Politicizing Reproductive Labor | Debating Democracy
Politicizing Reproductive Labor in Cold War Hungary
by Fanni Svégel, Eötvös Loránd University, Doctoral School of History
The lecture explores reproductive policies in state-socialist Hungary (1960s–1970s), with particular reference to changes in regulation and social perceptions of abortion, and the socialist construction of the “good mother”. The changes Hungary underwent in the second half of the 1960s significantly affected women’s reproductive strategies. Economic reforms, urbanization, the introduction of childcare benefits (known as “gyes”), and the contraceptive pill (Infecundin) in the wake of the sexual revolution have restructured family relations. This project analyzes maternalist social policies and their impacts based on the holdings of the Blinken OSA Archivum to underscore the connection between the traditionalist values of the Kádár regime and the popularity of contemporary state subsidies based on normative gender roles.
Debating Democracy: Ideas of Popular Sovereignty and Self-Government in Hungary and Yugoslavia, 1945–1968
By Cody James Inglis, Doctoral Candidate, History Department, Central European University
The presentation will give an overview of Cody James Inglis‘s research on the postwar debates on popular sovereignty and democracy in Hungary and Yugoslavia. In fact, these postwar debates were largely the continuations of interwar debates, particularly on the Left. The presentation will briefly outline the points of continuity, then discuss what changed in the ideational terms of these debates in the contexts of reconstruction and the consolidation of state socialist regimes. By comparing the Hungarian and Yugoslav contexts, the presentation aims to question the extent to which “people’s democracy ” or “socialist democracy ” were simply empty ideological slogans. Rather, as it will be argued, debates over democratic forms of (self-)government were legitimate, varied, and contested—which is to say, they were neither monolithic nor static.
