respectively.25 There was a clear expansion of the bottom level of the educational pyramid. Moving higher though in the same hierarchy, the decline was all but general for the young ages groups, especially for young men. Among the latter aged 18-19, the proportion of secondary school graduates was 5,9 % in 1920, 5 % in 1930 and only 4,8 in 1941, while among girls the comparable figures were 2,5
%, 2,3 % and 2,8 % respectively.26 We get quite similar results for those with higher educational degrees proper, aged 25-29. The relevant figures were successively 3,6 %, 2,9 % and 2,9 %, while for women 0,4 %, 0,4 % and 0,6 %.27
How could the above demonstrated expansion of elite training produce such mediocre global results, all the more that the further decline of the number of children per family and the simultaneous development of the supply of elite training must have significantly contributed to enhance per capita investments in education ? It is not the place to enter into an in-depth analysis of the data cited.
Let us simply refer to two (and a half) explanatory factors. One has to do with the possibly enormous demographic weight of young middle class refugees in the 1920 figures, which disappeared from among the young age groups of later censuses. The second concerns the real decline or stagnation of even age-group specific enrollments in elite education after the economic crisis of the early 1930s, which had a negative repercussion on the depressed 1941 figures. Finally, for 1941, the re-annexation of already earlier less developed territories of the former monarchy meant that populations of lower levels of education were incorporated into the rump state, generating a more modest average intellectual score for the whole population. However it was, the general educational balance sheet of the Christian Course proved to be altogether negative.
expanding demand, in Budapest five new girls’ secondary school opened its doors between 1914 and 1918. Moreover, out of the 31 schools for girls operating in 1917/18, not less than 22 remained in the rump state,29 and their numbers grew rapidly further on. By 1927/28 there were 30 girls’ gymnasiums and lyceums in the country with 13 of them concentrated in Budapest.30 At the end of the period in 1938/9 the number of girls’ gymnasiums and lyceums was 87 out of a total of 263. One third of the whole provision of secondary education granting thematura (érettségi) was at that time reserved for women, in Budapest almost half of it (28 out of 61).31 In larger towns there was no obstacle for girls to complete a secondary school itinerary in institutions of their own, where the same entitlements could be obtained as in boy’s secondary schools, besides the fact that girls could also sit for the exam and take their érettségi degree as ‘private pupils’
in boy’s gymnasiums and Realschulen. Till 1915/6 women actually could only take the graduation exam in boys’ schools, but afterwrds girls’ highschools progressively took over the graduating functions for girls, so much so that by the end of the inter-war years most female graduations took place in girls’
highschools.32
Table 2. The girls’ share (%) in elite education (1913/14-1925/26, selected years)33
% among
secondary school pupils having passed an exam
% among
graduates of classical
secondary schools
% among all students of higher education
1913/14 7,9 4,3
1918/19 15,0 14,5 8,3
1919/20 16,8 16,8 6,3
1920/21 17,2 17,3 8,1
1921/22 17,4 15,2 8,5
1922/23 17,6 16,0 8,2
1923/24 17,3 15,1 8,5
1924/25 17,1 15,6 9,0
1925/26 17,1 14,6 8,8
29 See the relevant map in Mészáros, 316.
30Ibid., 327.
31Hungarian statistical yearbook, 1939, 177.
32 In 1918/19 almost half of graduating girls (48 %) took their grades in boys’ secondary schools, but this proportion diminished to 20 % or less as of 1922/23. Data from Hungarian statistical yearbooks.In 1930/31 already only 10 % of girls graduated from a boys’ school.
33 Data from theHungarian Statistical Yearbooks.
One can say that the supply for women’s secondary education developed fast and indeed disproportionately, given the limitations opposed to their clientele to gain access to higher education and – as it will be apparent in the table below – given the specificity of women’s demand for restricted elite training, including secondary education and even matura but less often further studies, as compared to male graduates. The reason for such disproportion had to do with relatively low scale public investments in this sector. The state and local governments apparently tended to follow the demand – which was ‘structurally limited’ under thenumerus clausus – and contributed moderately only to the establishment of new girls’
schools. This was may be also due to the fact that Jewish girls took an even larger share in the demand than Jewish boys. The churches, on the contrary, made women’s education a field of outright competition for winning the souls. This can explain why only 7 public (and secular) girls’ schools opened their doors from 1918 to 1940 in the capital city as against 10 Church schools.34 On the country level in 1919/20 almost half of girls’ schools (14 out of 29) were still run by the state or by municipalities. Their numbers hardly increased and their proportion sharply decreased one third only (16 out of 49) by 1938/39.35 If Budapest was certainly the biggest territorial unit of the educational market in the country, the developmental dynamics of the supply of girls’ secondary education certainly anticipated the growth of the demand in the inter-war years. This is what Table 2 clearly demonstrates.
