Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 5. (Budapest, 2010)
Recenziók
Abstracts 521 eliminated, were very widespread in the country, especially Budapest. They also realised that there had been fundamental changes from the previously-permitted organisational forms. The biggest changes were in the nature of prostitution and its form of appearance. Under socialism, women who put their bodies up for sale were in a state of hiding, plying their trade in secret and depending on the “paid assistance” of other persons, many of them state employees. In addition, the authorities viewed them has having chosen their occupation without the pressure of poverty or coercion. What upset the guardians of the system and the police was that the women going into prostitution had grown up under socialism, adapted to a system of society which was supposed to be perfect. This paper analyses police affairs of the time to explore the rise of prostitution in the heyday of Kádárism. The author also shows that the new forms of prostitution and the way they operated and spread were interlinked with the same general, world-scale developments behind the slow but sure erosion of the system: the accelerating decline of authoritarian, conservative behavioural norms, the demands and effects prompted by the consumer society, and the transformation of attitudes to sexuality. ESZTER ZSÓFIA TÓTH The story of Ágnes and Ilona - infanticide by an incomer and a commuter in Budapest in the 1970s “The Ts have lived in Budapest a progressing capital city, full of new ideas, for 25 years. To look at, they seems the same as any women in the city. They wear modem clothes and stiletto heels. But inside, in their heart, they were carrying thousand year-old prejudices. The way they “did away with” their children harked to the custom of a remote, backward villages when a girl was disgraced.” This was how the women’s magazine Nők Lapja, in a 1965 article They must not know, presented mothers who killed their babies, similarly to another piece from 1985. They were both held up as examples of women who in their appearance were modem and urban, but who behaved, after giving birth to children, as uncivilised barbarians. The subject of the 1985 article, a “modem working woman”, was a pillar of the works women’s football team, but when she got
