Júlia Turgonyi (1928–2014) was an uncompromising advocate for women’s equality in both the world of paid work and the family in state socialist Hungary. A trade unionist and graduate of the study program of the party college (1951), she made it her mission to understand and describe the experiences of working women by grounding her work in extensive field research that included interviews and group discussions with workers. Her sociological research and the opinions she expressed based on it cut through official rhetoric to expose the real conditions of women’s lives and labours.

Júlia Turgonyi (Source: Arcanum Újságok)

Turgonyi was deeply critical of the idea that legal equality between men and women meant equality in practice. She argued that unless men’s position was challenged, women would remain trapped by the double burden – expected to be both full-time workers and full-time caregivers. In a 1973 article that sparked debate, she didn’t hold back:

Equal rights still mean substantially more rights for men [. . .] given the fact that in most families the woman, besides her employment, takes care of the children and the husband. [W]omen are ever less inclined to reconcile themselves to this situation. It becomes clearer and clearer that, in order to validate women’s equal rights, male prerogatives must be curtailed and finally abolished.

Her landmark studies, including a co-authored 1969 investigation into the lives of industrial women workers, were groundbreaking for their findings and for how unapologetically they questioned the status quo. She challenged the romanticized image of motherhood as a woman’s “chief vocation” and instead demanded a society in which women could fully participate as equals – not as overburdened caretakers, but as full human beings.

Turgonyi did more than include women into research on the iconic industrial working class. Systematically studying the public and private life worlds of women and men, she published on groups that were otherwise ignored or disparaged, such as retail trade employees. She conceived of education – including vocational training, trade union education, and children’s education within and beyond the family – as crucial to emancipatory change for both women and men.

Júlia Turgonyi’s activist research has shown that real change requires not just better policies, but a transformation of attitudes, roles, and power relations. These conclusions still deeply resonate with anyone thinking about gender and labour today.