Technikatörténeti szemle 23. (1997-98)

TANULMÁNYOK - Vámos Éva Katalin: Women’s Opportunities of Studying and Practising Engineering in Hungary from 1895 to 1968 (On the example of Budapest Technical University and its women students)

she reported on "The teaching of the Paris Congress." One decade later we cannot find any trace of her work in Hungary. From 1957 on she and her husband both worked in Vienna. While inVienna, Eszter Pécsi completed the designs for the Parking House Neumarkt. In 1958 the couple left for the United States. In New York City Eszter Pécsi was structural designer for Hotel America, a reinforced concrete sky-scraper. She equally made the structural designs for two sky-scrapers of Columbia University. Marianne Várnay was born in Budapest in a merchant family. After finishing secondary school studies she first enroled to the Faculty of Philosophy of Budapest University of Science, then to Palatine József Technical University. She was the first Hungarian woman who obtained a degree as architect. After 1924 she practised her profession partly in Hungary and partly abroad. Later she became a member of the Chamber of Engineers, at the Section of Architecture of which she was the first female member.

13 The events of Hungarian history affected women's opportunities of studying and practising engineering in a negative way after 1920. The Peace Treaty of Trianon (1920) reduced the territory of the country to one third of its original size. Within these newly established borders a two-year period of white terror was followed - according to recent historical evaluation - by the stabilisation of a "conservative limited democracy" and later a fascist regime which existed in Hungary until the end of World War II. In the post-World-War I times two immense economic crises (1926, 1930) took place with inflations hardly seen ever before. Amidst all this, a large number of families (mainly professionals) were streaming to Budapest from the disannexed territories looking for jobs. According to Andor Ladányi: "The relative overproduction of professionals that had existed, to a certain extent, already before the World War became, in the grave post-war economic situation an acute problem, taking into account the huge increase in the numberof university students. (Just an example to illustrate this: According to the data of the population census of the year 1920 the number of the physicians employed did not exceed 5000, at the same time the number of students at the faculties of medicine exceeded, in the academic year 1920/21, 4500.)"

14 This brought about that, in contrast to other countries that had participated in World War I, women were not allowed to study in higher numbers even after 1919, moreover, in order to restrict studies of women and Jewish students, "numerus clausus" laws were made. The directions and goals of Hungarian cultural policy were determined, from 1922 to 1931, by the ideas of Count Kunó Klebelsberg (1875-1932), Minister of Religious and Public Educational Affairs. He reasoned as follows: "If we train a much greater intelligentsia than needed, we will cause huge so-