Kata Jávor
Tradition-Bound
Roles and Gender in a Hungarian Village
...
Naturally, the changes that have been
underway in Hungarian society at large
have not bypassed the village where I did
my field work. These have included the
general extension of paid employment
among women and the access this has
given them to an income of their own,
along with a growing acceptance of birth
control and the spread of childcare facilities
in rural Hungary. These changes arrived
much more slowly than average and
became appreciable only during the
eighties. At the same time in Varsány, the
traditional norms of masculinity and femininity
and the asymmetry of the division of
power between the sexes have continued to
be sustained by the family, which in
Varsány is still essentially patriarchal. Even
today the division of labour within the
family underpins differences between the
sexes in relation to power and spheres of
interest; the moral and behavioural standards
that are applied to men and women
are totally different, and their socialisation
also proceeds by different routes.
What roles, then, are women and men
expected to accept in present-day Varsány?
That is still determined by the respective
positions that they occupy in the division of
labour and authority. The division of labour
itself is part of a symbolic system and not
just an extension of some biological factor.
At the start of my work in the village, during
the early seventies, one encountered a
rigid, gender-dictated division of labour
within the family, which generally attached
higher prestige to the activities of the
menfolk. Different jobs were ascribed as
having symbolic value according to whether
they were regarded as specifically men's or
women's work. That rigid division was
backed up by a powerful moral code, with a
man whose wife carried out a man's work
(e.g., driving a horse and cart or reaping
grain) being censured just as he would be
for undertaking women's work. On the
other hand, a man was not supposed to
dish up food for himself, but to sit at the
table for his wife to place the food on his
plate. In older times it used to be the
fashion for a wife to put literally every
object in her husband's hands, so that if the
husband was washing, for example, she
would stand behind him, holding a towel. It
would also be the wife who, when her
husband was about to set off for the fields
with his horse and cart, would hand up to
him the haversack containing the bread,
bacon fat, onions and water that would be
his midday meal, whereas in the evening
she would be expected to have a hot supper
ready, usually consisting of a dish of
potatoes, cabbage or beans with meat
on Sundays. Similarly, the home-made
sausages that were produced when pigs
were slaughtered towards the end of the
year would soon be eaten up by the men. A
wife was also expected to listen out for the
rattling of her husband's cart and rush out
to open the gate for him, and if the supper
was not ready, the angry husband might
well strike her.
Aside from hoeing, which was considered
women's work, women were
landed with the thousand and one tasks
involved in running a household. In the
olden days, even the soap that was used for
washing would be made at home. Much
time was taken up by processing flax, as
this was used not just for bed linen and
dishcloths but for the whole of the family's
underwear and shirts or blouses, so that
the loom was ready to be pressed into
service at any time except on feast days.
Often only night-time was left over for a
woman to pay attention to work on a daughter's apparel or trousseau, as the
village expected that, on being married, she
should be provided with all the linen
needed to last her a lifetime. At the wedding
feast, the female guests would inspect the
linen chests and wardrobes that would be
opened to their gaze to show that they were
suitably "crammed". Mothers with more
than one daughter, therefore, had a
particularly hard time of it.
...
More powerful than such changes,
however, has been the continuity by
which Varsány's families uphold the social
reproduction of male authority. The essence
of masculinity is perceived in the fact
that it should continue to be treated as the
source of authority and privilege within the
family. It has traditionally been a privileged
existence that is a by-product of a
historically and culturally determined
system of inequality between the sexes.
Some of the rites that institutionalise
gender differences have now lost their
previously obligatory force- as amongst
the young, for example, with the rule that
the man sits at the head of the table or that
the wife hands everything to the husband-
but others have persisted. Thus, it is still seen as natural, if a married couple goes
anywhere on foot, that the wife carry any
luggage. In other words, there has been no
fundamental shift in the expectation that
the man is there to be served. It is therefore
still common for a teenage boy today to
"order" his mother around without her
seeing that as being in any way odd.
The asymmetry of authority that
characterises relations between the sexes
in traditional village society, and hence in
Varsány, has been consummated in the
binary "domestic/public" opposition that
social anthropologists use to express the
duality of the male and female worlds.
Accordingly, women's activities are
carried out within the private sphere,
whereas men's activities are carried out in
the outside world, the public sphere, and
that is a major reason for the discrepancy
in their prestige. The question is to what
extent the changing position of women in
the social structure has had an impact on
the distribution of authority within the
family.
What can be said for sure is that over
recent decades, with the emergence of
women into the public sphere, there has
been a decline in the physical and
symbolic segregation of men and women
in Varsány. That has not brought any
serious change to the balance of authority
within the family, however, because for
women, even though they may have a job,
the domestic role remains primary. And it
remains so due to the low prestige of their
paid work and also the backwardness of
the local infrastructure and services, with
a continuation, to some degree, of the old
norm of self-sufficient families. This all
results in a continuing importance for
women of the low-prestige domestic
sphere.
The true weight of male authority
is another matter, given that the presence
of prestige often obscures the realities of
power. The fact is that, despite the higher prestige of men's activities and the
continuing restriction of women's control
to the family, the family has continued to
be the most important social unit in
Varsány. Since the men's workplaces
are often outside the village, decisionmaking
on many matters, both small
and large, is inexorably slipping over to
the women; it is they who supervise
and guide the children, with the menfolk
often being left only to give a nod of
approval to a fait accompli.
In the public sphere it is still the case
that greater expectations are placed on
women to give ritual respect to men. With
the elderly and middle-aged it is a general
strategy that outside the home a wife
should pay her husband certain forms of
the respect that is due to the head of the
family- in order to show that the husband
is master in the house, even though in
reality she is gaining ever-wider decisionmaking
authority. The problem arises with
the younger generation, where the wife may
be more disposed to question her
husband's place at the head of the family-
this is often a bone of contention.
