings qualitative and quantitative analyses to bear, combining statistical analyses of survey data, interviews with women managers in both countries, and archival materials including those from the previously classified archives of the Hungarian communist party and transcripts from sessions of the Austrian Parliament. She shows how women's access to power varied in degree and operated through different principles and mechanisms in accordance with the stratification systems of the respective countries. In Hungary women's mobility was curtailed by political means (often involving limited access to communist party membership), while in Austria women's professional advancement was affected by limited access to educational institutions and the labor market. Fodor discusses the legacies of Austria's and Hungary's "gender regimes" following the demise of state socialism and during the process of integration into the European Union.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822330905 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2003 |
| Series: | Comparative and International Working-Class History Series |
| Pages: | 222 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.47(d) |
About the Author
Éva Fodor is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College.
Read an Excerpt
Working difference
Women's working lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945-1995By Eva Fodor
Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3090-3
Chapter One
Three Generations of Women in Central Europe
My mother was Austrian and my father Hungarian. They met while my father attended medical school in Vienna. He came from a rather poor family and had five brothers and sisters but somehow managed to get a scholarship to study abroad. My mother was also a college student but she dropped out when they got married, and I was born soon afterward in 1925. The family moved back to Hungary after my father graduated and he became a doctor in B. [a rural town in southern Hungary]. My mother never went to work for pay. She raised me and my two siblings and took care of the household. Naturally, ... we also had a live-in maid to help her, and a cook who did not live in the house but came every day. A different woman did the laundry once a week, and the children had a series of nurses, "Frauleins" as they were called, from Austria. But my mother was ultimately in charge of the management of the household. She had the keys to the pantry and she assigned the tasks to everyone each morning. She decided what had to be cooked and sent the maid to do the shopping. She made sure that lunch was on the table every day at exactly 1 p.m. when my father came home to eat and that my sisters and I made it to the piano lessons [and] that everyone had the appropriate clothing and that allfamily events were properly celebrated.... My Austrian aunt and her family stayed with us for long stretches of time and we often visited them in the summers. My father owned an automobile, so sometimes my parents would drive to a nearby town to see a play or to go to a ball.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was officially dissolved in fall 1918 but its social, economic, and political legacies lingered on. Two of its successor states, Austria and Hungary, retained much of their common cultural, political, and social heritage for long after the declaration of their independence. In this context until the end of World War II the lives of middle-class women were quite similar in and sometimes, as in the case of Maria's mother whose life story is described above, alternated between, the two countries.
In 1949, three decades after the disintegration of the monarchy, the labor force experience of Austrian and Hungarian women was still quite similar. In both countries, about a third of all women were engaged in paid work after World War II (Benko 1982; Steininger 1991). Some of them stayed in the labor force for all their adult lives but most only worked for a few years before they married and/or had a child and then withdrew to manage the household, sharing at least some of the same pleasures and responsibilities as Maria describes for her mother. Two thirds of the women in both countries were classified as "dependents." They were housewives who worked at home in the household and received no direct financial compensation. As a consequence, women rarely attended higher educational institutions; in 1949 only around 20 percent of all college and university students were female (Statistisches Handbuch 1951, 245; Oktatas 1991, 99, 102). Many, as Maria's story shows, dropped out before graduating in order to marry and start a family.
Had Maria's mother stayed in Austria, the life of her eldest daughter would probably have proceeded on much the same tracks as hers had started. In her childhood Maria dreamed of becoming a psychiatrist, but her father, who was inclined toward more traditional gender roles, talked her out of this ambition. Thus Maria attended a Catholic middle school and started a teacher's college, although she couldn't finish because World War II broke out. The war devastated this previously stable middle-class family; they lost most of their belongings to successive German and Soviet raids. In 1944, at age nineteen, Maria was married off to a man fourteen years her senior, a well-to-do and well-respected doctor from Budapest whom she had met only a handful of times before the wedding ceremony. Soon, she moved with him to his richly furnished apartment in the capital, which was a considerably larger city than Maria had ever seen.
He treated me as if I were some sort of a wilting wildflower. I was completely locked away from the outside world, I knew nothing about what was going on in politics or in my husband's life. The wife at the time was supposed to be an ornament, plus she had to cook, clean, and look after the children, unless they could hire someone to do it, which we couldn't because it was right after the war. I never even bought a pair of pantyhose for myself while I was married to him. He would open the door of the closet, look in and say, "You need a new bra." Then off he went to get one. Sometimes he took me with him, but that made very little difference. He would ask, "What do you think? You like it?" but I never once dared say no.
