“The Minor Would Hinder the Mother in Finding Employment:” Child Protection and Women’s Paid Work in Early State Socialist Hungary

A Lack of Child Care Services and “Delinquent” Children

The early phase of state socialism in Hungary as in the other state socialist countries in East and Southeast Europe was characterized by wide-reaching economic and social transformations. The extensive industrialization of these formerly largely agriculture-based societies—also called catch-up industrialization—was at the forefront of these transformations. This process required not only the building up of heavy industry and a consequent expansion of the industrial labor force but also that economic investments were overwhelmingly poured into industry and the production of raw materials. ³³ While the large-scale labor force needs of this expanding industrial sector led to a significant lowering of the postwar unemployment rate by the early 1950s, a lack of investment in other sectors led to a drop in the standard of living, a scarcity of consumption items and a substantial proportion of the population living in poverty. ³⁴ Catch-up industrialization also rendered agriculture “a resource” for the industrial sector and the agricultural population “second-class citizens.” ³⁵ The country’s increasing need for industrial labor power combined with the socialist ideology of women’s equality resulted in women’s large-scale entrance into the labor force in the early 1950s. ³⁶ Most skilled work positions, however, were available only to men, and the female labor force in Hungary, as in other socialist countries, was concentrated in light industries, such as textiles, shoemaking, and food processing. ³⁷ Women’s wages in this early period were on average 60 percent of men’s, and wage work was gender-segregated. ³⁸ The onset of large-scale industrialization also offered job opportunities for Romani men, but mostly in the lower-paid, unskilled sectors of heavy industry, such as mining or iron-making. The employment rate of Romani women meanwhile remained much lower than Romani men’s and non-Romani women’s. ³⁹

In the early 1950s, when women’s labor force participation was on the rapid rise in Hungary, the socialization of care work was weak, with an insufficient number of child care facilities and limited number of places available for children in these institutions. The statistical report of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office on health and culture from 1952 stated that only one fifth of working mothers’ children under three were able to find a place in a crèche. ⁴⁰ Childcare facilities in Budapest were sufficient for the placement of 11 percent of primary school–age children, while in the countryside they were even scarcer. Temporary childcare institutions open for the period of intensive agricultural work covered 8 percent of the child population aged under six and only 1 percent of that under three. The situation became even more acute following the introduction of a population policy package in 1953 as a result of which abortion became tightly controlled. The subsequent increase in the number of small children meant that the growth in the number of places in crèches by almost 4,000 in 1954 contributed little to easing the problem. ⁴¹

In this situation, balancing employment and childcare was especially difficult for mothers, who were still considered more responsible for unpaid reproductive work in the home than fathers. It was the long-existing and functioning network of child protection institutions, children’s homes, and foster families that caseworkers mobilized to fill the missing and weakly developed institutional infrastructure of childcare services. ⁴² The countrywide system of child protection institutions, and their capacity to receive children immediately and house endangered children temporarily until a decision by guardianship authorities about their case was made, enabled caseworkers to place children there on a short-term basis. The fact that these institutions were used to ease the difficulties arising out of the clash of women’s paid and unpaid work was reflected even in the statistical reports of the period that are known to have contained adjusted figures on problematic issues under state socialism. The statistical report of 1952, for example, stated that because of the “insufficient number of places” in childcare facilities, “in case of temporary difficulties, such as lack of accommodation or unemployment,” parents were forced to place their children under the care of child protection institutions. ⁴³ According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, at the turn of the 1940s to the 1950s, there were around 25,000 children that is approximately 1.1 percent of all children under fourteen in state care. ⁴⁴ The number of placements in 1952 was predicted to surpass the prewar figures of 1938. ⁴⁵ According to “strictly classified” data from 1955, close to one-third of the 6,020 placements were based on material reasons. ⁴⁶ These children had mostly separated parents, or were raised by single mothers and single working women or they were orphaned or abandoned children. ⁴⁷

