LYNNE HANEY
"But We Are Still Mothers":
Gender and the Construction of
Need in Post-Socialist Hungary
Abstract
This paper examines the gender regime of the welfare state transition
underway in contemporary Hungary. I analyze this welfare restructuring
within three state terrains and trace shifts in regime policies,
institutional practices, and client strategies from late state socialism
to the present. I argue that these shifts denote fundamental alterations
in the social conception of need and in the nature of claims
to state assistance. In the last two decades of state socialism, the
Hungarian welfare apparatus was organized around maternal guarantees
that accorded women benefits based on their contributions
as mothers. These social guarantees provided female clients with a
sense of entitlement and practical resources for use in their domestic
struggles. In post-socialist Hungary, this maternal discourse is being
dislodged by a new language of welfare designed to target and
treat poverty. As the welfare system is oriented toward poor relief,
women's needs have been materialized and their maternal identities
displaced by new class identities and stigmas. With these shifts, the
practical and discursive space for women to maneuver has contracted—prompting
female clients to resist and reassert their previous
status as entitled mothers. The data presented in this paper are
drawn from archival, interview, and ethnographic research conducted
in Budapest, Hungary from October 1993 to April 1995.
Social Politics Summer 1997
© 1997 by Oxford University Press
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 209
Caseworkers employed in Budapest's Xth district welfare office
will remember March 13, 1995, for quite some time. On this
day, female clients converged on their office en masse to protest the
Bokros csomag, a government proposal to restructure the Hungarian
welfare system. Well before the agency's official office hours, lines
of women formed outside the building. When the doors opened, a
stampede of women rushed into the office. Their emotions ran high,
fluctuating between anger and fear. "I cried when I heard the news
last night," one female client remarked. "I kept my daughter from
school to come here and complain." To calm a group of clients
gathered around her desk, one caseworker assured them that the
reforms would not adversely affect them. "It will be like the aid
you already receive," she explained. "Those with low incomes will
continue to get support." Unconvinced, a female client retorted, "So
just like that aid, nothing will be left in a few months." The others
grumbled in agreement. Another woman staged a sit-in at a caseworker's
desk, demanding that she call Prime Minister Gyula Horn to
revoke the proposal. As a male security guard escorted her out of the
office, she quietly repeated, "No one cares anymore, but we are still
mothers. We are still mothers."
With her comment, this female client advanced a profound argument
about the nature of the welfare changes underway in Hungary.
Hers was a comparative analysis, based on what she and her fellow
clients had learned from years of experience in this system. For most
of their lives, these women had been constituted primarily as mothers
within the Hungarian welfare apparatus. Since the late 1960s, they
had been enmeshed in a subsystem of welfare that nearly universally
accorded mothers special benefits. They were entitled to three years
of maternity leave, family allowances, sick leave benefits, and childrearing
assistance. In the mid-1980s, maternity-leave payments were
income-based and child-rearing assistance means-tested. But in postsocialist
Hungary, this subsystem of welfare crumbled around these
women. By the mid-1990s, all other social policies met a similar fate.
The entire system of maternity-leave grants and family allowances
was subjected to income tests, and only specific classes of mothers
received financial and other aid. So although these women were "still
mothers," the welfare apparatus no longer accorded them special
privileges based on their identity as mothers.
While these Hungarian women experienced the current welfare
restructuring in comparative and historical terms, the scholarly literature
on the welfare states of Eastern Europe has not been systematically
comparative or historical. Only in the last few years has the welfare
state come into theoretical focus for scholars of Eastern Europe.
Within and outside the region, these scholars have begun to document
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the retrenchment of welfare underway throughout Eastern Europe.
In Hungary, many social scientists have linked this restructuring to
the 1990 political regime change, arguing that the entrance of new
parties and movements into the political sphere led to the reform of
welfare programs (Ferge 1992; Szalai 1992). Others have focused on
the imperatives of the transition to a market economy and how it
requires the scaling back of welfare programs (Timar 1991; Kornai
1994; Szalai 1994; World Bank 1992). Because these shifts are seen
as manifestations of the current political and economic transition,
these analyses tend to be ahistorical; they leave untheorized the historical
reconfigurations of Hungarian welfare that occurred prior to
the transition period. The few analysts that take a historical perspective
on Hungarian welfare do so in quantitative terms—focusing on
changes in the scope of social benefits (Ferge 1991; Deacon 1992),
patterns of re/distribution (Ferge 1996; Andorka 1996), or the overall
amount of welfare transfers (Toth 1994; Andorka and Toth 1995).
Hence, the existing literature on Hungarian welfare has centered on
alterations in the re/distribution of state resources and in the overall
size of the social policy apparatus.
The conceptual framework advanced in this paper will be of a
different sort. Rather than conceptualizing the Hungarian welfare
state transition in terms of the quantitative categories of size, scope,
or amount, I will analyze it for the social conceptions of need it
encodes. Drawing on recent feminist welfare state theory and historiography,
my analysis will be guided by the notion that all welfare
states embody distinct architectures of need—understandings of who
is in need and how their needs should be met (Fraser 1989; Fraser and
Gordon 1994). Welfare states not only engage in the re/distribution of
benefits, they also articulate historically specific interpretations of
need. These architectures of need are etched out on multiple terrains
within welfare states. First, they are articulated through regime policies—inherent
in social provisions, public proclamations, and discursive
constructions. Second, they are constituted through the practices
of actual welfare institutions—embedded in the organization of casework
and the professional models ascribed to by state actors. Because
welfare policies and practices define social conceptions of need, they
draw upon and shape women's identities in complex ways. Hence
welfare regimes must also be examined for the space they accord
women to advance their own interests and maneuver in their everyday
lives. In this way, my analysis of Hungarian welfare will operate on
three levels, tracing changes in regime policies, practices, and client
strategies.
With this conceptual framework, I identify three Hungarian welfare
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regimes from the inception of state socialism: the welfare society of
1948-1968, in which women's needs were familialized through state
policies and practices organized around the household; the maternalist
welfare state of 1968-1985, in which women's needs were maternalized
through provisions and agencies designed to secure the quality
and quantity control of motherhood; and the liberal welfare state of
1985-1996, in which women's needs are materialized through poorrelief
programs that bureaucratically regulate poverty. In short, Hungarian
welfare shifted from the familialization to the maternalization
to the materialization of women's needs. With these shifts, the nature
of women's claims to state support has also changed. In the first
two welfare regimes, assistance claims were linked to women's social
contributions as workers and family members. Hence, in these regimes,
the prevailing conceptions of need gave rise to a series of
entitlements and social guarantees. It would be historically inaccurate
to characterize these entitlements as "rights" since Hungarians lacked
the civil and political rights to participate formally in the social politics
of the period. Yet in post-socialist Hungary, the reverse is true—
although Hungarians have been granted formal political rights, their
previous social guarantees have evaporated. Assistance claims must
now be based on material deprivation: recipients' material needs,
rather than their social contributions, form the basis of all appeals for
state aid. Thus, these Hungarian welfare regimes encoded contrasting
conceptions of need as well as different systems of needs claims and
entitlements.
Although the history of Hungarian welfare can be periodized according
to these three regimes, this paper will focus on the contours
of and transition between the second two regimes. It will trace the
shift from the maternalization to the materialization of need in Hungary
and the ways in which this shift led to the replacement of an
old set of maternal identities with a new set of class identities. It will
also explore how, along this transition, the space available for women
to maneuver and secure their own interests contracted. More specifically,
my discussion will begin with an analysis of the welfare apparatus
of the final two decades of state socialism. In this section, I unearth
how motherhood was built into the social policies of the period and
how notions of a "good mother" shaped welfare work. I also illuminate
how this social conception of need enabled female clients to
expand their identities as mothers to protect themselves as wives and
women. This is followed by an analysis of the post-socialist welfare
regime. Here I reveal how social class dislodged motherhood as the
central principle guiding welfare policy and practice. I then show how
this focus on material need led to the stigmatization of the "welfare
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client" and how women resist this by reasserting identities inherited
from the state socialist period—a sense of entitlement based on moth-
erhood.1
The Maternal ist Welfare State: Quantity and
Quality Control of Motherhood
The roots of the Hungarian welfare state can be traced to the mid-
1960s. Before this period, Hungary was structured much like a welfare
society in which the well-being of the population was to be secured
through existing social institutions (Ferge 1979). In such an order,
the targeted social policies associated with a welfare state were deemed
unnecessary—economic planning and work-based provisions were to
meet the population's material needs, while the family was to fulfill
the caring welfare functions. Yet in the mid-1960s this changed, as
the needs of certain social groups were emphasized. A subsystem of
welfare then arose to link eligibility to specific social characteristics.2
Motherhood was one such characteristic. In this period a series of
social policies and welfare agencies emerged to address the "special"
needs of mothers. Because most of these policies were also based on
women's status as workers and included labor force participation as
an eligibility criterion, they were designed to redefine women's roles
as mothers. In fact, many of these policies were created to persuade
Hungarian mothers to exit the labor force for a considerable amount
of time. Thus, Hungarian women were put under the purview of a
welfare apparatus that constituted them primarily as child-rearers and
fostered a sense of entitlement based on motherhood.
