The Changing Politics of Women’s Work and the Making of Extended Childcare Leave in State-Socialist Hungary, Europe, and Internationally: Shifting the Scene

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss the emergence and expansion of extended childcare leave for working mothers in Hungary and parallel innovations in the international policy-making of the International Labour Organization (ILO). I argue that such a focus on the history of gender, work, and the life course helps us move beyond the amorphous vision of state socialism as a society of full-time workers and allows us to place the history of gender and labour in state-socialist Europe in a broader framework, thereby overcoming the implicit Western European bias in European labour history. The history of state-socialist Europe as a trendsetter for a changing international and European labour and life course regime brings to the fore an array of motivations and trajectories of – in the end – converging social policy reform in East and West as well as internationally which evolved around issues of work and labour. “Thinking together” Western European, Eastern European, and international arguments and actions that informed the introduction of extended childcare leave and related measures makes visible both differences and similarities. The integrative perspective suggested in this chapter points to the limited representation, both on the international stage at the time and in scholarship up to the present day, of Eastern European developments and actors, among them state-socialist trade unions and women trade unionists who, in their own way, aimed to present and represent women workers’ experiences and viewpoints.