The inadequate supply of childcare services coupled with the authorities’ wish to increase women’s labor force participation contributed to the presence of the institution of child protection in the lives of both employed and unemployed mothers. The clash between paid work and care was most tangible in those cases where children were institutionalized because of the danger of their “moral decline” or “inclination towards delinquency.” These dangers and inclinations had much to do with the lack of care children received as a result of missing childcare services. Left alone during most of the day while their parents were at work, children were “wandering,” not attending school regularly, or committing petty crime, such as theft. Caseworkers referred especially to teenage children as “on the way to delinquency” and “endangered by moral decline” as a consequence of their “inclination towards wandering” and school absenteeism. ⁴⁸ They described their parents as “orderly and honest people,” who could not secure their children’s care or exercise influence over their behavior “because of their day-long occupation.” ⁴⁹ The inadequacy of childcare services resulted in these children’s institutionalization.

Children’s case files testify that the lack of childcare services hit especially hard lone mothers, who had fewer chances than married women to secure care for their children while they were at work. ⁵⁰ “Based on the investigation [of the guardianship authorities] the minor is a regular school avoider, his behavior is uncontrollable, he lies and steals,” was a typical statement in the files of children raised by a lone working mother. ⁵¹ Thirteen-year-old Péter, for example, spent close to a year and a half in state care in the years 1955 and 1956, because his widowed mother, who worked “from early morning to late in the evening, could not look after him.” ⁵²

Newborn and small children could not be left alone while their mother was at work. Without childcare services, these mothers were forced to have their children institutionalized, once they had to return to their workplace. Three-month-old Lilla, for example, was institutionalized in 1954 in Budapest, because her mother was “unable to look after her”: “The child could not be placed anywhere else, because there was neither a crèche nor any other person there [in the small town], who could take care of her.” ⁵³ Mothers raising their children alone had less access to support from relatives. The four- and two-year-old sons of Mrs. Munkás were placed in state care in early 1955, because her husband left the family and she was employed. ⁵⁴ In yet another case, three-year-old Anna was raised by her employed mother, who was divorced. Guardianship authorities found the child’s placement in state care necessary, because “during the time the mother was at her work place the child would be left without care.” ⁵⁵ These employed mothers’ cases illustrate the important function of child protection institutions in filling the role of missing childcare services.

“The Minor Would Hinder the Mother in Her Employment”: Child Protection as a Tool to Enforce Unemployed Mothers’ Entrance into Paid Work

The inadequate supply of childcare services in the context of women’s growing labor force participation contributed to the presence of the institution of child protection in the lives of unemployed mothers as well. Children’s placement in state care served the purposes of pushing these mothers to find a job. On the one hand, there were not enough places in childcare facilities to accommodate demand. Access was also restricted by parental employment. On the other hand, child protection expressly served the regulation of mothers without a job. In child protection policy, children’s so-called moral endangerment reflected a negative evaluation of parents, including mothers, who were not employed. ⁵⁶ This was clearly manifest when the Ministry of Education reshaped the preconditions for children’s placement in state care in 1954, as a result of which those cases when the children of parents “able to work” were endangered counted as cases of moral endangerment. ⁵⁷ This measure aimed to decrease the number of children placed in state care based on the assumption that the employment of parents able to work and thereby their ability to support their children was secured in state socialist Hungary. Material endangerment was supposed to occur only when parents were physically unable to work. While limiting the number of children entering residential institutions that at the time operated over the limit of their capacity was an absolute necessity, this restriction also expressed the centrality of citizens’ participation in productive work in the early 1950s and the immorality of those not employed or irregularly employed although “able to work.”

In child protection practice, the importance caseworkers assigned to mothers’ employment expressed the role placement in state care played in pushing mothers to find a job. Guardianship caseworkers in the 1950s increasingly defined children as “hindrances” to their mothers in finding employment or performing well at work as a justification for placement in state care. In a typical case from Szolnok County in 1955, they described a mother separated from her husband as “being hindered from finding employment” by her two-year-old daughter. As there were no other relatives to look after the child while her mother was at work, she was placed in state care. ⁵⁸ In another characteristic example, the nine-month-old baby of a lone mother working at a factory in Budapest needed to be placed in state care, because she “hindered” her mother at work. His parents separated a year before, and the child was with the mother, who, “being employed, could not look after him.” ⁵⁹ In their effort to orient women towards their employment-related responsibilities, caseworkers argued for children’s placement in state care so that their mothers could either take up or continue employment. They used the institution of child protection in this process to put pressure on mothers.

