CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Varsa, Eszter |
|---|---|
| Title | Gender, "Race"/Ethnicity, Class and the Institution of Child Protection in Hungary, 1949-1956 |
| Summary | My dissertation examines the regulation and practice of child protection in Hungary between 1949 and 1956. As intersectional research, it focuses on this field with attention to how historical processes informed the changing content of the categories of gender, “race”/ethnicity and class, and how child protection, in turn, reshaped these categories. I conceptualize the character of the pre-1956 Stalinist state by building on theories about the gender, “race”/ethnicity and class construction of welfare provisions, social control theories and the theory of the politics of need interpretation. I approach the state as a multi-layered entity defining and interpreting people’s needs at the levels of national policy-making and institutional practice also allowing for individual-level agency. I address in particular how, at these levels, child protection approached and acted on Roma, how gender roles were reconfigured, and how poverty was treated in early state socialist Hungary. I pay specific attention to child protection constructing 1.) material need and the morality of productive work; 2.) sexuality, motherhood and family life, and finally; 3.) education. I argue that the introduction of a new welfare system in the early 1950s that related welfare provisions to employment, was accompanied by a shift in the definition of need manifest in child protection from 1953-1954 onwards. Hereby, the preconditions of children’s placement in state care for material reasons shifted from a postwar wider understanding of need to inability to work. Based on the 630 child protection cases of both non-Romani and Romani families from three different locations in Hungary in the early 1950s, I amend sociologist Lynne Haney’s description of early state socialist Hungarian welfare politics by highlighting the construction of motherhood as central to the family-centered regulative welfare politics of the state. Child protection shows that children provided an access for case workers to families, and targeted primarily mothers whom they considered responsible for reproducing the family. This regulative approach aiming to shape women into “proper” mothers, at the same time, intersected with efforts towards the “racial”/ethnic assimilation of Roma in Hungary. Romani mothers had a special role in adhering to and transmitting a communist morality of work and family life. |
| Supervisor | Fodor, Eva |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/gphvae01.pdf |
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