Dance Around a “Sacred Cow”: Women’s Night Work and the Gender Politics of the Mass Worker in State-Socialist Hungary and Internationally

Abstract

This chapter explores the struggle over the prohibition of women’s night work in industry that took place in state-socialist Hungary and between Hungary and the International Labour Organization ILO during the 1960s and 1970s. In Hungary, dedicated women trade union functionaries advocated for a gendered policy scheme that called for far-reaching special labor protections to be granted to women workers on social grounds and simultaneously ensured that such protections would not translate into gendered disadvantages. In the context of the Hungarian New Economic Mechanism, this feminist-laborist policy vision was overruled by the politics of transforming the woman worker into an economic being who did not deserve special protection, yet continued to suffer from economic discrimination as compared with men workers. This Hungarian development was part of the broader abandonment of (most) restrictions on women’s night work in state-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Internationally and at the ILO, this development served as a forerunner to and an indicator of a larger global trend reversal. The old laborist and laborist-feminist dream that woman-specific restrictions would be superseded by equally strict restrictions for both sexes died in the context of European-wide economic liberalization.