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

Erzsébet Árvay and Viola Tomori, both Transylvanian refugees, enrolled at the Royal Hungarian Francis Joseph University in Szeged at a time when changes were taking places in the student population which were to be instrumental in the later composition of the Szeged Youth. In 1928 Árvay became one of the first women to enroll in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, one of ten women among one hundred eleven students. When Tomori joined her the next year there were already more than twenty women in her entering class.

15 Árvay had been refused admission to the overcrowded university in Budapest, but enrollment in Szeged was still low. The Transylvanian university from Kolozsvár had been transplanted after the Romanian occupation and re-established in the provincial city of Szeged in 1921 as part of the plan to decentralize higher education. Despite a reputation for excellence, it had remained a small university throughout the 1920's with a large enrollment of refugee students from Transylvania.

16 Standards were high and it appears that the two women, who were serious students, were accepted on their own merits without discrimination. Both received the government and Rockefeller scholarships reserved for excellent students. Tomori and Árvay were to become life-long friends, forming a „sisterhood" of two in their activities with peasantry. Although Szeged become the second largest city in Hungary after Trianon, it still retained a predominantly agricultural character. The newly built university complex in the inner city with its well-designed broad avenues offered a startling contrast to the habitations of the field-workers and tenant farmers who rented out much of the city's land which spread out over approximately 101,268 acres. More than half of the city's 120,000 inhabitants were occupied in agriculture.

17 Students from other parts of the country were not attracted to Szeged but naturally gravitated to Budapest, the cultural and political center of the country. The peripheral location of the university in an agrarian city was instrumental in the emergence of the radical group of students, later to be known as the Szeged Youth. Far removed from central control in Budapest it was possible to evade the stifling political orthodoxy demanded by the regime, the talented group of university students were characterized by their marginality. The social diversity of the members, the extreme differences in social position, unusual at any time, was striking in interwar Hungary's hierarchical society. Of the fifteen members three were women at a time when women rarely took part in public life, the core members were Protestant refugees from Transylvanian. Four of the most artistically talented were Jewish. The best known under the later Communist regime was Ferenc Erdei of peasant background and Ortutay, a Catholic, their intense awareness of social tensions undoubtedly made them more sensitive to the social injustice toward the agrarian population. More than half of the city's inhabitants were field workers and tenant farmers. They lived on the outskirts of the city in quarters with 15 Statistics on women's enrollment taken from interviews with Viola Tomori and Erzsébet Árvay. Statistics on departmental and total enrollment from „A Magyar Királyi Ferencz-József Tudományegyetem Beszámoló, 1927-1929, 1929-1930." 16 In the first half of the 1920's more than 40% came from the cut-off territories. In 1927, the year in which György Buday became head of the Bethlen Gábor Circle, there were still 30% from the territories. András Hegyi, ed. Haladó ifjúsági mozgalmak Csongrád megyében. (Szeged: KISZ Csongrád Megyei Bizottsága Politikai Képzési Központja, 1982.) 17 141,775 H. 1 hold — 1.4 acres. Tanyai ügyek: újság-cikkek a „Délmagyarország" с szegedi napilapból. „Szeged mint földesúr," (Szeged, 1930) 9-19. 53