The role of child protection in enforcing women’s employment is also clear from caseworkers’ negative evaluation of unemployed and temporarily or irregularly employed mothers. Cases in which the status of children in state care was changed from material to moral abandonment or endangerment, when their mother was considered to be “able to work” but had no job or was only temporarily employed, testify to this condemnation. The difference between these two categories of abandonment was also expressed in financial terms: Parents or relatives were officially to contribute to the costs of state care for moral reasons. When the seven- and thirteen-year-old sons of Márta Seres were placed in state care in Budapest in the summer of 1953, their mother had only temporary employment. Not married, she was the sole provider of the four-member family that included her sixty-eight-year-old mother. Her earnings were so meager that her children “lived in deep poverty” and she finally had to relinquish their care. ⁶⁰ Guardianship authorities first established that without sufficient resources Márta was “unable to contribute to the costs of their care” and her two sons were institutionalized on grounds of their material endangerment free of charge. ⁶¹ Two years later, however, when caseworkers revised the boys’ status, they put their mother’s situation in a different light. She was no longer the poor single mother of two without resources but a parent “able to work” whose children “could not be kept in state care for material reasons.” The children were categorized as morally endangered and their mother was requested to contribute financially to their care. ⁶²

Sometimes caseworkers went as far as labelling mothers they found “able to work” but who were nevertheless unemployed as work-shy and potential misusers of the child protection system. They assumed these mothers would institutionalize their children to be free from the financial responsibility of their upbringing. In a single mother’s case, for example, whose daughter was placed in state care in Szolnok County in 1956 “so that she could find employment,” caseworkers stressed that “it [was] intolerable to allow parents able to work to place their child in state care and continue with her(!) unemployed life.” ⁶³ The typo is suggestive about the extent to which unemployment contributed to the negative judgment of this mother. In another case, a single mother’s baby was placed in state care on the basis of moral endangerment in 1955 in Szabolcs-Szatmár County, because “the mother was able to work, she was healthy, but had no permanent job, and was not willing to enter regular paid work.” ⁶⁴

Cases in which parents were denied their children back from state care show even more clearly how caseworkers were able to use child protection to enforce regular paid work for parents, including mothers. Ms. Erdei’s request in 1955 to get back three of her four children placed in state care a few years earlier was rejected. According to the decision brought by the guardianship office, the danger that the children aged ten, five, and three would “return to delinquency” was too high. At the time of the children’s placement in state care, Ms. Erdei’s partner, who was the father of the children, had died. As a lone mother, Ms. Erdei had great difficulties securing her family’s living. She had neither a “proper flat nor an income; she provided a very meager living to herself and her children from temporary work.” ⁶⁵ Caseworkers decided that despite the fact that Ms. Erdei had in the meanwhile obtained a job, her situation was not stable enough to look after her children: “It is undisputable that the financial circumstances of the mother have greatly improved since she has a full-time employment now. But it is also undeniable that the time the mother has spent in regular employment is not long enough for her to rise from her previous fallen state and to secure a proper home for her children. In order to achieve this, she will need more time.” The decision to keep the children in state care was also motivated by caseworkers’ opinion regarding “the general interest of the larger community” since “state care would ensure that the children would become useful members of the society, while their release from care contained the danger that they would turn into criminals.” In another case from Szolnok County it was the village community that requested in 1952 that the children of Mr. and Mrs. Bor be put in state care. Filing a petition with thirty signatures with the local guardianship office, the inhabitants of the village claimed that the behavior of the children, who “stole vegetable and fruit from the garden of others, shouted at elderly people and threw stones at them, was intolerable and posed a danger to the proper development of the [other] children in the village.” ⁶⁶ Villagers stated that the siblings misbehaved because of the work-shyness of their parents, who “taught their children nothing better than to steal.” When in 1955 Mr. and Mrs. Bor requested that their three institutionalized children be returned under their care, child protection caseworkers denied their request. As in the case of Ms. Erdei, they argued that it was “not the appropriate point in time yet” to release the children from state care since “that would endanger the achievements already gained” through the children’s institutionalization in the behavior of both the three siblings and their parents. According to their evaluation, the parents’ “attitude to work” had improved substantially since the removal of their three children from their care, but not enough. The family in fact had moved to a neighboring village where Mr. Bor found employment. The local council furthermore had provided the family a small apartment. Still, the return of their three children “would break the balance of the family and result in the resurfacing of earlier problems,” caseworkers established: Their apartment was not large enough to house all their children nor was their income sufficient to support them “properly.” Additionally, the parents “just started to think seriously about their family life” and were about to change their “world view” and earlier behavior.

