Hungarian women's writing, 1945-95

After the devastating war, the process of reconstruction in Hungary also entailed a redefinition of ‘femininity’.1 Reconstruction and reproduction are traditionally female duties and yet these issues were usually deliberated and decided upon, and then narrated by men. The standard histories of post-1945 Hungarian literature usually mention just two women writers: Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Erzsébet Galgóczi, representing different traditions, but both belonging to the new generation of women writers who started their career after 1945. This chapter will analyse the historical and intellectual circumstances as this new generation of women entered literary life after 1945, the way the communist takeover influenced the artificial promotion of women writers and their work, and how a new generation of women writers appeared in the mid-1980s. Finally, I shall analyse recent discourse on women’s writing.