The impetus behind the rise of this maternalist welfare apparatus
came from multiple sources. One group of reformers, the demographers,
were concerned with the quantity control of motherhood. After
the re-legalization of abortion in 1956, the Hungarian birthrate plummeted
to record lows. From 1954—1962, the birthrate fell by nearly
50 percent—from 23.0 births per 1,000 in 1954 to 12.3 in 1962
(Goven 1993). Drawing on these data, Hungarian demographers began
to warn of an impending disaster and to urge for population
policies to reverse the trend (Mod 1961; Klinger 1961). These demographic
problems were not unique to Hungary: they also characterized
other Eastern European societies experiencing the effects of industrialization,
urbanization, and high rates of female employment. Yet the
pronatalist path taken in Hungary differed from that of the other
countries in at least two respects. Instead of instituting coercive measures
to force women to have more children, Hungarian demographers
proposed population policies based on incentives for mothers (Klinger
et al. 1984).3
The goal of convincing women to reproduce was to be
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achieved by securing social conditions conducive to raising children.
Connected to this, rather than focusing strictly on childbearing, as
was done in neighboring countries, Hungarian policy makers centered
on child rearing. They proposed a support system that stretched beyond
childbirth itself—a system that encompassed birth payments as
well as benefits extending through the child-rearing process. In this
way, Hungarian demographers advanced a solution to the birthrate
problem based on incentives to support both the birth and the rearing
of children.
These demographic shifts coincided with the rise of economic problems
related to the first wave of Hungarian market reform. While
demographers were contemplating the long-term implications of the
declining birthrate, Hungarian economic reformers were in the process
of designing the New Economic Mechanisms (NEM) introduced in
1968. These reforms provided their own impetus for the rise of a
maternalist welfare apparatus. First, by legalizing certain sectors of
the second economy and giving enterprises more control in their
employment practices, these reforms spawned concerns about possible
labor surpluses and unemployment. This problem was particularly
acute for the regime given that much of its legitimacy rested on its
ability to secure full employment (Ferge 1992; Deacon 1983). The
state therefore had to find a way to siphon off workers from the labor
force without provoking mass unemployment. Social policies designed
to "encourage" Hungarian mothers to exit the labor force and devote
themselves to their children full-time were one way to secure this
downsizing (Horvath 1986; Goven 1993). In addition to alleviating
the side effects of market reform, these policies also facilitated a shift
in the responsibility for social reproduction to individual families.
Through policies targeted at Hungarian mothers, the socialist state
was able to reduce its investment in the social infrastructure, thus
transferring much of this burden onto Hungarian women.
While these demographic and economic problems presented dilemmas
for the socialist state, its distinctly maternalist response was
shaped by a third source, the ascendancy of professional psychology.
The regime could have resolved these problems in a variety of ways,
but it responded by redefining the role of mothers in large part because
of the influence of a new cadre of Hungarian psychologists. After
a ten-year hiatus, the first Hungarian psychology department was
reopened in 1957. This put the first cohort of newly trained psychologists
on the "job market" in the early 1960s. By the mid-1960s, they
had uncovered a host of new childhood disorders and neuroses. In
professional journals and at conferences, they developed a new branch
of "child-rearing psychology" (nevelesi pszicholdgia) that linked these
disorders to familial breakdown (Lieberman 1964; Gegesi 1965). They
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then proposed new measures to rationalize motherhood and the family—social
policies to provide mothers the time and resources to focus
on their children and institutions to "scientize" their child-rearing
practices. Hence, in the late 1960s, the demographic and economic
problems facing the regime converged with the professional appeals
of Hungarian psychologists, paving the way for the emergence of a
maternalist welfare state out of the previous welfare society.
The Maternalist Policy Regime
The centerpiece of this maternalist welfare apparatus was GYES
(Gyermekgondozdsi Segely), a maternity leave grant created in 1967.
When first introduced, the grant provided six months of support
equivalent to the recipient mother's salary and two years of additional
support at a fixed rate.4
In 1969 the grant was extended by six months,
thus providing recipients with a total of three years of support. Employers
were obliged to re-employ recipients upon completion of the
grant. GYES had two primary eligibility requirements. First, it was
offered only to Hungarian mothers. Fathers could apply only if the
mother was absent or too sick to care for the children. As Ferge
(1979,152) put it, the grant was designed to address the special "biological
and psychological needs of motherhood"—needs that Hungarian
fathers presumably did not have. Second, initial GYES regulations
stipulated that recipients had to be employed full-time for the 12
months preceding the birth, or for 12 of the last 18 months prior to
the birth. These regulations articulated the relative emphasis of wage
labor versus motherhood: for every one year of wage labor, women
received three years of subsidies for their mothering. What is more,
with time these requirements were relaxed. By the early 1970s, parttime
workers and students became eligible for the grant. As a result,
the percentage of eligible mothers increased in its first decade—although
only 57 percent of mothers were eligible in 1967, this number
jumped to 74 percent in 1970, 85 percent in 1974, and over 90 percent
in 1978 (KSH 1981).5
Although the scholarly literature on GYES has focused on how the
grant fulfilled the regime's needs (Horvath 1986; Ernst 1986; Gal
1969) or how it solidified a traditional gender division of labor in
the workforce and the home (Markus 1970; Goven 1993; Adamik
1995), GYES also fostered a sense of entitlement in Hungarian women.
It provided women with a legitimate way to stake a claim in the
welfare apparatus. Because the grant was available to a wide crosssection
of Hungarian mothers, it was not a stigmatized form of assistance.
And because the grant was used by diverse groups of women,
albeit for different amounts of time, it was never associated with
specific classes of women. One caseworker put it best when I asked her
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 215
about the social connotations of the grant: "GYES was for mothers. I
took it, my colleagues took it, and the clients took it. How could I
think of it negatively when everyone I knew used it?"
In addition to GYES, a number of shorter child care leave provisions
were established in this period. First there was the "housework holiday"
(hdztartdsi szabadnap), a provision that allowed mothers with
at least two children under age 14 to take one day of unpaid leave a
month. There was also a special system of paid leave for mothers—
women with one child were entitled to two days of fully paid leave
per year, and women with two or more children received five to nine
days of leave annually. The explicit justification for these provisions
was to "protect mothers" and permit them to fulfill the "special
responsibilities that accompany child rearing" (Pongracz 1986, 151).
Finally, Hungarian mothers had access to their own system of sick
leave benefits (tappenz). Women with children under 3 years of age
received 60 days of paid leave per year, and those with children under
6 were entitled to 30 days.6
Like GYES, Hungarian fathers were not
eligible for these benefits unless they were single parents.
During this period, the Hungarian system of family allowances
(csalddi pdtlek) also underwent a number of changes that made them
more accessible to mothers. First established in the 1930s, family
allowances were monthly payments provided to families to offset the
costs of child rearing. Until the mid-1960s, these payments were aimed
at large families with three or more children. They were also paid
directly to those "heads of households" employed full-time in a state
enterprise or cooperative. This meant that in two-parent households,
the father automatically received the allowance attached to his wages.
In 1968, the Ministry of Labor revised the employment requirements
and extended the allowance to students, part-time employees, and
"home workers." It also offered the allowance to families with two
children. As a result, the number of women eligible for the allowance
increased. Then, in 1974, the "head of household" provision was
replaced with a "primary caretaker" clause. This enabled divorced
mothers to receive the allowance directly. It also created an appeal
system by which married women could transfer the allowance to their
wages, thus bypassing the father altogether. Hence, for the first time,
Hungarian mothers became entitled to these allowances on their own.
Although no reliable data exist on how many women utilized this
appeal system, in the two districts of my research, I uncovered twentyfive
appeals from the 1970s. These women couched their appeals in
strikingly similar terms—they were mothers, the ones who cared for
children. Many bolstered their claims by raising complaints about
their husbands' irresponsible behavior, arguing that the men used the
money to finance their "unruly lifestyles." They believed they were
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entitled to support due to their motherhood status. Their belief was
confirmed by the caseworkers assessing their appeals. All of the
twenty-five appeals were approved on similar grounds—mothers
knew what was best for children and needed the resources to secure
their well-being.
This leads to the final component of the maternalist policy regime
of the period—child-rearing assistance programs {Rendkwiili/Rendszeres
Nevelesi SegSly). Created by the Ministry of Education in 1974,
these funds were distributed by caseworkers up to six times a year
on a per-case basis.7
Unlike other maternalist policies, there were no
work requirements attached to these funds. Most lower/working-class
mothers having trouble raising their children were eligible for them,
provided that their difficulties were not the result of their own "mistakes"
(Horvath 1982). In practice, caseworkers had enormous discretion
in allocating these funds and applied their own eligibility criteria
that centered on women's mothering practices.8
Applicants were put
through a battery of tests to prove their domestic competency—tests
that included home visits in which caseworkers evaluated their mothering
skills. In this way, eligibility decisions were rarely made on the
basis of the applicant's material "need." Rather, they were based on
their gender performance and presumed domestic competency.
Together, these four social provisions formed the core of the maternalist
policy regime. These policies trained women how to stake a
claim in the welfare apparatus and to frame their appeals around
their roles as mothers. While many of these policies were premised
on some sort of labor force participation, they elevated women's
identities as mothers to central importance. They taught women that,
as mothers and caretakers, they had "special" needs that entitled them
to specific resources. As I describe below, many Hungarian women
learned a similar lesson in more direct ways through contact with the
state welfare institutions of the era.