There we find indicators of the expansion of the female educational demand. In 1913/4 there were only 249 girls graduating from secondary schools, a mere 4,2 % of all graduates. This proportion reached 10 % in 1917/8, grew to 14,5
% in 1918/9 and attained 16,8 % in 1919/20 (with 687 female graduates). The figures oscillated around 15 % till the last years of the 1920s as shown on Table 2, when they made a new jump upwards with 16,4 % in 1928/9, 18,6 % in 1929/30 and 19,3 % in 1930/31.36 This indeed quite significant growth shows both the progress of the educational modernization of the country, whereby women’s elite education became an accepted norm in some middle class milieus, as well as its drastic limitations, especially if we compare the above figures with the extension of the network of girls’ educational facilities. Girls were always somewhat more often present among rank and file pupils than among graduates of secondary education,37 and they appeared much less often among university students.
This is a clear indication of their constantly hampered or inhibited educational mobility, compared to boys, especially when we know that they were
34 Mészáros, 167-174.
35Hungarian statistical yearbook1919-1922, 181 andibid. 1939, 185.
36 Figures from theHungarian statistical yearbooks.
37 In the years 1920/21-1925/26 the proportion of girls exceeded regularly 17 % among secondary school students, while their average representation among maturenten was only 15,6 %. Data calculated from the relevant issues of theHungarian Statistical Yearbooks.
extracted on average from much higher, more ‘bourgeois’ social circles38 and much better endowed with cultural and intellectual assets.39 In 1913/14 for example half of the pupils of higher girls’ schools with Hungarian mother tongue knew German, while only 18,3 % of comparable pupils of boys’ gymnasiums and Realschulen.40 In 1925 some 67 % of female students in Budapest spoke a foreign language, 35 % even two or more, while only 48 % of male students had the same skills (with only 14 % possessing several languages).41 Not independently from their family background, they appeared to display on average significantly higher scholarly achievements, as witnessed by their mean grades at Matura exams. In the years 1908/9-1914/15 not less than 38,2 % of graduates from a girls’
secondary school obtained their Matura with the best grade as against close to half that proportion among male graduates.42 The fact that in spite of all this the women’s share among university students hardly exceeded in the initial years of the numerus clausus half of their proportions among Maturanten, demonstrates the combined consequences of their lesser demand for higher education and the drastic efficiency of thenumerus clausus directed against women in universities.
The primary consequence of such limitation of the admission of women was to be found in indices of their better academic performances,43 a direct outcome of their initial over-qualification as against male Maturanten and their intellectual over-selection among the best graded secondary school graduates. But their exclusion from most faculties and vocational schools also generated a sometimes spectacular concentration of women students in a few study tracks, above all in Budapest and especially in the Philosophical faculties, but also – though to a much lesser extent – in the artistic academies (music, fine arts, industrial arts, theatre) and in the commercial sector of the recently founded Faculty of Economy – the latter all in Budapest -, besides the Faculties of Medicine.
The concentration of women in the University of Budapest (instead of Kolozsvár) was quite spectacular before the war, up to 92 % in the years 1911/12-19134/1444. This can be connected to the much more heavily urban (and Budapest based) middle class selection of female students, as against their male
38 Following a survey in 1925 only 4,4 % of female students belonged to lower class families, while 14,2 % of their male counterparts were extracted from lower class social categories. Cf.
Budapest Székesfőváros Statisztikai Évkönyve, /Statistical yearbook of the residential capital Budapest/, 1926, 650.
