"Divorce, Separation and Changing Family Practices"
21-23 September 2001

"Political, scientific and everyday discourses on family in post-socialist Hungary"
Mária Neményi

(Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

 

Draft please do not quote

 

In this essay I will discuss the stark contrast between the lack of attention paid to changing family patterns, and specifically to the topic of divorce, in sociological research, and the excessive emphasis placed on the family in political and everyday communication. The reference to families and family values has been the common denominator - strongly supported by public opinion - of the socio-political policies of the various governments since the democratic transition. The politicians were right to rely on the presumption, supported by various researchers, that the family, and the security afforded by a family, are at the top of the hierarchy of values of the Hungarian population, a preference that does not depend on whether the people who were polled were themselves living in a family or not. This unquestionable support for the family is hard to explain when we realise that families themselves have gone through significant change in the past decades, and that these changes, despite the radical effects on all aspects of society of the democratic transition of 1990, seem to be the continuation of a process that has started earlier.

The changes in family patterns can be characterised by the processes that are present in the rest of Europe as well. The main trends are identical, even if specific phenomena may appear, spread, and turn up in statistical data later in some countries than in others. These general phenomena - the downfall of the traditional family, e.g. the increase in the number of divorces, the first rising, later falling incidence of second marriages, the postponing of marriage, the conscious refusal to get married, the spreading of living alone as a lifestyle, as well as of unmarried cohabitation, the falling number of children per family - have attracted the attention of social policy makers and socio-political experts in Hungary as in the rest of Europe. While the trends are the same everywhere, there are of course country-specific factors that influenced and shaped these processes of change. Also, the way these changes were received by public opinion - feeding back into the processes of change themselves - depended to a large extent on the given political system, the governing ideologies, the economic and social circumstances, etc. Considering all of the above, it is worth taking a look at which societal processes shaped the changes that have taken place in family patterns in Hungary, at how the political decision makers, the policy measures, institutions, and communicators that form public opinion responded to these changes, and last but not least, how were they dealt with by the scientific analysts of the time, i.e. the sociologists, demographers, and psychologists.

Perhaps it is because of my personal involvement in the topic that I remember the period when I started working as a sociologist, the end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s, as a time when the family was a topic that attracted the attention of the leading sociologists of the time. It would be easy to explain this by saying that at that time, there was a peak in the rate of change in family life: although these changes had begun after the second world war, when the communists came to power, they had now reached a critical stage, and seemed to threaten the 'healthy functioning' of society. Therefore, political leaders were now eager to understand and possibly influence these tendencies. This, however, would be too simple an explanation. Knowing the personal history and the motivation of the leading sociologists and the junior researchers they worked with, I think that the family as a research topic was a refuge, a way of guarding one's political neutrality, for those who would not or could not deal with other important but politically charged topics (the structure of society, economy and society, etc.). The family was a safe haven that protected people from the aggressive interference in personal life of socialist politics and its subservient economical politics, not just at the level of daily life, but also for researchers who, by dealing with this topic, were able to avoid having to take a clear political stance. Among those who did research on topics such as families, divorce, and remarriages, there were experts considered 'politically unreliable' whose personal history included being sentenced to prison in '56, then released in the mid-60s, but also researchers who represented traditional bourgeois values and who integrated into the system only with their professional expertise. Perhaps that is why this was the heyday of family sociology: the rare current research on this topic still mostly refers to publications from that period.

The researchers of those years agreed that the socialist-style modernisation, which was forced onto the population and therefore perhaps did not unfold organically, coincided with the weakening of the economic function of the family. The increasing level of education of women and their taking on paid jobs in large numbers, hence the dominance of the two-earner family, the intensive urbanisation and social mobility, internal migration, and the spreading of urban life styles led to the formation of nuclear families that derived their legitimacy from the emotional needs of the family members, rather than from their economic interdependency. However, relationships based on emotional ties are less stable than family systems cemented by economic partnership and dependency. With the decline of religiosity and traditional persuasions - which state socialism consciously and rigorously tried to remove from societal communication - the control of the social surroundings over families, both at micro and macro level, also became less strong. From the point of view of the people - especially young people, more specifically (since these were significant changes for them) women - all of this led to the increased appreciation of personal freedom, the spreading of individualism, and the establishment of the right to assert personal interests.

