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

dirt floors, no running water, and no sewer system, the young women first became aware of the economic and social problems in the countryside as members of a Transylvanian student organization, the Gábor Bethlen Circle. The co-ed Protestant group was of the small „self-improvement circles" at the university, differentiated from the popular „fraternal organizations" by its emphasis on Calvinist precepts of social responsibility and social action.

18 Outsiders in Szeged, the refugee students were especially sensitive to the social and economic inequalities between poor peasant and wealthy landowner which in Transylvania had not been so extreme. The student group had been mobilized by a lecture challenging them to take up the cause of the peasantry of the Great Plain. In post-Trianon Hungary, preoccupied with concern for the survival of the Hungarian people, this population, often referred to as „pure Hungarian," had gained new prominence. Their isolation on the scattered small homesteads known as „tanya" had fostered the development of a unique local culture, though to be the repository of the „true" Hungarian national character. Isolation had also fostered shocking living conditions, resulting in illiteracy, ignorance, and an appalling state of health.

19 The question of the survival of this Hungarian population became a crucial one for the students who had been forced to leave their home in Transylvania, considered by many to be the „heartland of the Hungarian nation." A small group within the Gábor Bethlen Circle resolved to study the conditions of the tanya population and work for the renewal of the nation. Árvay was one of the first tojóin the „Agrarian Settlement Movement." In her gymnasium in Újpest she had received an unusually liberal education which had acquainted her with the social problems of the time. Her mathematics teacher had introduced his students to the controversial writings of the poet, Endre Ady, and taken them to visit the social welfare settlement. In the Protestant student association, Pro Christo, she had been encouraged to relate Christian principles to social problems. When György Buday, the leader of the Gábor Bethlen Circle, announced plans to study the „tanya" situation to her Bible class, she felt compelled to participate. When Viola Tomori joined the group in 1929, she found a new world within the Gábor Bethlen Circle, which had come to include an unusually diverse group of students, some from the peasantry, some from the prosperous Jewish community, for the first time Tomori found a group of friends who accepted her for her own sake and who were sensitive as she was to the social inequalities in the society of the Great Plain. At home and in school she had been raised as a „young lady" (úri leány) and taught that nice girls did not read the realistic contemporary literature on the peasantry. Under Buday'

s tutelage, she read books by Zsigmond Móricz, Dezső Szabó, and Endre Ady which had been forbidden. She described the effect of their trips to the tanya when she viewed at first hand the misery of the poor peasantry: „Here we saw confirmed with our own eyes everything that we read by Ady, Móricz and Dezső Szabó... and felt that we were right. That here were our true ancestors and real brothers."

20 Ferenc Bárány, „A szegedi egyetemisták szervezetei, 1921-1929," Fejezetek hat évtized történetéből (Szeged, 1982) 94-95. 19 Though the farms were nominally attached to a village or a town administration, many were more than fifteen or twenty miles away from a village, church, or school. Ferenc Erdei, Tanya világ (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1976) 7-13. 20 András Lengyel. Interview with Váró Györgyné Tomori Viola. 54