As these cases demonstrate, guardianship and child protection caseworkers were not only friendly supporters of women’s entrance into paid work. They mediated the tension that arose in the early 1950s between work and family life as a result of the inadequacy of available childcare services by relying heavily on the institution of child protection. They used children’s placement in state care not so much to facilitate but to enforce mothers’ entrance into paid work. In identifying mothers whose employment needed to be enforced and whose unemployment or irregular employment they found endangered the upbringing of their children, caseworkers’ judgment was not only guided by child protection policies. Their evaluation of families and children was put together from different pieces of information, provided by neighbors, schoolteachers, police, doctors, or at times the activists of the local social policy committee.

“As They Are Gypsies, They Are Not Employed”: The Negative Evaluation of Romani Motherhood

The files of Romani children placed in state care in the early 1950s show that caseworkers’ judgment about mothers was affected by prejudice about the work-shyness of Roma. This prejudice played an important role when guardianship authorities evaluated motherhood and the mothering of women they suspected as endangering the upbringing and development of their children. They were likely to find Romani mothers to be work-shy and potential misusers of the child protection system.

Guardianship and child protection caseworkers’ prejudices are not surprising in light of the abundance of references to the “education” and “reeducation of Gypsies” with a focus on “work” in most reports about the situation of the “Gypsy population” in the 1950s in North-East Hungary. ⁶⁷ While the first party resolution on the Gypsy population was issued only in 1961, there were already efforts in the early 1950s to produce specific policies directed at the assimilation and “uplift” of Roma at both local and ministerial levels. ⁶⁸ Furthermore, prejudices against Roma about their work-shyness were long-standing in Europe and were abundantly discussed and racialized during the Second World War. ⁶⁹ The identification of Roma with work-shyness was, thus, not a state socialist invention. It motivated among other things the authorities’ efforts for the removal of Romani children from their families and their placement in state care throughout the twentieth century. The characterization of Roma as work-shy was in fact key to the connection between child protection history and the history of “the solution of the Gypsy question” in Hungary.

The work shyness–biased approach to the employment of Roma also permeated the welfare-related work of local councils in the early 1950s. The program of the council of Szabolcs-Szatmár County for the year of 1953 in the field of social policy, for example, framed the employment of Roma in factories and home craft cooperatives for traditional “Gypsy occupations” as a means towards their education for work. ⁷⁰ Romani children’s institutionalization also surfaced in this document. State actors believed it would secure the disciplining of Romani children and their parents, and put an end to the work-shyness of Roma.

The case of the death of a newborn child in the Romani settlement of a small village in Szabolcs-Szatmár County in 1953, for example, testifies to this belief. The child’s death stirred the sentiments of the non-Romani establishment of the village not so much out of concern for the parents but rather due to fears of a possible outbreak of infectious disease and the danger they thought the Romani settlement posed thereby to the rest of the non-Romani–populated village. ⁷¹ A committee composed of the local doctor and council members, including the representative of the social committee, who went on site, established a shocking state of poverty and famine among Roma in the settlement: “the members of the [Gypsy] community were in a completely abandoned state . . . they lived only on water . . . because they did not have any food. The children suffered from edema caused by famine.” ⁷² As a result, the local council sent a request to the county-level authorities asking for immediate food aid for eighty-six persons at the Romani settlement and requesting that all children under fourteen be placed in state care on the basis of their poor health.

