Female front lines
A possible role for museums in analysing and presenting gender history
MúzeumCafé 29.
I would like to call attention to research involving a reinterpretation of female roles by focussing on individual lives, which goes beyond seeing women as ‘passive observers’ and makes an attempt to reconstruct the struggles enclosed in the female body and to present their battles involving breaking though barriers in both private and public spheres. Using the lessons of local and social history research, I would like to contribute to a feminine-centred interpretation of some historical events, modifying the homogenous image of women and drawing up feminine prototypes by examining the lives of four women who lived in western Hungary at the beginning and in the middle of the 20th century. I would also like to raise the question as to what role Hungarian museums can play in researching revealing female life stories and gender history in a broad sense, and publishing the results of analysis. I intend to present the four women in relation to the historical and social issues of the period. Their parallel life stories include individual solutions to problems of the last century such as the right of women to education and representation, the conflict between being predestined to represent accumulated family capital and traditional female roles, entering a profession and assuming a social role, the instinctive application of female survival strategies during the horrors of war. The individual destinies of the four women – Magda Szemző (1907–1988), Gabriella Galló (Schwartz) Gézáné Párczer (1914–1944), Margit Reiszig Józsefné Tulok (1907–1984) and Erzsébet Bertalan (1897–1945) – which are connected by their efforts to do more and better for the individual and the community, are absolutely ordinary yet more human than simply humane.