Welfare Practices and the Good Mother Mold
The maternalization of need embedded in the social policies of the
last two decades of state socialism filtered down to the institutional
level, shaping the practices of Hungarian welfare agencies. Although
very little scholarly work has been done on state socialist welfare
institutions, a quite extensive network of Hungarian welfare agencies
operated in this period.9
At the center of this structure were local
Gyamhatosag offices designed to ensure the well-being of children.10
Their duties were twofold: they maintained the large bureaucracy
surrounding the family and oversaw the upbringing of children in
their districts.11
Also operating at the local level were Child Guidance
Centers {Nevelesi Tandcsaddk) that addressed children's educational
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 217
and psychological problems. These centers drew in Hungarian women
for child-rearing counseling. In practice, both institutions focused
their work on mothers, thus strengthening and solidifying the maternalist
arm of the Hungarian welfare apparatus.
Established in 1952, Gyamhatosag offices employed four to six
caseworkers, most of whom were women with limited education.12
Underlying their understanding of child protection was a vision of
motherhood that they used to socialize clients. Caseworkers employed
a variety of techniques to evaluate their clients' child-rearing practices,
the most common of which were "domesticity tests." These tests were
reminiscent of those used by U.S. caseworkers in the Progressive and
New Deal Eras to determine clients' eligibility for Mothers' Pensions
and ADC (Gordon 1994; Mink 1995). Administered to a majority of
clients in the period, these Hungarian tests had two components. First,
clients solicited letters from their children's teachers to verify that
they were raising them "properly." Second, welfare workers conducted
home studies (k&rnyezeti tanulmdnyok) to assess their clients'
family lives. On these visits, they meticulously documented clients'
domestic practices: they recorded how clients furnished their homes,
from furniture styles to types of bedding; they examined their cleaning
skills; they tested their cooking ability by checking cabinets and asking
clients how to prepare certain dishes;13
and they observed how thenclients
interacted with their children. Welfare workers also interrogated
neighbors for information on clients' lifestyles and child-rearing
patterns.
Women's performances on these tests then shaped their institutional
trajectories. Clients who came out of these investigations with high
marks fared much better in this agency. These marks were the single
most important factor determining who received child-rearing assistance
(Horvath 1982). They overrode all evidence of material need;
caseworkers consistently denied aid to women they considered "careless"
or "unruly" mothers. Caseworkers also spent more time assisting
women they believed to be "good mothers." They were more likely
to go out of their way to track down a "deadbeat dad" or to help
secure an apartment for those women who fit their criteria of good
mothers. Caseworkers were also more apt to bend the rules for such
women—extending their maternity leave grants and waiving deadlines
for them. In this way, these state actors taught women that they could
"butter up the bureaucratic machine" by fitting into a particular mold
of mother.
State actors also transmitted this message to women by negative
example. During the last two decades of state socialism, the number
of Hungarian children put under state care rose steadily.14
Like most
aspects of their work, caseworkers had discretion in deciding when
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children should be taken from their homes (Hanak 1983; Domszky
1994). Although their grounds for institutionalization varied, one
thread ran through all of them—the mothers had been deemed "in-
competent."15
Most of them had alcohol problems; a majority were
victims of domestic violence; many also had mental health problems.
Because caseworkers believed these issues fell outside their sphere
of influence, they never addressed them. Instead, they labeled these
mothers "unfit" and ordered them to become better mothers. As a
caseworker said when I asked about a domestic violence case: "This
was not my job. It was for the woman to take care of. I protected
the child. If the mother didn't do that, I gave the child to someone who
did." Once again, the focus was on women's domestic competency—a
focus that taught women that their institutional fate depended on
their ability to demonstrate "proper" gender practices.
This singular focus on clients' mothering skills had interesting implications
for different groups of female clients. One might expect that
the caseworkers' preoccupation with domestic competency would lead
to clear class differences in treatment. But because caseworkers defined
domestic competency in terms of a woman's housekeeping, cooking,
and decorating skills, their notion of a "good mother" ended up
cutting across class divisions. Due to the absence of both labor-saving
devices and a domestic service sector, middle-class and professional
women did not necessarily have an advantage in these tests. In fact,
many of those clients deemed "good mothers" were working-class
women who exhibited impeccable gender practices—women who
were commended for rising above difficult material conditions to take
care of their families "properly." Moreover, it was fairly common
for professional women to be scolded for not devoting enough time
to domestic upkeep.16
Hence, because caseworkers evaluated their
female clients' domestic training and competency, the good/bad
mother distinction did not fall along clear class lines. Yet it did correlate
quite closely with race. Caseworkers' criteria for evaluating their
clients had consistently negative effects on Romani, or gypsy, clients.17
Gyamhat6sag caseworkers were uniformly intolerant of cultural differences
in mothering practices. They faulted Romani women for not
living up to their standards of cleanliness, decor, and culinary taste.
They were also insensitive to the non-nuclear family models of their
Romani clients, frequently exhibiting disgust at households in which
numerous extended kin resided or where two or more children slept
in one bed. As a result, Romani women were far more likely to be
pathologized and stigmatized as "bad mothers."
Like the Gyamhatosag, the Child Guidance Centers of the period
also focused their work on the mothering practices of Hungarian
women. Created in 1968 by a new cohort of professional psycholo-
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary •> 219
gists, these agencies were staffed by three to seven "family experts,"
most of whom were well-educated women.18
Guided by child development
models and psychoanalytic theories of family life, these psychologists
set out to treat childhood disorders and improve child-rearing
methods. These offices came in where the Gyamhatosag left off, but
their approach was less punitive and more educative than the Gyamhatosag's.
Like child welfare workers, these state actors also targeted
women. They believed in child rearing by design, a scientific mode
of raising children with clear prescriptions for Hungarian mothers.
The counseling conducted in these centers fell into three categories:
educational counseling to improve children's school performance; behavior
counseling to treat children who acted out; and psychological
counseling to guide children to healthy resolutions of their conflicts
(Horanyi 1985). Counselors met with the children a few times a
month and updated mothers after each visit. In these briefing sessions,
psychologists pulled mothers into the counseling process by linking
children's problems to their mothers. Mothers of children with educational
difficulties were routinely questioned about their involvement
in their children's education; those who devoted less than an hour a
day to their kids' schooling were scolded. Counselors also regulated
the quantity and quality of time mothers spent with children who
had behavioral problems, imposing time formulas on their interactions
and rules for how they should proceed. No such rules applied to
Hungarian fathers; they were absent from the picture.
This focus on the mother was particularly salient in the offices'
psychological work with children. To uncover children's psyches,
psychologists employed Rorschach tests, Thematic Aptitude Tests
(TAT), and "world games" (Merei 1974). Psychologists then analyzed
the results to unearth the psychodynamic issues plaguing the children
(Tunkli 1975). Due to the strong influence of psychoanalysis on their
work, their interpretations centered on dilemmas rooted in the Oedipal
stage—castration anxiety, penis envy, and gender identity confusion.19
As a prominent child psychologist explained to me: "Identification
was a big problem in Hungary, where we had overprotective mothers
and absent fathers. Boys never learned to identify with their fathers
and mothers never let them separate. So we got the boys, years later,
with problems related to the unresolved Oedipal stage." So what then
did they do? They taught the mothers how to let go of their sons.
"This was a struggle," another psychologist revealed. "Mothers were
so wrapped up in their sons, they couldn't break. I had to convince
them it was unhealthy. It took years for some to understand; most
never did." Hungarian fathers, who also had not fulfilled their Oedipal
expectations, were absent from the equation.
Finally, family experts also initiated counseling with Hungarian
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mothers themselves. Each center employed at least one "family caretaker"
(csaldd gondozd) to conduct home visits. When warranted,
psychologists would then instigate counseling with the mothers.20
Time management was the most common issue addressed in this counseling.
Psychologists often described mothers as "overworked" and
"overburdened," and hence taught them how to spend more time with
their children. Other mothers received communication training to teach
them how to speak effectively to their children. For instance, in one
1970 case, a woman was sent to a counselor by her son's teacher.
After a home visit, the family caretaker reported that the woman
"arrived home too exhausted to talk to her son." The counselor then
instructed her to put a clock on the table every night and speak to
the boy for at least an hour. The family caretaker paid follow up
visits to make sure she adjusted her mothering practices accordingly.
As with the Gyamhatosag, the criteria used by family experts had
interesting class and racial implications. Again, one might assume
that middle-class women had an advantage given the complex psychological
models and formulas adhered to by family experts. And although
some middle-class women did mobilize their cultural and
educational capital to shape counselors' evaluations of them, clients
were not judged primarily on their ability to speak the language of
psychology or time management. Rather, they were assessed according
to their willingness to devote time and energy to their children. In
practice, this undercut any advantage that middle class women may
have had. Family experts regularly complained that their middle class
clients worked too hard and refused to make sacrifices for their families.
They also faulted these women for being too "careerist" to spend
time on GYES or work part-time. Yet women with less demanding jobs
were frequently applauded for devoting themselves to their families or
for taking time off to resolve their children's problems. At the same
time, these psychologists' standards did have consistently negative
effects on Romani women, who were labeled incompetent mothers.
Those who did not spend enough one-on-one, "quality" time with
their kids were said to be "uncaring"; those who physically reprimanded
their kids were deemed "brutal"; and those who were illiterate
and thus unable to tutor their children were called "ineffective."
Hence, while the family experts' model of "good mothering" transcended
class divisions, it fell neatly along racial lines.
Expanding the Confines of the Maternal:
"Mothers Are Wives and Women Too"
The maternalism embedded in the Hungarian welfare apparatus
was a mixed blessing for female clients. On the one hand, it accorded
them financial and institutional resources. It also provided them with
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a strong sense of entitlement, a channel through which they could
secure state assistance. On the other hand, this welfare regime placed
their mothering practices under scrutiny and subjected them to higher
levels of surveillance. For those who did not fit into prescribed models
of domesticity, it led to the pathologization of their mothering practices.
