Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919

 A gendered division of experience of the war was something that contemporaries [of WWI] emphasized, and this gender dichotomy has inspired an impressive body of scholarly work on the cultural history of World War I and its aftermath. But what of revolution and civil war, where the generalized dichotomy of fighting front–home front does not hold? How do participants and witnesses experience and remember such events? Do the same gender differences apply? How does the presence of women in revolutionary movements and crowds affect the archetypes of the war experience: the myths of soldier’s honor and bravery, the images of the enemy, the images of battle? Events in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, afford us the opportunity to consider some of these questions. This essay examines the importance of gender within the two main cultures of remembrance that developed in postrevolutionary Hungary: a dominant right wing and an exiled and/or underground left wing. [Author]