Vortrag im Rahmen der Veranstaltungsreihe, die der akademische Mittelbau der Andrássy Universität Budapest anlässlich des sechzigjährigen Jubiläums des ungarischen Volksaufstands von 1956 organisiert.

Vortragssprache: ENGLISCH

The lecture argues that the recent boom in writing women`s history requires explanation as the recent turn of “herstory” writing in Central European countries left historians and activists puzzled. Historians writing history of 1956 have started to conceptualize the revolution and its aftermath as a political history. Only in the late 1990s women became the focus of scholarly research as wives, mothers and sisters in the framework of writing social history. The paper considers gender history as a paradigm in history writing and aims to give a broad overview of this present paradigm change. Women’s history writing as a revisionist history has been vulnerable for reconceptualization and the recent “second transition” uses revisionist history writing for supporting the legacy of national feminism, when women’s actions are evaluated as how useful were they for the national project. The talk gives an overview of developments in the historiography of 1956 from a gender perspective and argues that the turn from gender history to women’s history fits into the recent trend of revisionist history writing. Today, following the trends in other Visegrad countries, newly established historical institutions are focusing on researching women as victims of communism and women not belonging to the political sphere but rather as private or biological beings. The paper concludes with example of this paradigm change bringing in comparative examples of writing the history of the Warsaw uprising, using the work of Weronika Grzebalska and Borbala Juhasz and my own work on gendering the history of the revolution in 1956.