Women’s Struggles in Hungary

19the century: Habsburg Monarchy

Women’s organisation was mainly confined to the middle and upper classes.

1817: First women’s organisation, the Pester Women's Charitable Society, founded. As in many industrialising countries in this era, charitable bodies burgeoned as (often religious) outlets for middle- and upper-class women's activity.

1848–1849: Alongside related uprisings in other countries, Louis Kossuth led a bourgeois democratic revolution, including ending serfdom, and widening male suffrage; Austria defeated the war for Hungarian independence with help from the Russian empire.

Mid 19th century: Countess Blanka Teleki (pictured right bottom) opens first women's education institute. Women got access to secondary education. Women's educational development was one element in a modernising drive as Hungary asserted itself against Austria.

Late 19th and 20th Century: Austro-Hungarian Empire/ Dual Monarchy (1867-1918) and Short-Lived Soviet Republic

1867: Following a long struggle, including the events of 1848–49, Hungary became a joint partner with Austria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire/dual monarchy.

1895: Women were allowed to study philosophy, medicine, and pharmacy at university.

1904: Rózsika Bédy-Schwimmer (Rosika Schwimmer, pictured top left), a pacifist and women’s rights advocate, and champion of women workers, founded the Association of Feminists, who pushed for women's suffrage.

1913: Seventh Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance met in Budapest (pictured middle left). Also active in this period were female Social Democrats, and the National Federation of Women Clerical Workers.

1918: Breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hungary is a separate nation again; but as a losing combatant in World War 1 it would lose two-thirds of its territory and half its population by the terms of the Treaty of Trianon, 1920.

22 November 1918: Voting reform granted the right to vote to all women aged 24 and older (for men, it was 21), who could read and write (a regulation applying only to women), and who had been Hungarian citizens for more than six years.

March 1919: Béla Kun (pictured bottom left), who had been recruited to the Bolsheviks when a prisoner of war in Russia, led a coup and formed a Communist-Social Democratic coalition government, and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Women workers and men attained the right to vote from age 18. This was revoked after Kun was defeated – women would not gain full suffrage until 1945.

July 1919: Kun's government was defeated with the intervention of the Kingdom of Romania

1920-1946: Horthy Regime

Period of right-wing, nationalist backlash against the soviet republic and national humiliation at Trianon, with rolling back of democratic and women’s rights. There is economic hardship as a result of war and also the Great Depression. Although they were increasingly politically active, women were often seen in a traditional role as mothers and guardians of the nation’s children.

1920: Miklós Horthy (pictured top right) becomes regent of the Kingdom of Hungary and holds the role till defeat in the Second World War.

1920: Margit Slachta (pictured middle right) was elected as a member of the National Assembly, and became the first woman Member of Parliament. She was a Hungarian Catholic religious sister, who distinguished herself by opposing growing antisemitism.

November 1940: Hungary joined the Axis powers, allying with Germany in the Second World War.

December 1944: The invading Soviet Red Army established a Provisional National Government of Hungary after defeating Hungarian and German forces. During their occupation of Hungary, Red Army soldiers are estimated to have raped 50,000 Hungarian women.

1946-1989: Under Stalinism

Under the new Stalinist regime women had long maternity leave, and access to free crèches and kindergartens. But despite a formal commitment to equality, facilities were often of poor quality, benefits low, and women occupied the worst paid, lower status jobs. Women's educational attainment lagged behind men's.

1946: The Kingdom of Hungary is dissolved and replaced briefly by a democratic republic. This was dissolved in 1949 and succeeded by the Sovietbacked Hungarian People's Republic (until 1989). They nationalise the economy, and repress dissent.

1949: Women made up 18% of members of the parliament (and 30% in 1980) but had little real power to effect positive change for women.

There was formal equality between men and women but independent feminist organisations were suppressed and replaced by one, state-sanctioned Communist Party front, the Democratic Women’s Alliance. Women's participation in the workforce was encouraged, including, initially, through liberal abortion rights, although in 1953, concerned with a falling birth rate in the early 1950s, the regime temporarily banned abortion and encouraged motherhood. As elsewhere women experienced the double burden of paid work outside the house, and unpaid domestic labour.

23 October–4 November 1956: Hungarian Revolution: student-led protests against Soviet domination through the communist government of Mátyás Rákosi. The new government of Imre Nagy declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and pledged to re-establish free elections.

4–10 November 1956: Soviet troops invade and crack down on the revolt. Thousands were killed or wounded, and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians went into exile.

4 December 1956: 30,000 women and children march to the tomb of Hungary’s unknown Soldier to protest against the Soviet repression.

Post ‘56: while the revolt had been crushed, to stave off further unrest, the Soviets allowed Hungary to pursue a slightly more economically liberal and consumerist course than its other satellites. The period was known as ‘goulash communism’ and Hungary as ‘the happiest barracks’ in the Eastern Bloc. The women's and other radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s were portrayed by the Communist regime as unwelcome and decadent, Western interference.

1990-2009: Post-Communism

Working-class women were squeezed in the move away from a statized economy. There were moves against reproductive rights, with nationalist anxiety about low birth rates.

1990: Hungary held its first free elections after the fall of communism; only 7% of the elected members were women. By 2018, women made up just 12.6% of the parliament.

May 1990: The Feminist Network was established.

1997: Removal of the marital exemption from the rape law.

2004: Hungary joined the European Union.

2010-2026: Orban Governments

Under Viktor Orbán (top left) and his Fidesz governments there was an active rollback of women's and LGBT+ rights.

2011: In response to EU “gender mainstreaming” the Government espoused “family mainstreaming”.

2012: Ban on abortion pills comes into place. Abortion is reclassified solely as a surgical procedure. New constitution defines marriage as "between one man and one woman".

2018: Government bans Gender Studies programmes.

2020: Hungary’s Family Minister Katalin Novák published a video lecturing women on how to achieve success, advising women not to expect to get equal pay. Law introduced prohibiting the legal changing of one's gender.

2022: Decree that all women seeking an abortion must listen to the heartbeat of the foetus.

Today: Post-Orban

Hopes for liberalisation and better scope for women’s political organisation exist following the defeat of Orbán. Budapest Pride march has been unbanned after years of harassment by the authorities and an outright parliamentary ban in 2025. It will go ahead on 27 June 2026.2025: Restrictions on right of assembly put in place — this was tied to a ban on promoting homosexuality effectively banning pride events. 200,000 people nevertheless showed up to Budapest Pride in June (pictured bottom left).

12 April 2026: Péter Magyar, president of the centre-right Tisza Party, won a two-thirds supermajority in parliamentary elections, allowing him to overturn Orbán-era laws, and became Prime Minister. Magyar was previously a member of Fidesz but has pledged to be more pro-EU and culturally liberal and to combat anti-Roma discrimination.