The Urban Memory of Socialist Women Reflected in Budapest Street Naming Practices
The Urban Memory of Socialist Women Reflected in Budapest Street Naming Practices

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the changes in street names honouring women who were active in the workers’ movement in Hungary. It traces the urban memory of one eminent figure, Anna Koltói, across the main historical waves of street (re-)namings in Budapest between 1945 and 2022. Amidst the commemorations of socialist martyrs after the war, several streets were named after Koltói. The early 1990s saw the restoration of pre-war names, thuserasing her name from the inner districts of Budapest. In the recent memory politics after 2010, some districts continued to replace Koltói’s name, while others restored it. Situating the analysis in the scholarship of post-socialist gender labour, I interrogate the ambivalent visibility and acknowledgement of socialist women. I reconstruct the arguments put forward in the proposals and debates over changing street names that took place in the Budapest City Council and the local district governments. I show that just as after the war stakeholdersemphasised Koltói’s participation in the workers’ movement, in the early 1990s her name was associated with communism. Recent efforts to restore Koltói’s memory have sought to emphasise her activism for women’s rights as well as social democracy (as opposed to both conservativism and communism), doing so in order to make a political statement. The paper thus contributes to a critical analysis of women’s exclusion and inclusion in the memory politics of different regimes.

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