While the researchers registered these phenomena, and considered them the necessary result of the sociological and historical processes taking place in Hungary, they themselves contributed to, or at least did not prevent the 'crisis of the family' from being presented as such in political and societal discourse, as a crisis that requires measures to be taken, state interference, and political reactions. The big research waves of the 70s and 80s and the accompanying discussion in the media and in public discourse - e.g. the recurring discussion on the demographics of the Hungarian population, or the so-called 'deviancy research' - blamed the changes in family patterns for the falling birth rate, alcoholism, the rising incidence of suicide, and the tragically low life expectancy for men. In this discourse women, whose social roles went through greater change than those of men in the preceding decades, were covertly or sometimes even overtly presented as scapegoats, since both in traditional thinking as well as in the family image shared and propagated by the political and cultural elite, it is primarily women who are held responsible for ensuring reproduction as well as for the harmonious functioning of the family.

During the mid-60s, after the forced industrialisation of the 50s and the radical transformation of the economy, when total employment had been reached as women were now included in the labour market, economic growth started to run out, and it was feared that there was not enough work to maintain full employment. This was also a period of political consolidation and détente after the reprisals and the depression that followed the revolution of '56. Two seemingly independent phenomena - on the one hand, the turning away from obligatory and ideologically strongly supported state socialism, something which was never openly declared but still happened, i.e. the liberalisation of economic and societal relations, and on the other hand, as a result of opening up to the West, the infiltration of certain new ideas into the socialist world, which had until then been ideologically sealed - were connected in a paradoxical fashion. The massive labour requirements of forced industrialisation had been replaced by a need for fewer, but more highly educated employees, and as a first step it was deemed expedient to withdraw women from the labour market. This goal - even if it was dictated by economic interests - was usefully served by the psychologists and sociologists, who by this time were allowed to work and publish again, and who wrote and spoke about the importance of women's family roles, about the indispensability of early bonding between mother and child. This legitimised the institution in 1967 of the Child Care Allowance (GYES), which in appearance maintained mothers in their status of employees, but which in reality kept them at home again for years for the benefit of raising their children and running the family.

The sociologists of the period realised that in the process of the emancipation of women, the introduction of GYES was a step back towards the reconstruction of traditional family patterns, but they were still mostly positive about the introduction of this family-political institution, as it offered an alternative to the uniformity of the nurseries and kindergartens, as well as to women's double burden, that was gladly accepted by the Hungarian population - including women. The institution of GYES and the discourse it has generated from its inception until the present shows how serious social problems were degraded to socio-political questions, were simplified to a matter of redistribution. In the discussions on GYES, few words were spoken about one of the main and never revoked principles of the socialist ideology, about the equality of rights, about equal chances for women and men, about sharing household tasks, or about the institutionalisation of household and child care tasks, about the development of such public services. With women 'winning back' the primacy of their status as mother and wife, even if only for the period of infant care, public opinion came to connect women more closely to their reproductive functions than to their status as citizens with equal rights. Society blamed women for the falling birth rate, for the inadequacies in the care for children and the elderly, for the high abortion and divorce rates. As a consequence, these social problems were marginalised as women's problems; social discourse continuously tries to make women feel guilty (Adamik, 2000).

It was not only the family sociologists, who keep track of economic and sociological trends, that were concerned about the 'crisis of the family', first and foremost about the steadily rising divorce rate. Since politicians and decision makers consider marriage and the family to be the cornerstones of society, they too were worried to see enthusiasm for marriage falling, to see people getting married at a higher average age, shorter-lived marriages, a rising divorce rate, and less second marriages. The literature on this topic is full of data that supports the view that being married leads to greater wealth, a better health, greater happiness, and a less stressful life, when compared to unmarried life. However, research has also thoroughly documented that bad marriages have a negative effect on fertility: firstly, because dysfunctional marriages reduce the willingness to have children, secondly, because divorce can be an obstacle to having more children, thirdly, because there is an increased danger of deviance, i.e. of children growing up to be problematic teenagers and adults, which negatively influences their (the next generation's) attitude towards marriage. Obviously, socio-political policy measures are not enough to increase people's willingness to get married, or to improve the stability of marriages. The institution of marriage can only be strengthened by improving the quality of marriages.

