A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Historiae Literarum et Artium, 1. (Szeged, 1997)

Cornelius, Deborah S.: Women in the Interwar Populist Movement: The Szeged Youth

Women in the Interwar Populist Movement: The Szeged Youth DEBORAH S. CORNELIUS (Rutgers University) In August of 1933 a photography exhibit opened in the provincial Hungarian city of Szeged. The title: „Fifteen kilometers from City to Farm." In the stark puritanical style of the Bauhaus School, Judit Kárász's photographs documented the dichotomy between peasant and city life with startling power: barefoot peasant laborer contraposed against well-fed priest; peasant baby wrapped in newspaper nest to a lace trimmed baby carriage; village children in a muddy pathing pond by the up-to-date city swimming pool. In presenting the social reality which she perceived, the physical and mental oppression of peasant life contrasted against the light-hearted prosperity of the city, Kárász sought to disturb, to arouse the indignation - and the sympathy of her viewers. Judit Kárász, a pioneer in photo journalism and political radical, was an example of the „new generation" of Hungarian youth and one of the small number of exceptional women who took part in the populist youth movements in interwar Hungary. Small groups of marginalized young intellectuals in the late 1920's and early 1930's came to believe that their future was inextricably tied to the future of the Hungarian peasantry. They resembled populist and peasantist leaders of Eastern Europe in their belief in the innate spiritual and national values of the peasantry. Like the Russian narodniks of the nineteenth century, they urged intellectual youth to take up the mission to help the people. They placed their faith in the potential of the small peasant land owner to form a new rural middle class, and worked for the reconstruction of society in which a new leadership from the peasantry would merge with young intellectuals to create a stronger selfconfident Hungarian nation. Who were these women? How did „young gentlewomen" in Hungary's status conscious society become involved with the peasantry? What role did they play in the youth movements which prepared the intellectual climate for the populist writers of the latter 1930's? There is little known about them. The few works which have been published on the youth movements barely mention their names. In his trailblazing work, Populist Sociography, Dénes Némedi explains that the term „youth" as it was used in Hungary during the interwar period referred only to the intelligentsia, excluding peasants and workers.

1 It does not occur to him to point out that youth referred only to men. In the study of youth movements as it has developed, the very concept of „youth," with its connotations of activity and radicalism, has precluded the examination of women. In my presentation today I will focus on the three women members of the Szeged Youth group, the most influential populist youth group within the borders of truncated Hungary. The careers of the three women, Erzsébet Árvay, Judit Kárász, and Viola Tömöri, illustrate both the opportunities available to young women and the limitations on women intellectuals in the interwar period. Árvay and Tomori, both refugees from Transylvania, were active in the Szeged movement throughout its ten years of activity. Kárász, daughter of a prominent Jewish family in Szeged, was involved during the most radical 1 Dénes Némedi, A népi szociográfia: 1930-1939 (Budapest: Gondolat, 1985) 25. 49