Finally, by positioning them primarily as mothers, this regime
effectively obscured women's other identities, needs, and desires. By
reducing women to mothers, the welfare apparatus ignored the multitude
of issues impinging on the lives of Hungarian women.
Many female clients seemed quite aware of these mixed consequences.
As a result, they struggled to carve out spaces for themselves
within this regime and to use its positive aspects to counteract the
negatives. One way they did this was to mobilize the resources they
accrued from the regime in their domestic power struggles. In doing
so, they extended their recognized identities as mothers to protect
themselves as wives. Gyamhatosag clients graced with the "good
mother" label were particularly successful at this. Many of them
appropriated the financial resources they received from this office to
change their husbands' treatment of them. For instance, in 1974, one
female client threatened her husband with transferring the family
allowance to her name. She had her caseworker write a letter approving
the transfer—a letter she then showed her husband when he drank
heavily. Other women used the home visits accompanying child-rearing
assistance to achieve this end. In one 1975 case, a female client
told her caseworker about the obscenities her husband used, how
he often called her a "whore" (kurva). On subsequent visits, the
caseworker inquired about it and scolded the man for his language.
Then there was a 1978 case in which a woman informed her caseworker
that she had to apply for assistance because her husband
refused to work hard. On later visits, the welfare worker lectured him
about his "laziness" and pressured him to work more. In this way,
female clients used their caseworkers as instruments to shape and
regulate male behavior.
Women who had been deemed "problematic" mothers adhered to
a similar strategy. Many of them neutralized the control of their
caseworkers and husbands by playing them off against each other.
Similar to the way in which Gordon (1988) describes American women
using caseworkers to combat the violence and abuse they experienced
as wives, Hungarian clients also attempted to redirect the punitive
arm of the state onto their husbands. For example, one client whose
children were institutionalized in 1970 continued to initiate home
visits; she used these visits to provide evidence of domestic violence
and to suggest that her husband be put in state care instead. Another
client who applied for child-rearing assistance in 1974 left wine bottles
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lined up in front of her door. When her caseworker tripped over the
bottles, the client told her about her husband's drinking and how it
inhibited her from keeping an "orderly house." Clients also used the
coercive arm of the welfare state to control their husbands. Many
clients asked for copies of home visit reports to show their spouses—
"Look at what the tandcs said about us," a woman exclaimed to her
husband in 1980. Others used the threat of state care to force men
to shape up. In 1969, one client asked that her son be temporarily
institutionalized to prove to her husband that his abusive behavior
had "consequences." In these ways, clients forced state actors to link
their problems to their experiences as wives and to provide help
resolving them.
Clients connected to the Child Guidance Centers also utilized its
educative approach to protect their interests as wives. Some used their
involvement in their children's counseling to alter the division of labor
in the home; they mobilized the time formulas imposed on them to
devote more energy to their children and less to household tasks.21
Other clients used counselors to make more fundamental changes
in their families by linking their children's problems to the family
environment. "Identification problems," was what one Romani
woman exclaimed in 1970 in response to her counselor's representation
of her son's Oedipal issues. "His father is never at home and
when he is, he is drunk." In a 1974 case, one mother resisted her
counselor's suggestion that she leave work early to take her son to
sports programs in order to vent his aggression. Whenever the idea
was raised, she reminded the counselor that her husband was a military
man who always told their son he was "weak," thus hinting that his
hegemonic masculinity was the source of the problem. Still others
drew counselors into their family dynamics. Many clients were divorced
women who shared flats with their ex-husbands. These domestic
arrangements led to all sorts of conflicts—disputes that women
often used psychologists to resolve. In one 1972 case, a mother had
her counselor apply time regulations in her home, determining who
could use what room when. And, in a 1975 case, a woman got her
ex-husband's new wife removed from their flat by convincing the
psychologist that her son's bed-wetting and night sweats were caused
by the stepmother's disruptive presence.
Finally, in addition to expanding the confines of the maternal to
protect themselves as wives, female clients also raised needs they had
as women. They often drew counselors into their own emotional lives,
thus transforming child-rearing counseling into personal therapy.
Many of them spoke of feeling isolated. Others revealed serious bouts
with depression. Quite often these feelings surfaced in their children's
psychological counseling as mothers linked their own loneliness to
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their children's behavior problems. Similar issues arose in time management
counseling. Clients frequently shifted the focus of this training
to their conflicts between work and home. They spoke of the difficulties
of juggling all their responsibilities and discussed how this led to
feelings of failure. In doing so, clients created social relationships to
mitigate their own isolation and engaged state actors in the conflicts
they experienced as women. By the 1980s, so many women had
raised these issues that psychologists named the symptoms the "GYES
Syndrome" (Somlai 1994).
Through all of these different tactics, female clients used their status
as mothers to their advantage. By forcing state actors to acknowledge
the larger context in which they mothered, these clients advanced a
broader definition of their needs as wives. By utilizing the resources
of this welfare apparatus in their domestic struggles, they found ways
to meet these other needs. And by drawing state actors into their
interpersonal lives, they formed social bonds to counter the isolation
often associated with mothering. Within this maternalist welfare regime,
women developed a repertoire of strategies to protect themselves
in their everyday lives—a repertoire they soon found themselves defending
once this welfare regime changed.
The Liberal Welfare State:
Targeting and Treating the "Needy"
The mid-1980s was another turning point in the development of
the Hungarian welfare state. At this juncture, the Hungarian welfare
apparatus began to shift focus from the maternal to the material.
As in the late 1960s, this restructuring was an outgrowth of social,
economic, and professional forces. First, beginning in the late 1970s,
there was a marked increase in social inequality and poverty. As
Szelenyi and Manchin (1987) argue, a dual system of stratification
began to develop—at the top were new entrepreneurial classes with
access to second-economy goods, services, and incomes, whereas at
the bottom were large groups of Hungarians without the skills or
resources to secure second-economy incomes. The latter group, constituting
over 30 percent of the population, experienced real pauperization
in this period. New social inequalities also began to surface
among Hungarian families, as female-headed households and urban
families with children began slipping into poverty throughout the
early 1980s (Ferge 1987; Szalai 1991). These patterns of social differentiation
have only intensified in the post-1989 period. What was
once a widening gap between social classes has become a yawning
chasm in the last decade. Official unemployment increased from 0.3
percent in 1987 to over 11 percent in 1993, and concurrently the
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proportion of Hungarians living at or below the subsistence level
skyrocketed from 8 percent in 1987 to 16 percent in 1992 to 32
percent in 1994 (Ferge 1996; Andorka 1996).
Hungarian policy makers could have responded to these social
problems in a variety of ways. As in the 1960s, the path they took
was shaped by the ascendancy of professional groups, this time of
sociologists and liberal economists. Sociologists were the first to exert
their "expertise" in this area. They were the ones to bring the problem
of poverty to the fore in the state socialist period—through studies
of working-class and Romani communities, sociologists forced a recognition
of the poverty plaguing large sectors of the population. Based
on the practical experiences of poor-relief agencies like SZETA, sociologists
uncovered how these groups were falling through cracks in the
system, with their social problems going unresolved. Sociologists then
began to publish articles and research reports that faulted the existing
welfare regime for not addressing these problems and called for its
reform (Ferge 1982 and 1987). First and foremost, they proposed
more differentiated policies designed to meet the material needs of
specific groups (Ferge and Szalai 1985). They also sought to create a
network of new institutions, to be staffed from within their ranks,
that would treat these needs in direct and immediate ways (Gosztonyi
1993; Reves 1993). In effect, they called for a more discretionary and
targeted welfare state—and they did so in the name of the impoverished
classes.22
Almost paradoxically, these sociologists' appeals resonated with
the reform agenda of liberal economists. Similar to their counterparts
in the 1960s, these Hungarian economists made a link between social
and economic policy. But although earlier reformers used maternalist
policies to alleviate economic problems, this new generation of economists
viewed such policies as economically debilitating. Well versed
in liberal economic theory and well aware of IMF and World Bank
demands, these economists saw the "needs" of the Hungarian economy
as antithetical to the prevailing welfare model and claimed it
subjected the state to grandiose soft budget constraints (Kornai 1994).
As has occurred in Western Europe and Scandinavia, these economists
then pushed to narrow eligibility criteria away from "encompassing"
categories like motherhood to more "exclusive" ones like material
need.23
So although these economists launched their attack in the
name of the economy rather than social class, they joined sociologists
to argue that the system "needed" the means-tested policies of a
discretionary welfare state.
Hence, in the mid-1980s, the social problems facing the state converged
with the professional appeals of sociologists and economists
to pave the way for the emergence of a new welfare regime. As in the
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1960s, this convergence prompted a new social conception of need.
This time the architecture of need was etched out on the terrain of
class. Once organized around a series of maternal entitlements, the
Hungarian welfare apparatus became structured around targeted policies
for the poor and "needy." As means-testing became the main
method for distributing benefits, material need became a prerequisite
for state assistance; as welfare agencies were oriented toward poor
relief, clients' income determined how and whether they were dealt
with by the welfare system. Hungarian women were then repositioned
in the welfare apparatus and their old maternal identities were replaced
by new class identities and stigmas.