All of this prompts the following questions: what leads men and women to get married, and why are some marriages stable, while others are not? There is a huge international and a relatively large Hungarian body of literature on this subject. The lion's share of the literature consists of a variety of psychological approaches, from the documentation of fantasies about the ideal partner and methods for measuring the quality and stability of a marriage, to various theories such as social exchange theory and balance theory, and the research done within these paradigms. (Gödri, 2001). However, even these theories cannot disregard the socio-historical factors that influence at the cognitive or behavioural level the propensity of individuals to get married or divorced. They have to take into account the social norms, role requirements, models of behaviour that are present in society at a given time, and by the acceptance or rejection of which individuals shape their own life route. In Hungary, during the four decades of state socialism, there was a changing but nevertheless always present ambivalence, a contradiction that constructed the social representations of marriage and the family. The traditional concept of the family as maintained and passed on by family socialisation was seemingly in conflict with daily life, since the bourgeois ideal family with the working husband and the home maker wife, who raises the children, could not be realised in practice. What is more, this bourgeois ideal was not even thought entirely desirable anymore, with women now being more highly educated, professionally trained, and actively participating in the workforce. Despite all of this, public opinion polls and other research continued to prove that the family as an ideal had not lost any of its popularity. The entire arsenal of methods of cognitive dissonance reduction was needed to maintain the notion that the family, more specifically the family with children, is the primary source of happiness, against a background of real life decisions on divorce, getting married again, cohabitation.

Many have tried to explain this ambivalence, some by exploring the 'double bind' social pressure which the political leadership and its subservient economic-scientific-cultural elite exerted on society. The so-called 'state feminism' was such a pressure: the top-down introduction and acceleration of the emancipation of women. Part of this project was the total inclusion of women in the labour market; it was asserted that taking part in the production process was the best guarantee to be regarded as a member of society with full and equal rights. At the same time, the category of 'inactive workers' was created, which effectively drove women from the labour market, degrading them to the status of second-rate labour force, thus maintaining women's subordinate position. This external, macro-societal pressure was compounded by the patriarchal notions on gender roles shared by the members of society themselves, as a result of their upbringing or of their aversion to external pressure. On top of the interference of the authoritarian society into private life, and the difficult social and financial situation of the families, this meant an additional emotional burden that was difficult to bear and that led to the frequent breaking up of marriages.

The changes that marriage and the family went through raised the attention not only of family sociologists and psychologists, but also of researchers in the area of social stratification. The stratification-theoretical approach looks at the question of how society's openness or closedness is reflected in marriages. Measuring homogamy and heterogamy in marriage gives an indication of the extent to which the social parameters of the couple are similar, e.g. as far as education, class, and religion are concerned. Since after the second world war a new system was born in Hungary, that had as its goal the discontinuation of class society, i.e. the creation of communism, and that really did radically see to the destruction of the old older, to the abandonment of private property, to the obliteration of differences of descent, it was to be expected that these factors would have a smaller effect on the selection of the partner. There is indeed a strong increase in mobility between social strata between 1948 and 1960, i.e. the indicators of homogamy are lower. However, this trend breaks and from the beginning of the 80s homogamy is stronger again in certain occupational groups (managers, intellectuals, trained workers). (Bukodi, 2000) This reflects on one of the contradictions, typical of the socialist period, between the declared goal and reality, the effect of which on the fate of individuals and families cannot be ignored. Under the banner of 'we're all equal', the habits and fossilised traditions of the hitherto feudal society were truly disrupted for a few years, decades, and during the first years of socialism there were many relationships that would have been unimaginable earlier, e.g. between a child of a Jewish bourgeois family and the child of an uneducated peasant. However, both intergenerational and intragenerational mobility leads to a continuous clash between the cultural and moral values and norms of the various social groups. Experts on this period, at least those who do not use the simpler technique of scapegoating, have often connected this deep reorganisation of the social system not just to the rising number of divorces, but also to suicide, alcoholism, and to other forms of behaviour considered deviant.