39 Cf. Viktor Karády, "A társadalmi egyenlõtlenségek Magyarorszàgon a nõk felsõ iskoláztatásának korai fázisában",/Social inequalities in the first phase of development of higher education among women in Hungary/,Férfiuralom /Masculin domination/, ed. by Miklós Hadas, Budapest, Replika-könyvek, 1994, 176-195.
40 Calculated from data inHungarian Statistical Yearbook 1914, 273-274.
41 Source line in note 35 above.
42 Calculated from data in relevant years of theHungarian Statistical Yearbooks.
43 The 1925 survey in Budapest found for example that only 41 % of female students had not sit this year for an oral exam (colloquium) as against 54 % of male students.Statistical yearbook of the residential capital city Budapest, 1926, 652.
44 Data from Hungarian statistical yearbooksof relevant years.
counterparts. This could not continue under the numerus clausus, as witnessed by their enrollments in the 1920s in the medical faculties, for which detailed surveys are at our disposal. While in Budapest serious restrictions prevailed against women’s inscription throughout the years 1920-29, to the effect of limiting female presence in the student body to 7,2 % (very close to the figure of Jewish representation), the more liberal inscription policies of provincial universities benefited to women as well. In the years 1919-1929 some 23 % of medical students were women in Pécs, 16,5 % in Szeged and 13,5 % in Debrecen.
Altogether 70 % of female medical students studied on the benches of provincial faculties at that time.45 Later on this unbalance must have changed, though, and the capital city regained the majority of its female medical clientele. By 1938/39-1939/40 Budapest retained 55 % of them and the rest was dispersed in smaller groups in the provincial faculties.
But the majority of female students gathered progressively more and more in the Philosophical faculties. Indeed till 1923 women studied essentially the Arts and Sciences and Medicine in fairly equal numbers, up to above 90 % of all female students. The remainder was divided between pharmacy and the recently (1919) opened Economic Faculty in Budapest, the latter too admitting women, while Law, Theology and Polytechnics were kept closed to them for most of the inter-war years (at least as ‘regular students’). But in the first five years of the numerus clausus female students were specially targeted by restrictions in medical faculties, especially in Budapest, so that by 1926/7 some 61 % of women students were enrolled in Philosophical Faculties and in 1927/8 more than 65 %. As a consequence, by 1930/31 women constituted already close to half (49,1 %) of the student body of the latter (including the sciences), a proportion which declined but not decisively in the 1930s. In 1934/5 it stood at 44 % and in 1937/8 at 40 %.46
The relatively less restricted entry of women to Philosophical faculties could only increase the global share of Budapest in the female student population on the strength of specific conditions prevailing in this sector of the academic market. The educated middle classes of the capital city by themselves produced a good part of this female educational demand. But such demand was particularly captured by the presence of the main scholarly celebrities in the humanities and the natural sciences in Budapest, the end station of academic careers in fields of advanced learning, where teaching was less standardized, that is much more personalized than in medicine or in technical disciplines. By the end of the period in 1938/-1939/40 women represented 44 % of Arts and Sciences students in Budapest as against 37 % in provincial faculties.47 This relative overweight of women in the Budapest Philosophical Faculty, combined with the fact that all the teaching institutions of other major study tracks open to women either in a university (like pharmacy and economics) or in an academy (especially for artistic training) were located in Budapest (with the unique exception of the Normal
45 Survey results from the project quoted in note 1.
46 Calculated from data in theHungarian statistical yearbooks of relevant years.
47 Calculations following data inHungarian statistical yearbooks of 1939 and 1940.
School for teachers in higher primary schools, transferred to Szeged in 1928), preserved (and by the end of the period enhanced) the status of the capital city as the absolute center of women’s higher education in the country in the inter-war years. While in 1925/6 only 52 % of all female university students were studying in Budapest, this was the case of 68 % of them by 1938/9.
But between the two last years mentioned one can observe hardly any general progress as to the participation of girls in higher education. Globally, student numbers in universities decreased gradually and significantly – by one third - during this period in Budapest (from 4515 in 1925/6 to 3006 in 1938/9) and oscillated in the three provincial universities around 1000 students with ups and downs in each. The share of women stood at 11,7 % in 1925/6 to reach 13,8 % only in 1938/9 in universities proper (excluding other institutions of higher education).48 This quasi-stagnation can be interpreted as a visible impact of the policy ofnumerus claususon the participation of women in higher education.