The response of the county-level council was in line with the new child protection policy that did not allow the placement of children in state care on grounds of material endangerment when their parents were considered “able to work.” ⁷³ At the same time, it heavily emphasized the importance of employment for the “solution of the Gypsy question.” It squarely declared that the suggestion of the local council “did not serve the final solution of the Gypsy question,” ⁷⁴ and emphasized that “of primary importance was that Gypsy workers able to work get an opportunity to work.” The county council stressed that “it was unimaginable that the eighty-six Gypsies . . . who did not work, although [they] were able to work, receive financial support, because that would lead to the rearing of a crowd of work-shy people.” In consequence, it denied the request to place the children of the impoverished Romani settlement in state care. The county council stated this would be possible only if the children “did not have relatives obligated and able to provide for their support.” The authorities’ refusal to provide financial support to these families and their denial of children’s placement in state care aimed to pressure parents “able to work” to find employment. Their assumption was that without such pressure Roma were inclined towards “work-shyness” and would push the responsibility of care for their children onto the state. While in the end the county-level authorities denied the placement of Romani children in state care as a means towards “the solution of the Gypsy question,” the case nevertheless testifies to a belief in institutionalization among local actors as a way of handling the care of children of unemployed Romani parents. It also shows that the characterization of Roma as work-shy lay at the heart of these discussions.

The case files of children placed in state care show that such prejudice played an important role when guardianship authorities evaluated the mothering of Romani women. It influenced their decisions and their identification of women whose employment needed to be enforced. While caseworkers could find both Romani and non-Romani parents work-shy when they were temporarily employed or unemployed, the difference in the case of Romani parents hinged on the presumption that they were unemployed work avoiders because they were Roma. A Romani child’s file from Szabolcs-Szatmár County exemplifies this process: The local health protection circle and social policy committee investigating the case of a newborn Romani baby boy in 1955 found that the child’s nourishment was not secured with the mother: “The mother of the child (!) as they are Gypsies, they are not employed. The parents of the child support themselves only from temporary work and thus the nourishment and the maintenance of the child is not secured. The mother has no mother’s milk and the father has no long-term employment contract in prospect, so the child’s placement in state care is necessary.” ⁷⁵ While the child’s ensuing institutionalization expressed the authorities’ concern about his health, their prejudice against Roma as work-shy and the parents’ consequent inability to secure the appropriate care of the baby was also decisive in their evaluation of the case.

Prejudice against Roma as work-shy not only led to an assumption about work-shyness as the reason behind Romani mothers’ unemployment but as an extreme example from Szabolcs-Szatmár County shows, it could also result in caseworkers questioning the sincerity behind Romani mothers’ efforts to find employment. In a report about the situation of child protection in 1955 the county council complained about the high number of Romani children placed in state care upon the request of their mothers:

Also Gypsy women are trying to find employment in industry, especially those who live a youthful, lazy life outside wedlock. As a result of their entrance into paid work, they gave many children into state care or asked for their placement in state care. Approximately forty-fifty percent of the children placed in state care in the county were Gypsy children. The reason for these requests for placement in state care was that they wanted to improve their living, and wanted to get rid of their parental responsibilities. Thorough examination [of these cases] enabled the prevention of the further escalation of this process, moreover decreasing it to such an extent that in the first half of 1954 there were fifty percent fewer children taken into state care than in the same period in 1950. ⁷⁶

Disregarding a lack of access to childcare facilities for working mothers in the countryside, county council officials blamed Romani mothers for trying to make use of the child protection system to enable their participation in waged work. This excerpt underlines that they, like non-Roma, were also to meet the double expectation towards women in the spheres of productive and reproductive work. Unlike non-Romani mothers, however, Romani women were characterized as incompetent providers of care for their children when they turned to the child protection system in trying to reconcile their productive responsibilities with motherhood. Romani mothers therefore could find themselves in an especially contradictory position with the increasing emphasis placed on women’s employment coupled with inadequate childcare facilities.

