Vortrag
European Social Science History Conference 18. bis 21. März 2020

Dr. Eszter Bartha, affiliated researcher at the HAIT, will give on March 18th 2020 a talk at the European Social Science History Conference in Leiden. Her talk will be part of the panel "Negotiations of TransEuropean Feminisms II".

Working-class life under socialism has been an uneasy topic for many reasons. The first is clearly political: the Eastern European intellectuals – having rid of the state socialist system – tended to connect the „working class” with the failed regime or at best the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which had been discredited well before the actual collapse of state socialism. Another reason is the nature of sources: contemporary sources were often regarded as biased or outright falsification, which rendered working-class life and culture under socialism a topic, which attracted little scholarly attention. In recent years, however, there has been a moderate change of this intellectual climate in Eastern Europe, and there followed a new direction in labour studies in the region, which seeks to (re-)write working-class histories from a less ideologically oriented perspective.

The paper strives to contribute to this new school by re-reading contemporary literature on labour sociology and analysing source materials, which have not yet resulted in an academic publication – either under state socialism or later. The aim of the re-reading is to highlight the complex interactions between politics and science and detect the intellectual origins of post-socialist liberalism in Hungary. I also intend to show that while intellectuals challenged the official Marxist-Leninist ideology, the category of gender was remarkably missing from the dissident writings and also from the mental map of contemporary social science in Hungary. To highlight this point, I also examine working-class life-history interviews, which were conducted in the framework of an extensive survey and oral history project (Working-class culture) in the mid-1970s. While women workers were more disadvantaged in several fields (skills, wages, household and childcare duties, educational opportunities, etc.), than men, the analysis of the interviews will show us that women workers internalized the conservative gender roles and adjusted their dreams to their “lesser” social reality. To illustrate this point, I will also use men narratives to highlight the essential gendered difference between the life chances of men and women.

Most interview ended with a short, “psychological” summary of the relevant researcher, who conducted the interview. These summaries allow us to study the language of contemporary social science and the question as to what extent the researchers were sensitive to the gender differences. The analysis of the researchers’ reports testifies to the opposite; namely, that not only were they blind to the gendered discourses but they also displayed a remarkably patriarchal attitude not only to the workers in general but to the women workers in particular. Through the analysis of these materials the paper demonstrates that it was not only the workers, who harboured conservative social and cultural attitudes to gender roles but the mainstream contemporary social science was also blind to the category of gender and the conceptualization of gendered difference.