Female Roles

The four essays in this selection explore the social construction and the individual interiorization (or denial) of femininity and female roles.  Debora Silverman’s paper The “New Woman,” Feminism, and the Decorative Arts in Fin-de-Sie`cle France examines how the idealization of woman both as a decorative piece of art in her home and as the artist of the interior emerged as a response to the “new woman” regarded as subverting traditional female roles.  Rather than a simply negative, antifeminist reaction, the modernist program of the feminization of the interior assigned a creative role to woman and cherished values of “republican familial feminism”.
From literary works and interviews, Noémi Saly reconstructs the figure of Puella Classica, a controversial woman from the first decades of the twentieth century whose adventurous life involved different forms of deviance and conversions.  Preserving much of contemporary language and the atmosphere of coffee-houses in the capital, Saly uses long quotations to illustrate how the prostitute and poor writer of fin-de-sie`cle Budapest turned into a religious matron professing a clearly Slovak national identity by the 1920s.
Éva Federmayer’s article explores how contemporary Hungarian popular magazines of home decoration and furnishing discursively produce a ‘bourgeois’ social identity where the term bourgeois refers to the world of order, financial security, and hope.  These magazines reconstruct traditional gender differences by creating distinct ‘gendered’ spaces for men and women, and by giving rise to a timeless, mythic female figure responsible for the creation of a warm, familial atmosphere by the decoration of the interior.
In the last paper entitled Mothers and Daughters, Mária Neményi and Anna Kende analyze the social construction of female roles for two generations of Hungarian women in their mid-twenties and early fifties.  In their empirical research based on interviews, the authors – themselves belonging to these two different generations – also explore individual ways in which women interiorize female roles and femininity.