Reconciling Women’s (Re-)productive Roles: Pediatrics, Psychology and Early Childcare in Hungary, 1950s-1960s

• In Event: Women Experts and Feminist Knowledge Production in East Central Europe, 1945-1989

Abstract

This paper explores the role of women experts, in particular the impact of the pediatrician Emmi Pikler, in reconciling women's productive and re-productive roles through the promotion of early childhood education in socialist Hungary. By combining biographical expert trajectories, social history and the everyday, it sheds light on the role of expertise and its implications for increasing female labour force participation, especially among women of childbearing age. It also discusses the interdependence between expertise and ordinary women in relation to Gil Eyal’s ‘network of expertise’.

Author

• Annina Gagyiova, Inst of History CAS (Czech Republic)