“The Minor Would Hinder the Mother in Finding Employment:” Child Protection and Women’s Paid Work in Early State Socialist Hungary

Abstract

This article discusses the role of child protection and residential care institutions in mediating the tension between women’s productive and reproductive responsibilities in early state socialist Hungary. At a time when increasing numbers of women entered paid work in the framework of catch-up industrialization but the socialization of care work was inadequate, these institutions substituted for missing public child care services. Relying on not only policy documents but more than six hundred children’s case files, including Romani children’s files, from three different locations in Hungary as well as interviews with former children’s home residents and personnel, the article examines the regulatory framework in which child protection institutions and caseworkers operated. It points to the differentiated forms of pressure these institutions exercised on Romani and non-Romani mothers to enter paid work between the late 1940s and the early 1950s from the intersectional perspective of gender and ethnicity. Showing that prejudice against “Gypsies” as work-shy persisted in child protection work across the systemic divide of the late 1940s, the article contributes to scholarship on state socialism and Stalinism that emphasizes the role of historical continuities. At the same time, reflecting on parental invention in using child protection as a form of child care, the article also complicates a simplistic social control approach to residential care institutions in Stalinist Hungary.