But social and political changes interfered with Maria's not particularly happy marriage, and this is where her story takes a sharp turn away from those of her female relatives in Austria. In the early 1950s, her husband, who lost his job, income, and status after the communist takeover, decided to emigrate to Switzerland. Maria, however, refused to go with him. Instead she returned to B., now a mid-sized rural town, with a two-year-old daughter but otherwise just as she came: penniless, jobless, and largely ignorant about the realities of the changing world around her. When she set out to find a job for the first time in her life she soon found out that a family member who defected to the "West" had become for the family a major political handicap, and as a result Maria could not become the schoolteacher she had hoped to be. Instead, she found work as a sales assistant in a large department store nearby. A few years later a friendly boss, against many political odds, arranged for Maria to become the head librarian in her hometown, and soon afterward she was appointed to be the director of the local community center, a job she enjoyed immensely. But this line of work required a lot of traveling and time away from home and her daughter and young son (from her second marriage), so after a while she decided to switch back to the department store but in a higher position as head of one of the major departments. In the late 1970s she was elected to be the store's trade union representative (a paid political position in state socialist Hungary), which put her in close touch with the highest management: "Initially, I didn't want any political functions, but then they talked me into it, saying that all I had to do was represent the workers. That was not true at all, as I realized later, because I was fully dependent on the manager of the store. But I still tried to fight with him for higher wages, fringe benefits, and I listened to people's problems and tried to help. I retired from this job when I turned fifty-seven in 1982. I was very, very tired, I badly needed a break."
By the time Maria started her new life without her first husband she found that the expectations concerning women, the constraints present and the opportunities available, had radically changed. The Hungarian communist party, having gained full power by 1949, immediately set out to reorganize the economy and society. To satisfy the party's hunger for intensive industrialization, the size of the Hungarian labor force had to be increased in the shortest possible time, and women came to be classified as an important, mobilizable contingent. This was one of the most successful campaigns in the history of the party, and as a result by the time Maria retired in the early 1980s the work experience of women in Austria and Hungary had diverged significantly. This trend is well reflected in even the most basic indicators: in 1982, 73 percent of women between the ages of fifteen and fifty-four worked for pay in Hungary, with an additional 7 percent on temporary maternity leave, raising the economic activity rate of women to over 81 percent (Koncz 1985a, 1985b). Almost all of these women worked full time, year-round, and all through their adult lives. The proportion of "housewives" in the classical sense of the term dropped from 64 percent thirty years earlier to about 5 percent in 1982 (Koncz 1985a). Some women, like Maria herself, not only participated in the labor force but even managed to gain positions of authority that would have been nearly impossible for their mothers' generation. Maria's career is a good example of the kinds of jobs women were particularly likely to achieve: positions in state administration or in service institutions, such as a cultural center, a school, or a library. When Maria moved to the department store in the male-dominated economic sphere, the post she received still accrued some authority but she was no longer the top manager, only the head of a large department. Even her political position proved to be highly typical of her gender. Women were much more likely to have political careers in the trade unions than in the more prestigious and more powerful organization of the communist party. Nevertheless, Maria and some of her contemporaries achieved degrees of authority to which neither their mothers nor their Austrian sisters could aspire.
In Austria in the same period women's labor force participation rates moved in the opposite direction: the proportion of women in paid work declined until the 1970s and only started a slow growth afterward. By the early 1980s, 48 percent of women of working age were engaged in paid work (as opposed to 81 percent in Hungary), about 20 percent of whom worked part time only (Gross, Wiedenhofer, and Votsch 1994, 42; Rosenberger 1996; Matkovitz 1995). Most working women interrupted their careers for long stretches at a time to have and raise children. About 40 percent of Austrian women compared to 5 percent of Hungarian women were classified as housewives in 1982. Although the proportion of female students in the school system grew in both countries, in Hungary women reached equity at the postsecondary level by 1980 (Magyarorszag Statisztikai Evkonyve 1993, 287), while in Austria the percentage of women in universities at the same time stood below 40 percent (Osterreichische Hochschulstatistic 1999, 126). If we consider the working population, the rate of educated women was significantly higher and the gender gap in education much lower in Hungary than in Austria in the twentieth-century, post-World War II generation (Mikrozensus Jahresergennisse 1997, 107; Census: Summary Data 1990, 25). Given the similarities between the two countries before 1949, much of this divergence can be traced to the radical transformation of social institutions carried out by the state socialist regime in Hungary. Through what processes did this transformation occur in Hungary, and what were its consequences? Lacking these radical interventions, how did women's life progress in Austria? How did assumptions about men and women modify the social order in state socialist and in capitalist societies? And, to examine the reverse side of this question: What was the effect of state socialism and capitalism on gender relations and, in particular, on gender inequality in claiming positions of authority? Are there really two (or more?) different gender regimes that characterize state socialist and capitalist societies? These are the questions I seek to answer in this book.
