Andrea Petoe
Girls Educated as
Boys
Historical
Perspectives on Hungarian
Jewish Family
[German]
In the Yearbook
published in 1938 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the National
Alliance of Hungarian Jewish Women`s Association, Dezso Korein quoted S. R.
Hirsch in German to describe the role of Hungarian Jewish women: “Die Frau sei
die Priesterin des Hauses”. If we analyse the other 86 contributions in this
Yearbook, half of this written by men, to celebrate the most influential Jewish
women’s organisation in Hungary, we might as well get to the conclusions drawn
in the pioneering works by Marion Kaplan (The Making of the Jewish Middle
Class, Oxford 1991) and Paula Hyman (Gender and Assimilation in Modern
Jewish History, Washington 1995) pointing out that Jewish family was a
discoursive place which served as a site to articulate and enforce gender
identities. Family was not only a discursive place to define women’s needs,
desires, pleasures in the society but also a key site to transmit class, ethnic
and gender roles and to construct different identities. However the family as an
institution up to a certain limit accommodated to the changing social and
cultural context and I would argue family might serve as site of resistance for
example in Hungary at the turn of the century.
During the process
of modernization the rapidly assimilating Jewish Middle Class in Eastern Europe
adopted the ideas of bourgeois domesticity and mixed it with the Jewish
religious discourse on family. This process was happening at the same time when
the public space for women was opened up because of women’s increasing
participation in the labour market and in educational institutions. To return to
the quote at the beginning of this paper, the “Priest of the House” or rather
“Priestess” also became the “Angel of the House”. The double discourse on
religious family and on domesticity strengthened each other, which made this new
ideology very powerful in order to resist the challenges of modernity.
The first type of
response to this challenge, in the religious discourse the redefinition of
family for widening up its meanings. Women`s participation in the public sphere
could not be ignored any more. However women’s participation in the public life
was considered as acceptable if it served religious zeal or social welfare and
women were called “heroes without a name” following the Biblical tradition
describing women`s role. We know from the social movement literature that
mobilizing women in the “maternal frame” solves the paradox to make women active
in the public realm without challenging patriarchal power structures. So
we can look at social work using the term women`s agency, and charity as
a site where enterprizing talents found space for their activity and developed a
different female subjectivity.
The second route of
emerging Jewish women as social actors was outside the religious framework. By
the beginning of the 20th century educational institutions emerged as
key forms to transmit social norms, values and to construct places of
resistance.
At the turn of the
century in Hungary the percentage of women’s participation in the educational
system was considerably smaller than of men. But analysing the figures of
women’s participation in the higher educational system it is clear that women
entered the higher educational institutions with bigger educational capital, as
fluency in more languages, more sporting skills and their educational
performance during their years of studying all together was much better than of
their male fellow students or of their Jewish male fellow students. Among Jewish
population who were studying in the higher educational institutions women were
also very much present at the turn of the century. In the Budapest University in
the first ten years of women studying (1895-1905) there out of the total student
body 42,2 percent were of Jewish women, and 32 percent were of Jewish men.
According to the statistics this overrepresentation of Jewish women to Jewish
men, and also to women general was also true for the secondary level of
education.
This route was
supported by the demographic tendency that well to do Jewish middle class
families who were aspiring for inter-generational social mobility, were
restricting their reproduction rate by the turn of the century in Hungary, but
also in Germany. If only one or two children were born, and she or they turned
to be accidentally girl then, the girl was educated as a boy. The same
education, except one important factor: without religious instruction. The
social phenomenon “girls educated as boys” resulted in constructing a new female
subjectivity where women with much better abilities, with deeper determination,
entered to the very male world of professionals. These women were trained with
all the support of their family during the educational process as “boys”, and
during the conflicts they were trained.Through their own experience they understood how patriarchy operates, and
for them the techniques of the patriarchal rule as forced amnesia, forgetting,
discrimination became transparent. The social democratic, feminist movement and
later the communist opened up social and political space for assimilation and an
escape route from religious norms and duties. The modernity together with the
social program attracted a new generation of Jewish women taking part in leftist
activities. During our quest for fore-mothers we are looking back to the very
rich tradition of Jewish women’s political activism.
Hence the Bible
offers more models if we watch carefully. For the “girls educated as boys” there
was no space in the religious world. For them the civic, the state intervention
was desirable to oppose the overwhelmingly oppressive and religious private
sphere of domesticity. If we want to understand some of the reasons why the
majority of Jewish women in Hungary of today, are non-religious we should take
into consideration, besides other factors, the exceptional individual
achievements of our fore-mothers at the turn of the century and the family as a
possible site for resistance.
Dr. Andrea Petö
studied history and sociology. She was an assistant professor at the Central
European University, Budapest and has lectured and conducted research at other
universities as well. She currently serves as President of the Feminist Section
of the Hungarian Sociological Association.
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