This authoritative analysis of anti-liberal Hungary’s 21st century twist on “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” exposes its exploitation of women not only as unpaid carers in the home but also as a source of cheap paid labor. Fodor deftly links the Orbán regime’s notorious opposition to gender equality to its embrace of pronatalism, xenophobia, and expanded funding for church-based childcare and eldercare. A terrifying, essential read.
—Ruth Milkman, City University of New York Graduate Center and author of On Gender, Labor, and Inequality (lllinois, 2016) and Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Polity 2020)
Finally, a book that offers brilliant insight into the seemingly perplexing: the gender politics of the contemporary Hungarian state. With sharpness and wit, Fodor reveals how the public attack on gender--indeed, even on the concept of gender itself--goes hand-in-hand with the rise of authoritarian rule and right-wing populism. Giving this new gender regime a name, “the carefare state,” Fodor uncovers how it became so foundational to anti-liberal currents in Hungary. Part history of the present and part social policy analysis, The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary makes an enormous contribution to understandings of anti-democratic politics, gender relations, and social inequality in Hungary and beyond.