But we cannot stop telling the story of state socialism and capitalism in the 1980s. Another two decades later, the trajectories of the two countries seem to be converging again. Women's labor force participation rates had been steadily increasing in Austria since the mid 1970s, and by 1992 close to 58 percent of working-age women (between fifteen and sixty-four years old) were in the labor force (Gross, Wiedenhofer, and Votsch 1994, 43). At century's end, a few years after the collapse of state socialism, the proportion of Hungarian women in the workforce stood comparable to the European average at 60 percent as a result of another radical restructuring and an overall reduction in the number of workplaces (Frey 1996, 14). Moreover, although the representation of women in Parliament dropped from about 30 percent to under 10 percent in Hungary after 1990, in Austria at the same time this percentage surpassed 20 percent for the first time in the country's history (Neyer 1997, 186). By the middle of the 1990s Austria caught up in educating women as well: young women were just as likely to attend university as young men (Gross, Wiedenhofer, and Votsch 1994, 29).
In this context, the life expectations, daily worries, and obstacles Maria's daughter, Eszter, faces are unique to post-state socialist societies, yet she also shares more similarities with members of her cohort in Austria than ever before in the past fifty years. Eszter was born after World War II and had a career that resembled neither that of her mother nor her grandmother. She became neither a housewife nor a loyal, politically correct state employee. Instead, she chose entrepreneurship when in the early 1980s the opportunities for market-oriented activities opened up in Hungary. Using money inherited from her portion of the sale of the family's large apartment, and using her earlier experience in the hotel and tourism industry, she purchased and ran a small, 24-hour food store in Budapest. The store, and later the pub she operated at lake Balaton that catered to German tourists, made a lot of money during the last years of state socialism, and she and her husband were able to travel extensively abroad. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, tourism from other state socialist societies declined and 24-hour private food stores proliferated, thus Eszter saw a significant reduction in her profits. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s she lived in a beautiful, elegantly furnished apartment in Budapest with her husband. They had no children, which was the result of a conscious decision made to allow Eszter to run her business, the couple to travel, and her husband to pursue his career as an operetta singer.
Eszter made good use of the unique opportunities of the marketizing shortage economy of the late state socialist period, and she continued her entrepreneurship after 1989 as well. Her choices and career, although enabled by the specificity of the Hungarian "second economy," were in fact not altogether different from those of many of her Austrian female contemporaries. After 1989, her worries were also similar: Could her business survive? Could she avoid unemployment? Would she get a new loan from the banks? Should she have had a family or is she happy with her choice of a successful career instead? What causes this convergence in the life experiences of Austrian and Hungarian women workers? In fact, to what extent can we talk about a convergence at all? To answer these questions we must consider the legacies of state socialism as well as the radical social changes in both Austria and Hungary in the early 1990s. Although the focus in this book is on the state socialist period, I will briefly examine the issue of convergence in a more contemporary context in the last chapter.
How Do Gender Regimes Vary?
In this book I compare elements of the gender regimes of Austria and Hungary in the early 1980s in an effort to integrate the concept of gender into academic discussions on class structure and social mobility under capitalism and state socialism. Following R. W. Connell, "gender regimes" are understood as the "state of play in gender relations in a given institution ... [and to include] practices that construct various kinds of femininities and masculinities," the sexual division of labor, as well as gender ideologies (1987:120). Interests, ideas, and routines that differentiate between men and women shape all social institutions. Thus markets, states, political parties, schools, the family, and so forth can all be characterized by their gender regimes, even though these are neither natural nor predetermined. Rather they are negotiated in an ongoing manner and are open-ended within certain historical, social, and economic frameworks. The character of a gender regime depends on the social environment it is embedded in, while at the same time it also shapes this environment in fundamental ways.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Working difference by Eva Fodor Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix1. Three Generations of Women in Central Europe 1
2. Gender Regimes in East and West 17
3. From “K und K” to “Communism versus Capitalism”: The Social Worlds of Austria and Hungary 39
4. Exclusion versus Limited Inclusion 61
5. Mechanisms of Exclusion 76
6. Conditions of Inclusion: Examining State Policies in Austria and Hungary, 1945–1995 104
7. Difference at Work: A Case Study of Hungary
136
8. Convergence in the Twenty-First Century?
151
Appendix A. Data Sets, Samples, and Definition of Variables
163
Appendix B. Chronology of Legislation Targeting or Affecting Women
167
Notes 173
References 189
Index 201
What People are Saying About This
Éva Fodor's compelling analysis of gendered mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion in the workplaces of state-socialist Hungary and capitalist Austria provides a welcome set of comparative insights to the burgeoning literature on gender, states, and societies, and speaks to core questions in feminism and studies of inequality.
— coauthor, States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism and Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States
Working Difference contains much fascinating new material and exciting analysis. It will make an important contribution to gender theory and to the study of postsocialist stratification. This book is one of only a small handful that directly compare Eastern and Western European political economies and one of the only ones that compares gender regimes. It will have a wide influence on discussions of gender regimes, welfare states, and the historical role of state socialism.
— coauthor of The Politics of Gender after Socialism