ABSTRACT
This chapter examines debates over women’s citizenship in Central-Eastern Europe (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland) after World War I. After 1918, women throughout CEE gained the right to vote. Yet women still lacked full legal equality with men, particularly within marriage. While the specifics varied by country, laws throughout the region allowed married men substantial legal powers over their wives and denied married women equal access to state employment. Some women, like Františka Plamínková in Czechoslovakia, entered politics to fight for women’s equality in all areas of the law, but their efforts were largely unsuccessful. While these activists prioritized women’s individual rights, many of their fellow citizens believed that their governments should be more concerned with protecting families. Rightist nationalists, such as Cécile Tormay in Hungary, argued that laws should respect what they believed were natural gender differences, protecting women’s place within the home and preserving men’s ability to provide for their households. By the late 1930s, support for women’s legal equality in CEE had decreased and women enjoyed fewer rights than they had in 1918, showing that the history of women’s rights in CEE is not a simple narrative of linear progress.
