The State Socialist Emancipation Project: Gender inequality in workplace authority in Hungary and Austria

Communist revolutionaries set out to unite not only the proletariat but also the housewives of the world. While admittedly secondary in importance to the abolition of class-based inequalities, the emancipation project targeting women featured significantly on the agenda of Eastern European Communist Party ideologues. 1 In their understanding, women’s emancipation centered on the political and economic imperative of integrating the female population into paid work and into positions of state socialist authority (Molyneux 1982; Einhorn 1993; Gal and Kligman 2000b). Early feminist scholars, among them Simone de Beauvoir, expressed enthusiasm for the radical changes introduced by the Communist Party in Russia and elsewhere, but most recent scholarship on gender emphasizes the shortcomings of the emancipation project (Wolchik and Meyer 1985; Funk and Mueller 1993; Corrin 1994).