Welfare Policies: From Maternal to Material Need
The first sign of this shift from the maternal to the material occurred
with the 1985 GYES reforms that linked maternity leave payments to
income. Since its inception, GYES had consisted of flat-rate payments
given to all mothers regardless of their income. This flat-rate system
was disadvantageous to middle-class and professional women whose
salaries were significantly higher than the universal payments. As a
result, these women tended to stay on GYES for shorter periods of
time than other classes of women. In their poverty studies, many
sociologists linked these use patterns to the rising inequalities among
Hungarian families, arguing that they widened the social distance
between middle, working, and lower-class families (Ferge 1987; Szalai
1991). To rectify this, GYES was broken into three separate provisions
in 1985—maternity leave grants (Gyermekdgyi Seg£ly) that ran for 6
months after childbirth; the child care grant (Gyermekgondozdsi Dijl
GYED) that extended for 18 additional months at 75 percent of the
mother's previous salary; and child care assistance (Gyermekgondozdsi
Sege'ly/GYES) that ran for another 6 months at a flat rate. By
linking maternity leave payments to the mother's previous salary, the
goal was to entice middle-class women to use the grant, thus flattening
out the class differences associated with it.24
Hence, for the first time
since its creation, class became a central principle structuring the
Hungarian maternity leave system.
Whereas these GYES reforms sought to increase middle-class women's
usage, all of the other policy reforms in this period were designed
to exclude the middle class and to target "needy" classes of Hungarians.
The first set of policies to undergo this kind of reform were the
local-level child-rearing assistance programs. Beginning in the mid-
1980s, these schemes were subjected to stricter income formulas and
means-tests. All applicants for these funds were required to submit
official income documentation from their employers, stating the exact
amount of their monthly salaries. They also had to report all other
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assets, including bank statements of their savings and accounts of
additional valuable items. Home visitors were deployed to check up
on their accounting and to report any discrepancies to caseworkers.
Caseworkers then calculated the overall resources at the applicants'
disposal. Only those applicants whose monthly income fell below the
subsistence level were eligible for the funds. These regulations applied
to clients seeking occasional (Rendkivuli Nevelisi Segily) and regularized
assistance (Rendszeres NevelSsi Segely). And they applied to those
clients who caseworkers found "sympathetic" as well as those they
considered "problematic" mothers.
Interestingly, the actual number of Hungarians receiving childrearing
assistance soared during this period. Table 1 provides nationallevel
data on this increase. Whereas these numbers are a reflection of
the socioeconomic changes of the period, they are also indicative of
how discretionary the allocation of these funds had been in the previous
decade. Once domesticity tests were replaced by means-tests,
caseworkers ended up distributing more of this assistance.
Hungarian welfare policy also took on a more explicit class character
with the decentralization of the funding for welfare assistance.
The 1990 Local Government Act and the 1992 Social Act restructured
the relationship between the national and local governments, effectively
shifting much of the burden for welfare funding from the former
to the latter. The national government now provides local governments
with "block grants" to cover a portion of their welfare expenditures.
The amount of these transfers is based on a combination of
factors, including the number of inhabitants in a district and the taxes
paid by local residents (Szalai and Nemenyi 1993). This bred variation
among locales in the level of assistance provided to clients; the smaller,
wealthier districts offered more extensive support to their residents
(Harcsa 1995). In Budapest, districts differed in the number of times
Table 1. Child-Rearing Assistance Cases
1980
1983
1985
1987
1990
1993
Regularized Assistance
11,342
19,689
27,848
39,081
101,033
289,000
Occasional Assistance
—
120,309
194,997
375,243
2,341,000
Sources: MQvelSdfcsi Minisztferium 1988; Szalai and Nfeminyi
1993; Ferge 1995, 1996.
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 227
clients could receive child-rearing assistance. They also varied according
to the types of programs available to clients. Some districts created
special funds for large, impoverished families; others offered support
schemes for poor families to offset price increases; and still others
instituted emergency programs for clients who could not afford medicine,
clothing, or school meals. These new programs all shared one
important feature: they were all means-tested and based solely on
material need.
This movement towards the targeting of the "needy" culminated
in 1995 with the introduction of the Bokros csomag. After almost a
year of parliamentary debate and constitutional court review, this
plan went into effect in 1996 and dismantled the remaining maternalist
social policies. In the form passed by the Hungarian government, the
Bokros plan made two major changes to the welfare system. First, it
subjected all family allowances to income-tests and thus made them
available to certain classes of Hungarian families. In particular, the
plan stipulated that only those families with monthly incomes below
19,500 fts per person were eligible for an allowance. Because the
subsistence level lies at approximately 18,800 fts per person and the
average monthly income is 18,000-20,000 fts, large sectors of the
middle class were cut from the allowance.25
Second, the plan also restructured the system of child-care grants.
These changes were the most contested component of the plan—the
Hungarian constitutional court was flooded with appeals from politicians
and Hungarian mothers questioning the program's constitutionality.
By early 1996, the court deemed these changes constitutional and
they went into effect on April 15, 1996. These reforms abolished
GYED and subjected GYES to income-tests. Once entitled to 3 years
of support, Hungarian women are now granted 24 weeks of maternity
leave. Only those women whose income fell below the family allowance
cutoff of 19,500 fts per person were eligible for an additional
year of support at a fixed rate. By subjecting GYES to these meanstests,
the plan cut many middle-class mothers from the grant.
Yet this reform package did more than limit the scope of these
policies. It also applied a new definition of need to national-level
policies—a definition that gave preference to class rather than motherhood.
This was articulated explicitly in the public debate spawned
by the reform package. Supporters of the plan frequently used class
arguments to justify it. The day the package was announced, Prime
Minister Horn stated that Hungary was now divided by class and this
necessitated new policies aimed at those in need. Other government
officials made similar claims, drawing on examples of wealthy women
who received state assistance. As female MP Szolnoki Andrea put it,
"Two well-paid doctors do not deserve a family allowance. In their
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budget it is a drop in the ocean. But poor parents should receive more
support. This differentiation is necessary" (Kertesz 1995). Or, as one
local government official explained to me, "It is a simple principle.
Give to the poor and not to the rich. This is basic. But because of
our socialist past, we have a hard time understanding it. We will
learn."
In the process, many Hungarian women will learn a lesson of their
own. These reforms are teaching women that motherhood alone does
not entitle them to state support. Women's claims to state assistance
can no longer be based solely on their contributions as mothers; they
must now be framed in terms of their material needs. Thus, these
reforms are socializing women that they will be recognized by the
welfare state primarily as "needy" individuals. Yet for many female
clients this is not a new message. Rather, it is a message they have
received in more direct ways through contact with the welfare agencies
of the period.
Welfare Practices: Testing and Training the Needy
The first institutional outcome of the sociologists' attempts to revamp
the Hungarian welfare apparatus occurred in 1985 when the
Ministry of Education established twelve Family Support Services
(Csaldd Segito Szolgaldtok) to be run on a trial basis. By 1991 over
a hundred centers were operating in Hungary, and twenty in Budapest
alone (Gosztanyi 1993). The entrance of these agencies immediately
prompted a reorganization in the institutional division of labor. After
a series of professional battles, most Child Guidance Centers began
to focus only on children. They transferred their family caretakers
and clients with domestic problems to Family Support Services or the
Gyamhat6sag. Thus, the institutional welfare apparatus bifurcated
once again, this time between educative Family Support Centers and
the punitive Gyamhatosag. Yet, despite their distinct orientations,
both institutions centered on their clients' material lives, thus replacing
the earlier maternalization of need with its materialization.
Within local Gyamhatosag offices, this period was also marked by
internal changes in the organization of welfare work. In the late 1980s,
the number of workers employed in these offices increased by nearly
50 percent (MQvelSdesi Miniszterium 1988). Local governments then
instituted new procedures for the home visits conducted by welfare
workers. They standardized these visits by setting limits on the number
required for different kinds of cases. They also created fixed questionnaires
workers used on these visits. In doing so, they altered the
focus of these investigations. Once designed to assess clients' domestic
practices, these investigations became tools for surveying their mate-
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 229
rial lives. The questions related to clients' cooking and cleaning skills
were removed and replaced by new questions designed to gauge their
level of material need. Home visitors were asked to determine the
cost and overall "comfort level" of applicants' flats; to assess the
value of their furniture; to list all of their electronic and household
appliances; and to note if they had a telephone or an automobile.
These questionnaires were closed-ended, composed of multiple choice
questions and only a small space for comments on the applicant. This
left welfare workers less room for their old discretionary practices
and reflections on clients' domestic competency.
Like the old domesticity tests, these new poverty tests determined
clients' institutional fate. These tests not only shaped how clients were
treated, they determined whether they were dealt with at all by these
offices. Caseworkers used these tests to forge out their clientele; only
those women who could demonstrate material "need" became clients.
Women found to be living in stable financial circumstances were
routinely shuffled out of the office. "I am sorry, I cannot help you," a
caseworker once told a woman seeking advice on her son's delinquent
behavior. "You have the resources to deal with the problem, but
maybe you can try a probation officer." Others were ignored once
they were found to be financially secure. For instance, in 1994, one
woman was referred to the office by her son's teacher. On our way
to visit the mother, the caseworker told me all about the woman's
mental problems and inability to get her son to school regularly. The
caseworker was prepared to make a serious intervention—until we
reached the home. Although we found the mother bedridden and
suffering emotionally, she lived in a five-room, well-furnished flat in
one of the best areas of the city. After discovering how large her
disability pension was, the caseworker dropped the case. When I asked
her about this change in attitude, she responded, "I don't have time
for that. She can pay someone to take care of her son if she needs to.