The case files of children placed in state care I have presented so far reveal how guardianship and child protection caseworkers used the institution of child protection to enforce rather than only facilitate the employment of mothers. The lack of childcare services in Hungary in the early 1950s created a tension between women’s responsibilities in the field of paid work and care, a situation in which the institution of child protection fulfilled a central role. In mediating this tension, it enabled guardianship and child protection caseworkers to regulate the behavior of mothers. Women’s lack of employment contributed to care workers’ negative evaluation of their mothering. In case of Roma, the long-standing prejudice about their work-shyness led to their characterization as incompetent mothers even when they tried to reconcile paid work with raising children. Not only caseworkers were involved, however, in mediating between wage work and family life. Mothers and at times fathers were also active participants of this process.

Parental Invention: Using the Child Protection System for the Purposes of Childcare

Although the institution of child protection had a high potential for and was used by caseworkers for the regulation of parental behavior in Stalinist Hungary, it was not simply a form of state intrusion in the lives of individuals or the oppressive arm of the state in a totalitarian dictatorship. Subjects are not only passively “subject to something,” such as “surveillance, control or government, and law or rule,” they are also “initiators.” ⁷⁷ The parents, especially lone mothers and at times lone fathers, who turned to children’s homes to ease the tension between work and family life when childcare services were not available in the early 1950s in Hungary were such “initiators,” who “strategized” and “maneuvered” their way through state-provided resources, using them to secure their own well-being. ⁷⁸ Like so many women before, in different historical times and places, who had no access to childcare, or only inadequate or unsuitable care, mothers and at times fathers in early state socialist Hungary also used their maternal and paternal invention to secure care for their children while they were at work. ⁷⁹ This not only took the form of private arrangements but mothers and fathers also used institutions, such as children’s homes, not intended for the purpose of childcare. Historian Jessie B. Ramey has described similar parental strategies among poor African Americans in the early twentieth-century United States. Because of their long hours at work and a lack of day care, these parents used orphanages for the purpose of childcare. ⁸⁰

The case of Géza illustrates a similar situation in the context of early state socialist Hungary. His well-to-do, middle-class family left Romania before the war, to settle in Budapest in 1944. Following his parents’ divorce in Hungary, Géza’s mother, who used to be a housewife, earned only a meager living from selling drinking water at a railway station and later working in a small kiosk. “She worked all the time. When the first train arrived at three in the morning, she was already there, her kiosk was already open. When the last train left at half past twelve at night, she was still there,” remembered Géza. ⁸¹ His mother had no time and his grandmother was unable to look after him and his sister. As a result, Géza became a “very mobile little boy” who spent time outside in the street rather than at home. It was Géza’s uncle, working at the Ministry of Health and familiar with the option of institutionalization, who convinced the children’s mother to have both Géza and his sister placed in a children’s home where they would be looked after during the day. The story of Géza not only exemplifies how the institution of child protection filled the role of missing childcare services in the lives of working mothers. It also shows that lone mothers, like the mother of Géza, for whom it was close to impossible to balance work and family life without access to childcare, turned to child protection institutions as an alternative.

As Géza recalled during the interview, it was at the point when he had started to spend time in the street that his mother agreed to his institutionalization. The case files of children in state care also confirm this pattern. Numerous mothers first turned to the local guardianship office when they realized that their children, who spent a large amount of time without appropriate care, started to misbehave. Requesting the institutionalization of their children, these mothers often emphasized that it was due to their employment that they could not look after their children. They argued for state support in fulfilling their childcare responsibilities by referring to their obligations towards the state as employees. They did not call on communist ideology about women’s emancipation through the socialization of care work but rather excused themselves for failing to look after their children properly. They relied on a shared understanding about the traditional gender breakdown of work, in which women were regarded responsible for childcare and care more generally. A typical case in point was the mother of ten-year-old Mária, who asked for her daughter’s institutionalization, saying that she was at work and could not provide adequate care for her child. ⁸² Caseworkers agreed that the child took advantage of the fact that her mother was away and placed her in state care, as she risked becoming “morally delinquent.” These children were not forcibly removed from their mothers’ care, but their mothers requested their sons’ and daughters’ institutionalization in order to bridge the tension between employment and childcare.

