„Mindenki … úgy ment oda, hogy ez a világcsúcs” (Munkásnő ország-gyűlési képviselők megéléstörténetei a szocialista időszakról)
"Everyone Went There in the Belief that this was a World Record." The Stories of Women Worker MPs about the Socialist Era

Summary/Abstract: In the official discourse of the Socialist era workers were regarded as a uniform social class. The women worker MPs of the time represented not only the “ruling class” in the Parlia-ment, but also emancipated women. In the paper, I use two life story interviews conducted with two former women worker MPs, Éva and Paula to analyze how they experienced their life as an MP. It seems that in their life storytelling they attach importance to the period when they were representatives. They described their relations with the politicians em-bodying the political system as paternalist. They structured their life storytelling so as to present the path to becoming an MP as a career. While Éva saw the decade of her repre-sentative status as a successful period, Paula's relation to this phase of her past is much more contradictory. While in the interview situation Éva's secrets and taboos were rather connected to her private life, Paula's suppressions were directly linked to her representa-tive status. Because of that their relations to the past were also different. Paula much rather likes to talk about this phase of her life as a period that is over, while Éva is still proud of it. It seems that as members of the working class, regarded as a uniform social group in the official discourse, they represented themselves in their remarks only. They cannot be re-garded as representatives of women interests, but they described this phase of their life as one in which they, as attractive women in the prime of their life, could become part of such events that their fellow women workers had no chance to.

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