CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Szegedi, Gábor |
|---|---|
| Title | Good Health is the best Dowry: Marriage counseling, premarital examinations, Sex Education in Hungary, 1920-1952 |
| Summary | This study deals with the topic of marriage counseling in Hungary from the early 1920s to the early 1950s. Marriage counseling is used as an umbrella term for a wide range of practices including medical, legal or sexual counseling for individuals and couples, before and during marriage. The focus of this project is on premarital counseling and on preparation for marriage in general, which includes the production of sexual knowledge through sex education materials. Marriage counseling thus, at least as it was primarily understood in mid-20th century Hungary, becomes primarily a health issue and a preparation of young adults for proper marriage in a biological sense. I examine the 1941 Hungarian Marriage Law in detail and treat both the policies it implemented and the discourses that led to it as a Foucauldian, biopolitical attempt at sexual normalization. In this framework marriage counseling is both a “secularized confessional” and an attempt by power to induce self-normalization through a “discoursive ferment”. The study points to the anti-miscegenation clause in the Marriage Law and treats race defilement cases as further attempts at defining the borderlines of “respectable” sexuality, which resulted in a broad understanding both of “race protection” and of “marital health” in contemporary Hungary. I put forth that while anti-Semitism and state racism was discredited, marriage counseling had a long afterlife after 1945 and not only because it remained in force until 1952 and that it returned in a different form for 15 years in 1973 but also because it was part of a “state socialist”, authoritarian turn in Hungarian biopolitics and it was the first important, mass VD screening procedure implemented in 20th century Hungary. |
| Supervisor | Rév, István and Hall, Karl |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/szegedi_gabor.pdf |
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