Who Is Afraid of the “Ugly Women”?: Problems of Writing Biographies of Nazi and Fascist Women in Countries of the Former Soviet Block

Narrative frames about Erzsébet Rátz, one of the few Hungarian female political journalists before World War II, changed dramatically twice during her lifetime—first, in the aftermath of WWII and later after the fall of communism in 1989. As a student of archeology in Italy during WWII, Rátz penned the most enthusiastic letters home praising Italian Fascist achievements; these her father Jenő Rátz—the deputy prime minister of the quisling Sztójay government—subsequently had published in the Nazi newspapers Egyedül vagyunk (We are alone) and Magyarság (Hungarians). After the “liberation” of Hungary by the Red Army, she was condemned as a “fascist journalist” and sentenced to eight years imprisonment, an exceptionally harsh sentence in 1946. According to the communist-dominated People’s Tribunal, Rátz was punished for engaging in such an “unwomanly” activity as political journalism; Rátz, as a woman, was unfit “for the huge responsibility which is a part of political journalism.”¹ This gender bias of the People’s Tribunal later worked to her advantage when she herself successfully petitioned for her rehabilitation in 1994. She claimed then that as a woman she could only repeat and re-edit what others had already said: it was not her own opinion, because as a woman she could not possibly have an “opinion of her own.” She therefore concluded that her trial in 1946 was a show trial.² The People’s Tribunal, as well as the rehabilitation process after 1989, served as corrective forces to restructure the gender hierarchy. After WWII she was punished as a politically active woman, as a Nazi, and as a “class enemy,” and after the collapse of communism, she was celebrated as a “passive” woman who was a victim of communism.³

At the post-War People’s Tribunal, a female witness testified that, regarding Teréz Mészáros—an active female politician in the Arrow Cross Party (the Hungarian Fascist Party)—her husband had “commented on how ugly it is if a woman joined a party and she is even wearing a party button.”⁴ In the post-War context, “ugliness” bound ideological boundaries between communists and fascists to a politics of gender. Such politically engaged women as Rátz and her less well-known “ugly” colleague Mészáros were labeled as such due both to their activities as fascist party members who supported anti-Semitic propaganda and accepted German power during the last and tragic months of WWII, and as politically active women.⁵ The massive appeal of extreme right-wing parties and movements for women was a new phenomenon in Europe after World War I. Jeffrey Herf has labeled these sympathetic women “reactionary modern.”⁶ Female membership varied between 5 and 40 percent in the case of the Arrow Cross Party, which was exceptionally high in the Hungarian interwar political context. And yet, despite her position as both a “reactionary modern” and a pioneering woman journalist, Erzsébet Rátz has not attracted the attention of feminist historians. Why? The answer can be found in the theoretical challenge she poses to feminist historians and to the genre of biography.

The first problem is related to the attraction of feminist biographical research to “nice” stories. With the birth of new social movements in the 1960s, feminist historians started a quest for their foremothers; therefore, research became mostly focused on left-wing and liberal women’s movements producing biographies of “worthy” women.⁷ This focus on remarkable women was also present in the scholarship of communist countries, which was making the life stories of female artists and left-wing politicians visible already before 1989. After 1989, the publication of biographies about “worthy” women continued.⁸ The existence and the increasing influence of the “non-progressive” women’s movement made research on this topic a necessity. From the 1980s, new historical research also focused on Nazi and other fascist movements at the same time that extreme rightist political movements restarted their activity in such...