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

stage of the movement in 1932 and 1933. In my study of Hungarian youth movements I was fortunate to meet Árvay and Tomori, who were active in the group from its beginning. This presentation, which is a spin-off from my dissertation research, was made possible by interviews with the two women in the summers of 1989 and 1990. Balancing their recollections with fragments of information from articles, newspaper accounts, and letters, I will attempt to assess their role in the movement as a first tentative contribution toward the creation of a documentary base for further study. Among the first generation of Hungarian women to have relatively free access to a university education, they shared the generational struggle of their male colleagues to make a place for themselves in truncated Hungary with its diminished career opportunities. They were not consciously feminists. Like the Russian women populists of the nineteenth century they were not concerned with women's issues as such.

2 In the post World War I period women's legal and social status had been greatly improved and opportunities for women intellectuals expanded. Their priorities were similar to those of their male counterparts, who believed that the crucial issue was the future of Hungary and the need to restructure its semi-feudal hierarchical society. These women belonged to the generation shaped by the Treaty of Trianon. The fragmentation of the nation dramatically affected the course of their lives. Erzsébet Árvay and Viola Tomori were uprooted Transylvanian Hungarians, among the approximately 426,000 refugees who fled to rump Hungary after the dismemberment of the former kingdom.

3 Árvay was a child of seven when her family fled their village at the time of the Romanian occupation in 1918. Her father received a teaching position in a small village in Transdanubia, and at ten Árvay was sent to live with a great aunt in Újpest to attend the Dorottya Kanizsay Girls Gymnasium. Tomori and her mother left Kolozsvár in 1921 when her father, a railroad supervisor, was imprisoned for transporting Hungarian newspapers into Romania. They settled in Szeged where she attended a conservative Catholic girls school. Tomori, who maintained a strong sense of her Transylvanian Protestant identity, was not accepted by her classmates in the Árpádházi Szt. Erzsébet Gymnasium. The child of older parents, she lived within the protective environment of her family circle. Judit Kárász was born to an established, prosperous Jewish family in Szeged, but family cohesion was disrupted by scandal when her father was arrested for warprofiteering in 1916. She and her mother lived away from Szeged in Budapest, returning only in 1927.

4 As soon as she completed secondary school in 1930, Kárász left Hungary. Like many other young Hungarian intellectuals, she took advantage of the opportunity to study in the West, enrolling in the Bauhaus School in Dessau.

5 The effects of Trianon exerted a determining influence on their educational plans. Along with other women among the impoverished middle classes, they found it necessary 2 See the discussion of women in Russian populism in Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 3 For estimates on numbers of Hungarian refugees, see István E. Mocsy, The Effects of World War I: The Uprooted (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) 10-12. 4 Interview with András Lengyel, literary historian. 6/22/90, Móra Ferenc Múzeum, Szeged. 5 Information on Kárász' life is taken primarily from Ferenc Csaplár, „Kárász Judit szociofotói," Tiszatáj (Szeged, 1970/7) 656-658, and Pál Miklós, „A magyar szociofotó egyik úttörője: Kárász Judit (1912-1977)" Fotóművészet (1988. XXXI. l.sz.) 11-16. 50