CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Czerván, Andrea |
|---|---|
| Title | Women with children in a Hungarian village. The intersections of gender, familial status, geographical space and class in the post-state socialist era |
| Summary | In the thesis I introduce the findings of my research done in a Hungarian rural locality. I did interviews with local women with children and participant observations on recruiting events of nearby factories. The thesis has two main arguments. First, instead of a new wave of the ‘retradi tionalization&# x2019; of gender roles and women’s confinement in the private sphere as housewives, the gender division of labor characterizing the interviewees’ families mirrors the dominant norm of state socialism. Women are working mothers, primarily responsible for unpaid reproductive labor and also expected to be secondary breadwinners. Men are rendered primary breadwinners symbolically and have a high degree of freedom from unpaid reproductive labor. This division of labor is problematic not only because it assigns certain tasks to persons based on allegedly ‘natural’ characteristics, but because unpaid reproductive labor and ‘feminized’ paid labor tend to be devalued in capitalist patriarchy. Although interviewees tend to naturalize the division of labor in their families, they draw borders between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of unpaid reproductive labor. They also question the division either because their work is devalued by the husband, or because of women’s ‘double burden’. Second, while inhabitants’ situation is generally vulnerable, women with children are marginalized in the realm of paid labor of the village because of the interplay of the structure of the local labor market, particular constraints stemming from women’s responsibility for unpaid reproductive labor, and the the norm of the male work free from reproductive duties. Historically, there has been a lack of local non-agricultural workplaces in the village, thus, many inhabitants had worked either in the local agricultural cooperative that was privatized, or at nearby industrial factories that were abandoned during neoliberal economic restructuring, further decreasing the number of local workplaces. The problems with public transport and the schedule of child care facilities make commuting almost impossible. |
| Supervisor | Zimmermann, Susan |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/czervan_andrea.pdf |
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