‘Should Women Starve to Death?’: Alliances and Coalitions of the Hungarian Association of Feminists Amidst Inter-War Crises and the Peak of Fascist Anti-Modernism

The public forum (ankét) entitled ‘Should Women Starve to Death?’, organised by the Hungarian Association of Feminists (FE) in late 1934, brought together intellectuals from a wide spectrum of political ideologies to debate women’s employment, feminism, the rise of fascism, and the economic crisis. The speakers emphasized the interconnectedness of women’s economic emancipation with the post-WWI crisis of masculinity and the family. In response to the national conservative attacks on women’s rights and feminism, many highlighted the class dimensions of women’s labour. I argue that these attacks were typical expressions of anti-modernism, with elements of backlash. The forum shows that despite being traditionally seen as a bourgeois-liberal feminist organization, by the 1930s the FE had developed a political agenda that aligned more closely with social democracy and the political left. The 1934 forum can thus be understood in the history of European feminist political thought as a moment of coalition-building, as well as an alternative to popular front political organizing – in the Hungarian case, with the striking absence of communists. Read together with the feminist efforts against death penalty just a few years earlier, these texts reveal a different type of feminist thought in 1930s Hungary, with general human values and social justice as core concepts, marginalising the still important, yet narrower gender equality ones. My analysis is situated within the history of political thought, incorporating elements of social and economic history, along with the recovery of biographies of interwar women intellectuals, highlighting both the specificities and commonalities of the Hungarian case within the broader context of East Central Europe.