Women, Housing Conflict, and the Culture of Violence in Hungary's Long World War I

This paper explores the tumultuous history of the early post-World War I period in Hungary, which was marked by renewed warfare, military occupation, impending territorial partition, two leftist revolutions and a subsequent counter-revolution. Many histories of this period focus on high politics and paramilitary violence. However, this paper pivots away from these issues to examine the interrelationship between the emerging culture of political violence and the social history of the housing crisis in Budapest, Hungary between 1914 and 1922. Using court cases and depositions, it will home in  women’s use and threats of violence to address housing shortages and resolve housing conflicts in domestic spaces such as single apartments, apartment buildings, courtyards, and the smaller neighborhoods where people lived.

Such disputes are important for understanding women’s engagement in the violent political struggles that defined Hungary’s experience of World War I. By exploring how longer-term developments in Budapest’s history of urbanization were entwined with the radicalized politics and culture of violence of the early post-armistice period, this paper uses an intersectional perspective to analyze the contradictory effects that women’s engagement in these struggles had on the gender ideology and hierarchy of the different regimes established during a period of extended political crisis.  It also shows how struggle in the domestic sphere provided an avenue for women to assert their loyalty to the state during a period and under conditions when the assumption of women's “natural” estrangement from politics collapsed as a consequence of war and revolution(s).