The measurement of the homogamy of a marriage can be based on the social class, or the religious - cultural orientation, but also on the level of education of the marriage partners. The traditional family approved of, even considered it advantageous if the husband was more highly educated and therefore had a better social position, since the income of the family was based on the employment of the husband. The continuous improvement in the level of education of women, which has now in the younger age groups reached, even surpassed that of men, has necessarily led to an increase in educational homogamy. This - together with women's independent employment and career development - has shocked and undermined the traditional marriages based on the authority of the husband. Since in social exchange theory the stability and quality of a marriage are strongly determined by the extent to which the partners can realise their expectations, by whether they profit from staying together or from breaking up, it is evident that women are much less at the mercy of their husbands because of the increasing independence afforded by having their own income. It is not accidental that along with the steady rise in the number of divorces, we also see that by far the majority of divorces are initiated by women.

From the 70s until the present there were also mostly demographic, but also family sociological studies done that simply attempted to document the facts. When looked at at this level, the first signs of the process of modernisation appear in the Hungarian marriage statistics. While up until the 70s the so-called non-European type of marriage habits were characteristic of Hungary - i.e. most people were married in their twenties - after the second half of the 70s the marriage ratio started on a long-term decline, while at the same time the average age of getting married went up, and having children was postponed (Csernákné, 1996). From the 80s onwards there was a so-called 'marriage deficit', i.e. per year more marriages were terminated than there were couples getting married, and this trend continued after the democratic transition of 1990. Since 1949 the number of couples married per year went down from 11.2 per 1000 inhabitants to 5.2 in 1994. The ratio of people remarrying after a divorce also fell significantly. While in the 50s 270 out of 1000 divorced men remarried, this number went down to 35 in the 90s. For women this same ratio went down from 115 to 23. In other words, first marriage was postponed or consciously avoided, while the readiness to remarry fell. This clearly shows that society's ideas about marriage changed. Marriage is no longer the only imaginable type of relationship between a man and a woman, which is proven by the frequency of cohabitation and by the high proportion of people already living together before marriage. Opinion polls show that for many, marriage has more disadvantages than advantages, and this is especially true of urban, young, educated people, i.e. they are more sceptical and critical of marriage, than older, less educated people who live in the countryside (Tóth, O. 1994).

The ambivalence towards the family is also apparent in the way divorce is dealt with. While society as a whole, public opinion, and individual families expect young people to get married, they are also resigned to the fact that they get divorced if the marriage does not work out. While the number of marriages fell, the divorce rate continued to go up - in 1995, there were 464 divorces per 1000 marriages, and if we look at the sum of all marriages then one-third ended in divorce in the 90s. Of the couples who were married in the last few decades, 18% were divorced within 10 years, which also shows that divorce mostly affects young people (typically people in their thirties), and especially, in three-quarters of the cases, families with children. Not just the practice of divorce, i.e. its use as a way of resolving conflicts, but also the way it is judged has changed over time, and not just in the age groups affected by it. We do, however, see that women tend to agree with a statement such as 'Divorce is usually the best solution when a couple can't seem to work out their marriage problems' more than men, and that divorce is more generally accepted in the higher strata of society than among people who are less well educated and who live under less favourable circumstances. (Tóth, 1997).

A study of the middle classes' attitudes and habits with respect to marriage and divorce, performed after the democratic transition, compared practice with the opinions on this topic of three distinguishable layers - lower-middle, middle, upper-middle - of the people who rated themselves middle-class in a country-wide representative sample. It was found that the proportion of divorced, unmarried partners, and single people was 12.3% of the entire sample, 16% of the lower-middle class group, and 27% of the upper-middle class group. It also turned out that the higher the socio-economic status of the respondent, the more acceptant s/he is of cohabitation, divorce, or living apart together (Utasi, 1996). The traditional values were characteristic of the more disadvantaged social groups. Women, less well educated people, and people living in villages were more likely to disapprove of changes to the traditional forms of marriage, and the older the respondents were, the stronger their disapproval was.

It is evident that statistical data and attitudes with respect to marriage and alternative forms of living together are undergoing continuous change. This brings us back to the question of why the academic and political representation of the current situation is so different from that of the 70s and 80s, when the changes that traditional families underwent and the accumulation of related problems provoked extensive media attention as well as comprehensive and thorough research efforts. We established above that the analysis of 'the crisis of the family' inspired the very best researchers of the socialist period, and that this topic received a lot of public attention in a period of limited publicity, whereas now there is hardly any research on this topic, and if there is, then the results - i.e. further proof of the downfall of the traditional family - do not get much attention in the now free media.

