Power, patriarchy, and paternalism: An examination of the gendered nature of state socialist authority

The east European state socialist regimes promised unprecedented gender equality and encouraged women's participation in the public sphere through quotas and various other measures. Yet, a sizeable gender gap remained in a number of arenas of society. In this dissertation I examine the mechanisms through which gender inequality in positions of formal, bureaucratic authority was created in state socialist Hungary and compare these to the situation in capitalist Austria.

I argue that the variation in the character of "patriarchal" processes in the two countries are explained by the specific institutional characteristics of state socialism and capitalism. In both Austria and Hungary gender inequality was achieved through women's exclusion from the most valued resource necessary for access to authority, but these were different in the two societies.

I use the Austrian Microcensus of 1982 and the Hungarian Mobility Surveys of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office from 1992 and 1992 to identify these key resources and assess women's share in them. I find that in the 1980's, the time of my comparison, women were excluded from gaining sufficient education and labor force experience in Austria, where these were crucial for claiming authority. This was not the case in Hungary. In a state socialist context these resources were secondary in importance compared to political capital, thus women's access was not limited. However, Hungarian women were less likely than men to join the communist party, which was one of the most important reasons for their lower participation in bureaucratic authority.

I also show that not only the process but also the degree of patriarchy differed in the two societies: women's educational gains and experience in the labor market contributed to the reduction of the gender gap in authority in Hungary.

I call patriarchy of the state socialist kind "neo-paternalist". Using archived documents of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party I show that political leaders treated women differently from men and constructed them as unequal, politically unreliable, but educable subjects of the state. I contrast this to women's inferior citizenship status in capitalist societies.