At times, fathers needed to use their paternal invention. The fact that there were many fewer occasions when lone fathers rather than mothers turned to the institution of child protection confirms the prevalence of traditional attitudes towards the gendered division of work. Situations when fathers needed to mediate between their employment and the needs of their children occurred only following the death or absence of the mother and when other relatives were unwilling or unable to provide care for the children. When four-year-old Éva’s mother died, her maternal grandparents agreed to raise her younger sister and brother but could not afford to raise a third child. Neither could Éva’s paternal grandparents, who lived in their former three-room house together with two other families. Since Éva’s father worked during the day, he placed her in state care.

Interviews in contrast to the case files of children provide a rich background to how parents and children coped with state care resulting out of the tension between paid work and care. They reveal that for parents it was the best available alternative they could turn to while struggling with the responsibilities of employment and childcare. For both the children leaving their families and their parents it was important to see children’s homes and child protection institutions in this context as something positive. In their stories, they emphasized the difference between former orphanages for abandoned children and the new children’s homes. For some, like Géza’s mother, state care was acceptable only because she perceived it following the pattern of boarding schools, familiar to her from the education of upper middle-class children before the war: “To her, this was not such a horrible thing, because in the social circles she came from, it was fashionable to send children to institutions. ‘Had the war not happened, we were well-off enough, I would have sent you to a boarding school on a ship,’ she used to tell me. Or my parents would have sent me abroad, to learn English, German, Italian or French. This school on a ship would have been something similar to that too.” ⁸³ For Éva, it was a sign of her father’s care that he selected “a good place, a castle” for her daughter, and he “did not give her simply away to an orphanage.” ⁸⁴

Conclusion

This article contributes to a little-discussed area of welfare state history, namely, the onset of state socialism including the period of Stalinism in state socialist Eastern and Southeastern Europe through a case study of child protection between 1949 and 1956 in Hungary. Taking a Foucauldian perspective on the role of residential institutions in defining norms of behavior and deviance, it presented child protection as a means for the regulation of women’s behavior through the encouragement as well as enforcement of their entrance into paid work. The insufficient socialization of care work at the moment of women’s growing labor force participation in this period enabled the institutions of child protection to take an important function in filling the role of missing childcare services and thus exercising greater influence over the lives of mothers. At the same time, the article also engages with historical scholarship on the welfare state and state socialism that challenges the total subordination of social actors and clients of welfare to the state. Using sources beyond decrees produced at the highest level of decision making in the field of welfare politics, such as local-level child protection case work, sheds light on the presence of actors at different levels of the state hierarchy, who represented contrasting positions on cases considered for placement in state care. These sources also show that there were other actors beside the authorities who could initiate placement in state care, such as villagers or parents. Parents turned to child protection in this period in order to ease the tension between their responsibilities in the field of productive and reproductive work. Such parental invention confirms negotiation with existing resources in Stalinist Hungary, as in other historical contexts where parents had no access to childcare.

Importantly, an intersectional approach to children’s case files shows that prejudice against “Gypsies” as work-shy persisted in child protection work across the systemic divide of the late 1940s. This manifested not only in the questioning of Romani women’s sincerity in finding employment but also in the belief among local actors that Romani children’s institutionalization would contribute to the elimination of work-shyness among Roma. Through an examination of local-level practices in child protection the article thus contributes to scholarship on state socialism and Stalinism that emphasizes the role of historical continuities. It also amends the existing gendered analysis of the state socialist period in Eastern Europe through the means of intersectionality by pointing to examples of the differentiated evaluation of mothers who were considered “Gypsy.”