In the meantime, 'family' - undefined, without the article - became the main keyword in politics, and this is especially true of the conservative, right-wing parties that have been in government twice already since the democratic transition. Family refers implicitly to young families with children; the elderly, lonely people, or those who have already raised their children do not seem to fit the category anymore. The current leading government party's famous slogan, 'three children, three rooms, four wheels', as a goal to be reached and an image of the future, does not even attempt to address those who because of their age or their marital status cannot take part in the realisation of this petit bourgeois dream. The traditional motto of one of the other parties in the coalition - God, Homeland, Family - also promises the reinstatement of traditional values. A good example of the need there seems to be for reviving traditions is the astonishing announcement of the leading government party (they are called 'young democrats'), aimed explicitly at the young people concerned, but in fact meant for the less well educated, older age groups, in which they promised to enact that church weddings have the same status as civil ones, thus giving up the more than a century old institution of civil marriage. The notion of the family has become political again, once again politicians consider the family to be the basic unit of society, rather than addressing individuals - men, women, pensioners, young people, city- or village dwellers, Hungarians or members of other ethnic groups - based on a realistic interpretation of the processes taking place in society. The collectivist approach of politics to families is also evident in e.g. the distribution of social allowances, or the introduction of family-based taxation. The individualisation that has taken and is still taking place in society is not reflected in the views of the politicians that are currently in power.

So why is it that sociologists, who are familiar with demographic statistics, with the way public opinion develops, with the likely effects of policy measures on various population groups, do not react to the policies and plans of the political decision makers, that are based on a conservative ideology rather than on reality? I would like to present two, partially related hypotheses, but I have to admit that even together they do not give a satisfactory answer to the above question.

The first hypothesis has to do with the peculiar situation that the social scientists found themselves in, in a Hungary that has as its official goals the establishment of a democratic society and a market economy. The transition of 1990, which affected all areas of society and brought about essential changes, resulted in a kind of live laboratory for social scientists, with a broad range of topics to study. Which changes were actually studied was partially dependent on the interests of Western- European or American researchers and foundations, and also on what types of research it was possible to find funding for. The most frequent question among social scientists at the beginning of the 90s was: who won, who lost as a result of the changes. It is not accidental that the Western-European and American activists and researchers of the second wave of feminism were primarily interested to see whether women, who under socialism were emancipated, worked, and relied on professional child care, would be able to hold on to the quasi-equal position that had been forced onto them from above, or would go back to the patriarchal family model of bourgeois society. The Hungarian family sociologists - by now exclusively women - that the Western feminists got in touch with, were used to dealing with the subject of women primarily through the study of changing family structures and roles. Now they started to see the decades-old trends in a new light. The 'transitological' studies that were typical of the early 90s were a suitable background for the question of what the consequences of the transition were for women, why there were no women's movements, why did feminism not get stronger when all quantifiable indicators showed that women were being pushed back into the private sphere? How did women react to their rapidly falling participation in the labour market, in parliament, in politics? How did they respond to the reduced child care services - nursery schools, kindergartens - and social allowances, that they relied on under socialism? In the past decade countless volumes were published in the USA and Western-Europe co-authored by Central and Eastern European sociologists (who had hitherto done research on families), which dealt with the above questions on the relationship between women and the transition (Basu, 1995, Funk-Mueller, 1993, Rueschemeyer, 1994, etc.). These researchers did not add to the literature on the sociology of the family; instead, they became the founders of new women studies or gender studies programs and academic departments, or they worked on the curricula of these new programs, thus becoming the Hungarian representatives of the various branches of feminism.

The second hypothesis is also connected with the processes of change in Hungarian society after the transition, and with the academic response to these processes. The change to a market economy now threatens to rapidly divide society in two; previously, society was artificially homogenised and, at least at the publicly visible level, free of extremism. For the young, the educated, the people who adapt well to changing circumstances, the new system has brought success, wealth, and spectacular career opportunities, whereas the majority of society has lost out as a result of the transition both objectively and subjectively. Freedom and security, both positive terms, became antagonistic concepts. Those sociologists who previously studied daily life, the extent to which society determines human relationships, and the relationship between power and people, seeing the dramatic changes that the transition brought about, now turned their attention to important questions such as poverty, powerlessness, and ethnic discrimination. The qualitative methodology used in family sociology could easily be adapted to research programs that no longer targeted the general crisis phenomena of the family, but rather specific topics, such as the situation of the largest ethnic minority, the Gypsies, in Hungarian society. In other words, the intellectual capacity, the social sensitivity and commitment of the limited number of researchers was already tied down by these new topics, which are in a way related to the work they did previously, but now seemed more important and more exciting than their prior area of expertise, which had lost its novelty.