Please, I have clients who can't even feed their kids."
Caseworkers articulated a similar message through the kinds of
assistance offered to those women who actually became clients. Overall,
these state actors dealt with clients in one of two ways. In an
overwhelming majority of cases> they distributed financial assistance.
Once used as a reward for "good" mothers, child-rearing funds became
the main way caseworkers approached their clientele—they simply
allocated aid to their clients and assumed this would solve the
problem. In the two districts of my research, the proportion of clients
receiving child-rearing assistance increased dramatically in the past
decade. Table 2 has the data for one of these districts. As these data
show, by 1992, a large majority of clients in this office were recipients
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230 • Haney
Table 2. Xth District Assistance Cases
Number of Cases Percentage of Cases (%)
1985
1989
1991
1992
384
1,070
3,884
5,010
8
22
61
71
Source: KSH 1985, 1989, 1991, 1992.
of child-rearing assistance. Put another way, three out of four Hungarians
connected to this office had been defined as "needy" or materially
deprived.
In addition to the distribution of child-rearing assistance, caseworkers
continued to place large numbers of children in state care. Once
used to punish "incompetent" mothers, institutionalization became
the central way caseworkers dealt with clients with severe material
problems. Although the overall number of Hungarian children placed
in state care has remained steady since the mid-1980s, the grounds for
institutionalization have changed (MQvelSdesi Miniszterium 1988).
Poverty has become the main justification used to remove children
from their homes. In the many cases I reviewed from this period, I
uncovered very few references to clients' mothering practices. Instead,
a new thread ran through these cases—women were deemed incapable
of providing basic necessities for their children. This is corroborated
by statistical data collected by these institutions. In 1984,29 percent of
the children placed in state care were said to be materially (anyagilag)
endangered; by 1992, this number had increased to 87 percent.
This shift in focus from the clients' mothering practices to their
material lives gave rise to a new discourse and imagery surrounding
the "welfare client." Caseworkers now adhered to an extremely condescending
tone when speaking or writing about their clientele. Once
reserved for Romani women, the image of the "welfare cheat" loomed
over all Gyamhatosag clients. "Clients are different today," one older
caseworker revealed in an interview. "They lie, cheat and steal. Even
the Hungarians do this now. Terrible."26
These agencies had institutional
archives of stories to support this view: Home visitors who
found electronics and appliances hiding in closets; caseworkers who
discovered forged income documents; and clients who came to the
office covered with expensive jewelry. Caseworkers also developed a
common language to discuss their clients, frequently calling them lazy
(lusta), uncultured (kulturdlatlan), simple [egyszerU] and disorderly
(rendetlen). They then used these defects to explain client poverty. A
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 231
few caseworkers even used animal metaphors to describe their clients,
referring to them as cattle and pigs. One office kept air freshener by
the entrance to get rid of the "sickening smell" of poverty. In effect,
their focus on individual need gave rise to a preoccupation with
individual defect; their materialization of need led to the pathologizing
of the welfare client.
In many ways, local Family Support Services were designed to
counter such practices. Staffed by a new cadre of young, well-educated
social workers, these institutions defined themselves in opposition to
the Gyamhatosag. The social workers employed in these offices saw
their job as client advocacy; they set out to help clients curb their
poverty and navigate through the maze of new welfare regulations.
While these social workers did indeed take a less punitive approach,
they also adhered to a narrow conception of their clients' needs and
constituted them as "needy" individuals.
More specifically, one form of assistance social workers provided
to clients was to act as their mediators with other state bodies. All
of their clients came to them voluntarily, often on a walk-in basis.
New clients were inevitably greeted with a litany of questions about
their income and work history. Social workers then made the necessary
calculations to determine if they were eligible for additional state
benefits. If so, they referred clients to the appropriate offices. More
common were clients who had been denied some form of state support.
Here social workers embarked on what can best be termed "client
packaging." In effect, they taught clients how to represent themselves
to secure state assistance. Many social workers conducted role plays
with their clients. "Now pretend I am an assistance officer. How
would you explain your problem to me?" In these exercises, social
workers critiqued clients' language and tone of voice. "Anger will not
work," one social worker told a Romani client. "They don't like that
over there." Social workers also told their clients what to emphasize
when framing their appeals. "Don't talk about the fights with your
husband," one male social worker advised a client. "Just tell them
that your husband lost his job and you have no heat." Hence, in their
"advocacy" work, these social workers taught clients how to couch
their appeals in new ways, how to appear sympathetic as well as
needy.
Social workers transmitted a similar message through their distribution
of the office's resources. Family Services had emergency funds,
food, and clothing. Few formal rules guided the allocation of these
funds; clients were not entitled to any of them (Katona and Szabo
1992). Rather, they had to convince social workers that they deserved
these resources. In effect, clients had to beg for them. Material need
was the most important factor determining who received these bene-
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232 • Haney
fits. While many female clients staked a claim to these funds on their
children's behalf, they were denied unless they mustered up evidence
of material need. "I have no money for your son's camp," a social
worker told her client. "Ask your ex-husband. My records show that
he is still employed." Other women couched their appeals in terms
of domestic problems. They too were regularly rejected. One woman
asked a social worker for money to fix a window her husband had
thrown a television out of in a drunken rage. She was denied. As her
social worker told me, "Excuse me, but if they can afford a television,
they must have the money to fix the window!" Again, only the materially
"needy" were worthy of support.
Although these kinds of short-term interactions constituted the
bulk of their work, social workers also had small caseloads of clients
they met on a regular basis. In these cases, social workers treated
their clients' ongoing, recurring problems. A number of clients were
the beneficiaries of "resource management" counseling. "Some clients
don't realize they are poor," a social worker once explained to me.
"They spend money like they had jobs. Then they come in here when
they run out (of money)." So social workers taught these clients to
"economize" and "budget," showing them how to calculate their
monthly expenses and to shop for discounted products. Others were
counseled about changing their lifestyles. Clients with alcohol problems
were routinely lectured about its connection to poverty. "How
many forints do you spend on palinka?" a social worker once asked
a client. "Imagine, if you had that money, you would not be here."
This lifestyle counseling was particularly salient in one of these offices
that received funding from the Catholic Church.27
Here social workers
often tried to instill new "values for living" in their clients—such as
morality, piety, and frugality. As one of them put it, "If more clients
lived like this, they would not be in such terrible conditions."
In this way, the approach taken by these social workers echoed
that of Gyamhatosag welfare workers. Like their counterparts, social
workers materialized their clients' needs. Although their practices did
not have the same hostile tone, social workers did locate the source of
clients' problems in the latter's behavior and lifestyles. Social workers
taught clients that if they represented themselves better or lived more
effectively, they could improve their situation, thus making a similar
connection between individual need and individual defect.
"But We Are Still Mothers"
These changes in the Hungarian welfare apparatus were not carried
out on groups of docile, passive, female clients. Rather, they were
done to women with developed opinions about their needs. In their
eyes, the welfare changes were threatening and oppressive. They criti-
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 233
cized the reforms on numerous grounds. Many female clients mourned
the loss of their previous sense of maternal entitlement. They often
complained about having to beg for state assistance. When they submitted
income documentation, they commented on how this should
not be of concern to caseworkers. "Why do you need evidence of my
mother's pension?" one young woman asked a caseworker. "Isn't it
enough that I am a single mother with two kids?" During home visits,
clients frequently demanded that caseworkers justify inquiries into
the value of their household items. Others found such investigations
degrading. Female clients from the Family Support Services often told
me that they dreaded coming to these offices because it made them
feel "embarrassed" and "ashamed." As a female client once said to
her friend as they left the Gyamhatosag, "I always feel dirty here.
They are so despising."
A few clients also offered politically astute analyses of the longterm
effects of this materialization of need. These clients viewed the
welfare changes negatively because they felt that the changes jeopardized
future funding; they claimed the government was more apt to
cut programs destined for the poor. And in fact, in 1994, one district
reduced the amount of child-rearing assistance. A number of clients
immediately interpreted this as proof of the government's disregard
for policies supporting the poor. One client made this argument to
me the day the Boleros reforms were introduced. When she learned I
was from the United States, she asked about the welfare reforms
underway in the United States because she had heard they were similar
to the Boleros plan. I then explained how they were different—that
these were cuts in the already-targeted AFDC program and that they
paled in comparison to those under attack in Hungary. She quickly
corrected me: "You pay attention. This was the first step. Then they
will cut more. It will not be so different."
Other female clients seemed most troubled by their loss of institutional
resources. This was particularly true of Gyamhatosag clients
who had come to rely on caseworkers to help with their domestic
struggles. During home visits, clients often became disgruntled by
welfare workers' indifference to their familial problems. As they told
stories of domestic turmoil to the blank, uninterested faces of caseworkers,
they became frustrated. "Did you hear me!" one Romani
woman exclaimed as her caseworker measured the size of her flat. "I
said that he goes to those prostitutes on Rakoczi square. This is
dangerous for the little one, with all the diseases. Are you writing this
down?" In another case, a female client became furious when she got
no response to accounts of her husband's abuse. When we arrived at
her flat, she was cleaning and her husband was sleeping. As the welfare
worker made her usual calculations, the client whispered stories of
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234 • Haney
the man's heavy drinking and violence. When the caseworker interrupted
her to ask if she had a car, the woman began yelling about
how no one cared and the Gyamhatosag was no good. The caseworker
responded that she was assessing her eligibility for child-rearing support,
not the quality of her marriage. As we left, the woman returned
to her cleaning with a defeated look on her face.
