ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on life interviews conducted with members of an unskilled women's workers brigade who received the State Prize in 1970 and their families. The State Prize was established in Hungary in 1963. It was the most prestigious award that members of a socialist brigade could receive and was given to those for exceptional service to the State. Though a considerable amount of work has been done on specific forms of cultural identity, these tend to rely on race, gender and some labour historians even reject gender as a useful analytical category because women workers played only a minor role in traditional working class politics. The most important sources were qualitative oral history interviews carried out with skilled workers and semi-skilled women workers. The principal aim was to recall and recount the life-story narratives of retired women workers, which provided important clues to understanding the nature and meaning of everyday life in the socialist period in Hungary.