Perhaps a third hypothesis can be added here. However offending the sanctified concept of the family, as it is used by politicians, is to many, the family sociologists still have to acknowledge that from the point of view of most people, the only thing that was not touched by the society-wide changes is the family. For the average person the family - no matter what its connotations are, no matter what changes it went through - is still the only type of human contact that is based on solidarity, helping each other out, the gratification of instincts and emotions, and that is immune to at least the direct interference of the various political systems. It is difficult to interpret the ambivalence between the popularity of the concept of the family and the continuous change that the meaning of the concept is going through, especially when we also look at the ambitions of the various governments apparent in their family policies. Apart from the complexity of the topic, scepticism may have also been responsible for the fact that researchers do not study this topic anymore: the decision makers are not interested in being confronted with reality, for them the family is not a reality but a political slogan with positive associations.

We have established that there is a lack of complex family sociological research. However, the Hungarian part of an international comparative research project is underway. (Improving Policy Responses and Outcomes to Socio-Economic Challenges: changing family structures, policy and practice). This international research aims firstly to inform policy by developing the knowledge base on the social situation in the European Union and applicant states, such as Hungary; secondly, to increase the understanding of the policy process, the policy options available to meet socio-demographic challenges, and their possible social and economic impacts; thirdly, to make recommendations for improving the efficacy of policy responses and outcomes to socio-economic challenges at EU and member state level, taking account of national diversity. This research will enable us to interpret the family-related ideology, the decisions, and policy measures of the political elite using actual data on people living in various family forms, and on their expectations of the state's family policies. We will be closer to answering the complicated question of what the family, marriage, and divorce mean for individuals and for society as a whole.

Bibliography

Adamik M., 2000: „A legnagyobb ígéret - a legnagyobb megaláztatás" Az államszocializmus és a nőkérdés, /The Greatest Promise - the Greatest Humiliation. State Socialism and Women's Issues / PhD dissertation, Budapest

Basu, A. (ed.) 1995: The Challenge of Local Feminisms, Women's Movements in Global Perspective. Westview Press, USA

Bukodi, E., 2000: Ki, mikor és kivel házasodik? A házasság helye az egyéni életútban és a történeti időben /Who marries whom and when? Place of marriage in the individual life/routes and in historical time/, Szociológiai Szemle, 2000/2. pp. 105-127.

Csernák Józsefné, 1996: Házasság és válás Magyarországon /Marriage and Divorce in Hungary/, 1870-1994, Demográfia, 1996, 2-3.sz. pp. 108-135

Funk, N.-Mueller, M. (eds.), 1993: Gender Politics and Post-Communism, Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, Routledge, New York,

Gödri, I., 2001: A házassági kapcsolatok minősége és stabilitása /Quality and stability of marital relationships/, Kutatási jelentések 66, Central Statistical Office, Budapest

Rueschemeyer, M. (ed.) 1994: Women in the Politics of Postcommunist Eastern Europe, M.E. Sharpe, Inc. New York, London

Utasi, Á., 1996: Házasság és válás középosztályi identitással - praxis és attitűdök /Marriage and Divorce with a Middle-class Identity - Practice and Attitudes/, Szociológiai Szemle, 1996/2, pp. 57-70

Tóth, O., 1994: A házassággal, a válással és az együttéléssel kapcsolatos attitűdök /Attitudes related to Marriage, Divorce and Cohabitation/. INFO-Társadalomtudomány, 1994. No.30.

Tóth, O., 1999: Family Forms and Patterns of Cohabitation in Hungarian society, in: Lévai, K. and Tóth, I. Gy. (eds.): The Changing Role of Women, Report on the Situation of Women in Hungary, 1997, Social Research Informatics Center and Ministry of Social and Family Affairs, UNDP, Budapest

 

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