Due to their loss of entitlement and institutional resources, many
female clients deemed the new welfare regime dangerous and threatening;
they experienced it as narrowing their room to maneuver in their
everyday lives. In response, they reasserted the one sense of entitlement
they knew—a sense of entitlement based on motherhood. Although
this positioning was not without limitations, they had learned to use
it to their advantage by expanding their identities as mothers to protect
their interests as wives and women. In the post-socialist period, they
then tried to salvage this identity. Women had numerous ways of
achieving this. Prior to the Boleros plan, one common tactic was to
extend the entitlement they accrued from GYES to other areas, to
become eligible for other forms of state support. For instance, when
they applied for child-rearing assistance, those clients who were on
GYES often made a big fuss about it. They repeated it over and over
to caseworkers, in the hopes that it would help their applications.
Others grounded their appeals in terms of GYES, arguing that they
needed support due to lost wages. When one client's application was
rejected, she even argued that women on GYES should not be subjected
to the same means-tests because they had chosen not to work on their
"children's behalf." This use of GYES was particularly salient in
Family Support Centers. Here many women pleaded for help on the
basis of GYES—if the government was willing to support them to
care for their children, couldn't social workers help out too?
Interestingly, some clients used GYES to counter the condescending
approach of caseworkers. They appropriated GYES as a shield to
defend themselves against stigmatization. Clients often claimed that
their poverty was a temporary condition, the result of GYES. "We
were in a good material situation before the baby," one client remarked,
"but since then we have fallen." They were not lazy, simple,
or disorderly; they were committed mothers willing to live in difficult
conditions to be with their children. Female clients used a different
tone of voice when speaking of GYES. When caseworkers quizzed
them about their material lives in the large collective offices, clients
tended to whisper while they listed the types of poor relief they received.
But when they mentioned GYES, they spoke up. "Oh, and of
course I am on GYES," a previously quiet woman screamed. Clients
also mobilized GYES to connect with caseworkers and to close the
social distance separating them. For instance, two pregnant casework-
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 235
ers were employed in one of these offices. Female clients often asked
them about their pregnancies and plans for child care leave. They
then discussed their experiences on the grant, prompting a conversation
about something they shared. A client once joked about one of
these caseworkers after she went on leave, saying "I hope her husband
is well paid. Maybe she will come in after me, sitting on my side of
the desk this time." Hence, in these ways, female clients appropriated
GYES to counteract the pathologizing of their needs.
Other women mobilized the products of GYES to reassert a sense
of maternal entitlement. These clients staked claims to state support
in the name of their children. Clients brought children of all ages to
these offices. Waiting rooms seemed like playgrounds, with children
running around and screaming. Mothers chased them, warning them
not to get dirty before they saw the caseworkers. Once inside the
office, mothers drew on their kids to get support. Some pointed out
how well behaved their kids were in order to argue for aid. Others
brought in school records to prove they were responsible mothers.
"Look how my son writes his name," said one client whose income
was just above the cutoff for assistance. "I taught him this." A few
even had their kids sing and dance to impress social workers. In effect,
these clients tried to butter up the bureaucratic machine by illustrating
they were good mothers with good kids. While this may have worked
for them in the past, it was futile in this context. Social workers just
looked at them, perplexed by the "strange" things clients did to get
assistance.
Clients whose children had been placed in state care adhered to
similar strategies. Many of them appealed these decisions by arguing
that material neglect was not maternal neglect. In the office, they tried
to convince caseworkers that they were competent mothers despite
their poverty. During home visits, they tried to exhibit good mothering
skills to get their children back. In one case, a woman who lived in
a dark basement flat put out a plate of cookies when we arrived.
They were her son's favorite cookies and she brought them to him
when she visited the children's home. Then there was the single mother
who lived in a small flat with two other families. She showed us where
her daughter slept before she was taken away—a small, old cot with
a worn-out teddy bear on it. She paid extra rent for the cot, but
always did what was best for the "little one." Yet caseworkers seldom
budged. They rarely let clients distract them from a narrow focus on
their material lives.
Finally, a few clients protested the materialization of their needs
in a more direct fashion. These women engaged in shouting matches
with caseworkers, refusing to accept their new rules. They overtly
challenged the limited focus on their material lives and forced social
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236 • Haney
workers to explain why their needs as mothers no longer mattered.
In these exchanges, female clients asked some penetrating questions.
Why was it important if they had televisions or VCRs? And why
wasn't it important that they raised their kids "properly"? Why was
it relevant if they knew how to economize? And why wasn't it relevant
that their husbands beat them? Who made these decisions? Few clients
got answers to these questions. The "needy" ones got a little money
and were shuffled out of the office. The others were just shuffled out.
Conclusion
In this historical account of the development of Hungarian welfare,
I have argued that the regime change underway in Hungary marks a
fundamental shift in the meaning of welfare itself. Instead of conceptualizing
this transition in terms of the quantitative categories of size
or scope, I approached it through the lens of social architectures of
need. This conceptual lens drew into focus parallel changes on three
terrains of the Hungarian welfare state—regime policies, institutional
practices, and client strategies. In doing so, it illuminated how the
transformation of the Hungarian welfare state is characterized by
deep alterations in the social conception of need and in acceptable
modes of argumentation for state assistance.
During the last two decades of state socialism, women's claims to
assistance were based primarily on their contributions as mothers.
Social policies extended special support to mothers; state caseworkers
employed domesticity tests to survey their mothering practices; and
state psychologists mobilized family models to rationalize their child
rearing. In this way, state policies and practices sought to constitute
women's identities as mothers. In the post-socialist period, this maternal
discourse has been dislodged by a new language of welfare. As
social provisions are means-tested, state assistance is being extended
to the impoverished. As poverty tests replace domesticity tests and
poor relief substitutes for child rearing counseling, state support is
targeting the "needy." In the process, women's identities as mothers
are being displaced by a new set of identities based on class. Hence,
with these shifts in the social conception of need, women's identities
have been redefined and reconfigured by the Hungarian welfare appa-
ratus.
The conceptual framework developed in this paper also enabled
us to assess the concrete effects of these shifting conceptions of need on
women. Through an analysis of past and present Hungarian welfare
regimes, I revealed variations in their level of discursive penetrability
and in the institutional resources offered to women. Although the
state socialist regime confined most of its welfare discourse to the
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 237
maternal, female clients expanded it to assert their needs as wives.
This regime scrutinized women's mothering practices, but it also provided
them the resources to scrutinize with: caseworkers to scold their
husbands; counselors to set household rules; and welfare funds to
serve as domestic collateral. The post-socialist welfare regime accords
women less room to maneuver. It hears the appeals of certain classes
of women and only those connected to their material lives. Moreover,
state actors read new meanings into these appeals, interpreting them
for evidence of individual defect and pathology. While state actors
continue to scrutinize, they no longer offer women resources to scrutinize
with. When clients utilized their children and their domestic skills
to resist the new regime, they were responding to this contraction in
space. In trying to salvage their past identities as mothers, they sent
a message about the discursive and practical losses they are suffering
in the present.
Although these clients' strategies reveal a great deal about the
relationship between the past and present in Hungary, they also have
significance for the future. Their contestation raises questions about
the limitations of a welfare apparatus that restricts itself to the material.
In particular, their experience compels us to contemplate the ease
with which a materialization of need breeds an individualization of
need, and the speed with which an individualization of need leads to
the stigmatization of the "needy." It also forces us to consider how
this kind of welfare discourse closes off channels for women to define
and advance their own interests. When these Hungarian clients went
to battle against the post-socialist welfare regime, they struggled to
develop a more responsive welfare structure and a more participatory
needs-talk. Through their resistance, these clients raised fundamental
questions about how welfare policies and institutions can be structured
to provide women discursive and practical resources—questions that
will remain at the center of the politics of need for decades to come.
NOTES
Research for this paper was supported by grants from the International
Research and Exchanges Board (LREX), the Joint Committee on Eastern
Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science
Research Council, and the Office of the Chancellor at the University of
California, Berkeley.
1. The data used in this paper are drawn from research carried out in
Budapest from October 1993 to April 1995. During this period, I conducted
research on the development of the welfare apparatuses of two Budapest
districts. In order to protect the identities of my subjects, I am forced to keep
the precise districts of my research anonymous. I will use X and XX to
identify them. These districts were chosen on the basis of various demographic
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238 • Haney
criteria: they were similar in size but varied according to the class and ethnicity
of their inhabitants. District X was a historically impoverished area
with an ethnically diverse population, while District XX had working-class,
middle-class, and bourgeois pockets with relative ethnic homogeneity. This
mixture allowed me to examine the practices of welfare offices working with
different populations and hence ensure the generalizability of my research
findings.
In my research, I collected four types of data. First, I conducted eighteen
months of fieldwork in the three social-welfare institutions of these districts:
Child Protective Services {Gydmhatdsdgok), Child Guidance Centers (Nevelisi
Tandcsaddk), and Family Support Centers (Csaldd Segfto' Szolgdlatok).
I had access to all areas of their work—I attended staff meetings, observed
social worker/client interactions, and accompanied caseworkers on home
visits. Second, I completed thirty-five in-depth, open-ended interviews with
Hungarians affiliated with the social-welfare apparatus from 1952 to 1994.