The asymmetrical balance of power is
also underlined by a double moral
expectation and norm on top of the
rigid division of labour and authority.
Accordingly, strong self-assertion is seen as
most important for a man, and self-control
and self-discipline for a woman, with a
given action being judged according to the
gender of the person who performs it. This
duality is at its most acute in the field of
sexuality. In cases of premarital intercourse
and adultery, public opinion in the village
will always condemn the female party on
the grounds that "Men will be men." In
recent years, though, the fact that young
couples will have sexual relations prior to
marriage has been tacitly accepted in
Varsány, so that on this point the moral
blame is roughly equally apportioned
between the sexes.
...
True, the process of training children for
work has seen a lessening of the gender
polarisation, even if that is a levelling down;
but the main reason for the change has not
been any radical overhaul of concepts about
gender roles as much as, in general terms, a
radical shift in the status that Varsány's
children have gained in the family. One
important aspect of this is an "upgrading" of
the value attached to daughters, particularly
in the families of younger couples. In
general, less is expected of children, but
despite that, subtle distinctions are still
made between the two sexes. Thus, girls still have to cope with a greater burden of
expectations and are still expected to be
more diligent. Only now this comes in the
area of school performance, where girls are
expected to complete secondary school,
whereas for boys the future is seen to be in
training for skilled work.
Nursery schooling
has played a part in diminishing ideas about
the role of gender in the division of labour.
All the same, offers by young boys who have
been taught in school to help with laying the
table are, for the time being, still rejected by
even the youngest mothers, who consider
it to be "un-boyish". It should also be
remarked that the process of roping
children into work according to gender is to
this day more pronounced in Varsány's
farming families, in line with the parents'
generally more traditional outlook on
gender roles.
Prescriptions on gender roles also
extend to outward appearance and
clothing, which are treated as a form
of behaviour. In traditional villages, the
clothes that an infant would wear up
to 2- 3 years of age were neutral, and
later on they primarily reflected changes
appropriate to the age group; only with
girls of marriageable age did they become
an important tool in selecting a partner.
Differentiation of the sexes was served by
a colour symbolism for clothing by which
it was deemed appropriate for boys to
wear ever-darker clothes as they grew
older, whereas for girls it was ever brighter
and lighter shades. The clothing for a
newborn would be light blue for a boy
and pink for a girl, though if a daughter
was born when a son had been expected,
she would wear any light-blue clothes
that had been bought in advance- but not
the other way round. Thus, the aforementioned
cultural asymmetry, which
treats transgressions of the female sexual
boundary more harshly, shows up even in
the field of colour symbolism. Boys'
clothing differed from girls' not just in its dark colours and confined forms, but also
in the casual attention that was given to it.
From the mid-seventies onwards, the
family's attention was more and more
focused on the children, which was
reflected in a steady growth in expenditure on clothing them. As the selection of
clothing grew more fastidious and
differentiated, it increasingly served to
distinguish the sexes. With the opening of a
nursery school in the village in 1976, the
wardrobe for girls expanded with items of
clothing that previously had only been adopted when older girls went out into
society. Children were now only permitted
to wear clothes that the mothers deemed
characteristic for girls or boys. Thus, the
coming of the nursery school lowered the
age at which girls had to be provided with
the attractive clothing that meets the norms
of "girlishness"- an important vehicle of
their gender role. In other words, the
already strong gender polarisation of
clothing grew even stronger, in that the
wardrobe for boys, though possibly a bit
more fastidious, in essence continued to
comply with the old norms (e.g. they were
not allowed to wear coloured or even
patterned pullovers), whereas that for girls
became ever more differentiated.
On leaving the relative "laxity" of infant
school behind and heading for puberty, girls
had to adopt an ever more ritualised
outward appearance to satisfy a growing list
of criteria and be considered suitably
"girlish". Among those criteria were fitness
for the occasion, variety, trendiness and, on
certain special occasions, conspicuous
newness. On the other hand, even in the
nineties most mothers were still citing
durability as their main criterion in choosing
clothes for boys, though it is quite another
matter that their sons are no longer in total
agreement with them, as the supposedly
"manly" indifference about such matters
and the dominance of dark colours began to
give way among teenage boys some six or
seven years ago.
In Varsány, clothing is nevertheless an
important tool in bringing up girls and boys
and forming gender stereotypes. For several
decades it has been associated with a
complete gender polarization that from the
earliest age treats colourfulness and variety
as being female prerogatives, while
unconcern and lack of colour have until
very recently been seen as more befitting of
masculinity.
From an early age, youngsters of both
sexes acquire important messages from
their clothing about what constitutes
sexuality, or more specifically, its cultural
freight. As they approach adulthood, the
physical appearance of boys and girls
becomes ever more polarized, and with
that, almost unavoidably, they are taught a
social and cultural definition of sexuality.
One should note, though, that the positive
discrimination given to girls in the matter of
how they dress is evidence precisely of the
persistence of sexual stereotypes, and
specifically, of how in Varsány getting
married is still considered, even today, the
principal index of their success in life.
This may bring us nearer to broaching
the issue of how inequality between the
sexes is reproduced despite superficial
signs of change (divorces, greater sexual
freedom, the growing informal weight
that women occupy within the family, etc.).
My observations show clearly that sexual
roles have been polarized to the extreme
in Varsány by the system of social and
cultural conditions, and that discrimination
between men and women remains a
fundamental factor of social organisation in
the village.
Translated by
Kata Jávor
is an ethnographer working at the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences. She is the author of many articles on Hungarian village life, especially on
peasant society and ethos, as well as a book on the lifestyle and life strategies of the
Zsolnay family, founders of the famous ceramics factory in Pécs, Hungary.
