Parallel Stories: The Rise of Far-Right Women’s Movements in the 1930s and 2010s

This chapter puts into dialogue the lives of far-right women in politics (intellectuals, relatives of party functionaries, administrators, artists, and simple criminals) who rejected both the “conservative offer” and the leftist emancipation project in the interwar Hungary with the women participating in contemporary radical politics rejecting both the neoliberal emancipation project and feminisms. What can we learn from historical-comparative analogies with regard to far-right women’s political mobilization? Using the lenses of anti-modernist emancipation and “gender as symbolic glue” in the two contexts based on testimonies of far-right women activists in the people’s courts after 1945 and in interviews made with contemporary far-right women activists about their motivations to join the movements, I argue that activists from both historical periods intended to create alternatives in terms of values, institutions, and symbolic systems as a critique of other gender regimes.