My respondents included former caseworkers, psychologists, local government
officials, and politicians. Third, I carried out primary source research
in the local government archives of both districts. In particular, I analyzed
a random sample of case files from the Gyamhat6sag (1952-1994) and the
Nevelesi Tanacsado (1969-1994). I sampled 100 cases from each institution
for each decade under examination, bringing my overall sample to over 1,000
cases. Finally, I also collected primary and secondary source materials on
the social policies, laws, and provisions produced at the national level in the
state socialist and post-socialist periods.
2. Prior to this, eligibility had been informally linked to other social
characteristics—the most important of which was bureaucratic privilege. As
many Hungarians have shown, the Hungarian "welfare society" bred its own
forms of inequality (Szelenyi 1978 and 1983; Szelenyi and Manchin 1987;
Ladanyi 1975; Szalai 1984). My point here is that by the mid-1960s, eligibility
became formally tied to other characteristics. These included age, family
structure, and ethnicity. In terms of the latter, beginning in the early 1970s,
the Hungarian Romani population was given limited preferential treatment
in state policy, particularly in the sphere of housing policy. For more on this,
see Kemeny (1974) and Ho6z (1975).
3. More specifically, countries like Romania and Poland dealt with similar
demographic shifts by outlawing abortion and restricting access to
birth control (Kligman 1993). Thus, their population policies were centered
much more on childbearing rather than child rearing. I thank Gail Kligman
and Katherine Verdery for drawing this comparative observation to my atten-
tion.
4. The fixed rates varied over time, but generally hovered around 60-70
percent of the average Hungarian wage. For data on this, see KSH (1981).
5. A similar increase characterized women's use patterns. The percentage
of Hungarian mothers using the grant rose steadily over this period. By the
mid-1970s, over 15 percent of female workers were on GYES at any given
moment. At the same time, there were significant class differences in use
patterns. These differences surfaced in the amount of time different groups
of mothers spent on the grant. Although women from all classes used the
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 239
grant, well-educated, better-paid professionals tended to stay on it for shorter
periods of time. In 1985, the Hungarian government tried to alter this pattern
by giving recipients the option of taking 75 percent of their previous salary
for the grant's tenure. These GYES reforms are discussed in the following
section. For more data on women's use patterns, see KSH (1981, 1988).
6. These benefit levels varied by economic sector and enterprise but averaged
50-70 percent of the recipient's salary. For data on these levels see
Ferge (1979), Gal (1969), and Pongracz (1986).
7. The use of these funds varied by district. In the two districts of my
research, 200-300 assistance cases of some sort were initiated yearly throughout
the late 1970s and early 1980s. This number increased dramatically in
the mid-1980s. See tables 1 and 2 for these data.
8. Applicants for these funds were almost exclusively female. That is,
although no national-level data exist on the sex of these recipients, in the
170 assistance applications I reviewed in my archival research, only two were
initiated by Hungarian fathers.
9. What is more, the few existing analyses of Hungarian welfare work in
this period are completely gender blind (Konrad 1974; Hanak 1983; Horvath
1982; Domszky 1994). For instance, although Konrad provides a powerful
(albeit literary) analysis of these institutions, he fails to mention that the
overwhelming majority of state actors and clients were women. Nor does he
unearth the gender regime underlying their institutional practices.
10. All Hungarian families had some contact with the Gyamhatosag because
parents were required to register with these offices after the birth of
each child. The two institutions I studied averaged 8,000-12,000 cases per
year throughout this period; of this number, over half were ongoing cases
that involved regular contact. In this way, 10-15 percent of Hungarians in
these districts had some contact with these offices on a yearly basis—with
5-7 percent of these residents maintaining a regular contact with the Gyamha-
tosag.
11. In addition to registering children, the Gyamhatosag's other bureaucratic
duties included making recommendations in child custody cases, enforcing
child support payments, solving housing problems, providing permission
for minors to get married, and ruling on all GYES and family allowance
appeals. This bureaucratic work constituted approximately 30-40 percent
of their caseload; the rest was devoted to their child protection work.
12. An overwhelming majority of these state workers had only secondary
school degrees. A few of them also had degrees from technical colleges (szdk
fdiskola) in law or legal administration. See MQvelSdesi Miniszterium (1988)
for these data.
13. For instance, take a 1970 comment by a caseworker on a home visit
to resolve a custody dispute: "The woman seemed like she cooked. But when
I asked her how she did stuffed cabbage, she hesitated. I do not think she
cooks regularly for the children."
14. From 1965 to 1985, the number of children placed in some kind of
state care (including temporary institutions) more than doubled—whereas 1
percent of all Hungarian children were in state care in 1965, 2.3 percent
were in such institutions by 1985 (MOvelSdesi Miniszterium 1988).
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240 • Haney
15. In the two districts of my research, I uncovered 117 cases of institutionalization
during this period, 98 of which involved such "mother blame."
16. This was particularly true in divorce cases. Most middle-class and
professional women became Gyamhatosag clients through divorce cases and
custody disputes. That is, caseworkers were often deployed to assess the home
environment of middle-class women to determine custody arrangements. It
was through these visits that such women were regularly blamed for being
too careerist and not committed to their children and families.
17. Unfortunately, I cannot give precise data on how many Romani clients
were deemed "bad mothers" because caseworkers were not permitted to
state the race of particular clients or to note whether a client was Romani.
Yet caseworkers frequently allowed their racism to slip into their case reports
by calling clients "un-Hungarian" or even "dirty Gypsies." These slips then
enabled me to uncover the racialized undercurrent of their work.
18. In contrast to Gyamhatosag workers, almost all state psychologists
had advanced degrees. In the districts of my research, they were evenly split
between those with university degrees and those with degrees from technical
colleges in teaching, pedagogy, or psychology.
19. One 1973 case beautifully illustrates their interpretive bias. In this
case, a 5-year-old boy was brought to the office by his mother who was
concerned about his bed-wetting. A psychologist then conducted a "world
game" with the boy in which she asked him to build his own world using
small figures. In the midst of the game, the boy retreated to the bathroom
three different times. The psychologist fixated on this, writing that it signified
castration anxiety. As she wrote in her notes on the case: "The boy
repeatedly went to the bathroom during our session to check if his penis was
still there. He fears that it will disappear. This is obviously the source of the
bed-wetting..."
20. In the hundreds of cases I reviewed, I did not uncover a single example
of a father receiving therapy—even in cases when the father was clearly the
root of the problem. One example comes to mind here. In 1976, two boys
were referred to the office because they had been acting out in school. In an
initial discussion with their mother, the counselor learned that their father
was a serious alcoholic who often climbed to the top of their high-rise
apartment building (lakdtelep) and threatened to jump. Instead of calling the
father in, the counselor initiated sessions with the mother to give her advice
about how to control her husband's drinking—how to hide the alcohol or
to water down his wine. In one session, she even advised the woman to make
larger dinners as a way to fill up her husband so that the alcohol would not
dramatically affect him.
21. For instance, in one 1975 case, a mother demanded that her husband
participate more in the household while she addressed their children's behavior
problems. As a family caretaker recounted after a home visit, "I arrived
to the home at 6:30. The mother was in the back working with the boys
while the father was heating up the food. When I asked her about it, she
smiled and said he did this since the therapy started."
22. And herein lies an interesting irony. In the beginning this poverty
work was an oppositional move on the part of sociologists. Many of them
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Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-Socialist Hungary • 241
were connected to dissident circles and focused on poverty in order to use
social democratic politics to critique actually existing socialism. At the same
time, sociologists had an interest in framing the problem in class terms—it
allowed them to carve out places for themselves in the welfare apparatus,
both as policy makers and as state actors. In a sense, many of them were
sociological "intellectuals on the road to state power" (Szelenyi and Konrad
1979). And, in the post-1989 period, many did indeed reach this goal. The
new Hungarian welfare state became quite a profitable venture for them—
sociologists have found new jobs in this welfare apparatus, and have created
new journals, educational institutions, and publishing companies with which
to analyze it.
23. There are striking similarities in the discourse used by these globally
hegemonic economic actors. Their modes of argumentation are always the
same, wherever they sprout up: They argue that market economies cannot
work with entitlement criteria that force them to devote large portions of
the GDP to social spending; they employ the "symbolic token" of the debt
to instill fear of an economic collapse; and they warn that high welfare
expenditures will make states impotent. For examples of these arguments in
the Hungarian context, see Kornai (1994) and Toth (1994); for more on
their parallels to global discourses of need, see Haney (1996).
24. There was also a racialized undercurrent to this move from GYES to
GYED. In addition to differing by class, GYES use patterns varied by race,
with Romani women using the grant for longer periods of time. The shift
to GYED was then an attempt to convince more non-Romani Hungarians
to have children and stay on the grant longer.
25. These numbers were compiled from 1994 data collected by Ferge
(1996) and adjusted for the rate of inflation. The median monthly income
was calculated for active earners only. Had pensioners and/or the unemployed
been included, the rate would have been significantly lower. I should also
point out that the new cutoff is higher for single parents, at 23,400 fts per
person.
26. In her comment, the caseworker distinguished between Romani and
non-Romani clients and meant that non-Romani clients now cheat and steal.
Of course, Romani clients are also Hungarians and, in this way, her comment
had racist overtones.
27. A few Family Support Services received funds from different nongovernment
bodies such as the Soros Foundation, the Red Cross and/or the
European Council. Usually, these funds were connected to specific programs
run by social workers. To my knowledge, this office was the only one in
Budapest to receive ongoing support from the Catholic Church.
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