The most striking characteristic of sexist and anti-Semitic discourses is the excessive use of spatial metaphors. From the very beginnings of their increased visibility, both women and Jews were accused of flooding, rushing, thronging into and occupying both physical and symbolic spaces like coffee-houses, university benches, middle classes or sacred Hungarian soil. Their physical presence in these spaces seemed to cause a disruption in the perception of order and eventually resulted in a discursive backlash aiming to force both women and Jews back and keep them at bay both metaphorically and physically. That is, for the public opinion to re-establish order they had to be put back and confined to what was considered as “their” spaces.
What was considered to be the proper place for Jews, however, is explicit only in case of the most radical anti-Semites: out of the country. Still, at least, as long as the proper place for Jews was out of the country and only spatial metaphors were used in anti-Semitic discourses, the idea of their eradication did not surface – as it could only be born with the eventual appearance of biological metaphors. Such metaphors appeared as early as the end of the 1880s in Hungarian anti-Semitic discourses, but they only became dominant in the 1920s, not surprisingly in the very historic moment when Professor Lajos Méhely, eminent physiologist-zoologist, became the director of the most important racist review,A Cél (The Objective). (Gyurgyák 2001, 387-397)
Social spaces considered to be proper for women were restricted to those domains that were associated to traditional female roles such as caring, teaching, nursing or potion mixing. For 1920, policies concerning women’s admission to universities were designed either to completely exclude women from certain areas of higher education, like medical schools, or restrict their access to faculties associated with traditional female roles. Women could not study Catholic theology, and less in line with the above logic economics, engineering, law. Even after 1927, when women’s access to universities was finally regulated by law and their number stabilized between 1264 and 1550 per annum, that is, between 11.8 and 14.2 percent, they were not allowed to hold prestigious or otherwise important positions. Although women were allowed to enter faculties formerly inaccessible to them, albeit not in every university, and from 1928 on they could apply to pass the examination leading to the position of private lecturer [Hungarian:
magántanár], in 1938 there were still only 4 women bearing this title, 4 assistant lecturers [Hungarian: adjunktus] and 29 assistants [Hungarian: tanársegéd] in the whole country. (Papp 2004, 46) Still by 1941 the number of women in the labor force was higher than in 1920. The “Modern Woman” (as the New Woman was called in Hungary) was an omnipresent character entering and occupying the popular press and culture, especially the women’s magazines and the new media, the film. However, this modern woman was only modern in her appearance, because the accomplished women on the screens, while smoking, driving, wearing tailor made ensembles, and playing tennis had only womanly concerns. At best,
she was an actress, an artist, or a secretary and never had anything on her mind other than the men in her life. Enjoying a limited right to vote and a limited access to study, she was kept far away from power and politics and in blissful ignorance of the fact that she was everything but emancipated.
Conclusively, after 1920 the battle was won, the place was clean and order, e.i. male Christian hegemony, was reestablished. However, if we consider the process starting in 1938, it was obviously not the perception of an important majority. Even though no immediate connections can be established between the Numerus Clausus law and the Hungarian Anti-Jewish Acts of the 1930s, the symbolical signification of this measure can hardly be emphasized enough. There are sometimes even minor historical events, which cast a “long shadow”. The passing of the Numerus Clausus law in Hungarian Parliament in 1920 is a decisive case in point.
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