Abstract

The paper compares the activist biographies and agendas of the first generation of Romani women activists Elena (Ilona) Lacková (1921-2003) and Mária László (1909-1989) in (state) socialist Czechoslovakia and Hungary between the 1950s and the 1970s. Despite differences in age, the time focus of their activist lives - the 1950s for László and the 1950s-70s for Lacková – and their agendas, the paper points to similarities in their activist lives.

Challenging the “token Roma” argument contributing to diminishing the genuine engagement of Romani activists working within the state apparatus in the (state) socialist context with improving the lives of their communities, the paper addresses the ways in which Lacková and László translated but also reshaped the party line toward the “uplift” work with the “backward” Roma.

Taking a gender, class and race/ethnicity intersectional perspective to analyzing their activist lives, the paper highlights Lacková and László’s transgressive activist behavior, defying the culturally defined gendered limits to Romani women’s accepted behavior and presence in public spaces. Last but not least, we compare how the work of Lacková and László are remembered by Roma and non-Roma communities today.

Bio

Marie Láníková, sociologist, is an assistant professor at the University of Hradec Králové and a postdoctoral researcher in the project FEMEX: Women experts and feminist knowledge production in post-war East Central Europe (1945-1989) at the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Eszter Varsa, social historian with a Ph.D. in Comparative Gender Studies (Central European University, Budapest, 2011), is a research affiliate in the ERC project ZARAH: Women's Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century at Central European University, Vienna and an investigator in FEMEX "Women experts and the production of feminist knowledge in post-war Central and Eastern Europe (1945-1989)" at the Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.