A Russian woman told me that Hungarians only count boys, so if you ask a Hungarian mother how many children she has, and she has five children, but three are boys, she will say 3.
In 2015?
I personally cannot believe that it's this bad, that Hungarian's do not value females as much as males, but since MAGYAR-AMERICAN is now available in Hungary on a Hungarian server, I would love for some of you who are presently living in Hungary to make some comment!
I have heard and overheard women in my own family, of the previous generation to mine, say things like "now our name is carried forth," when a son's wife gives birth to a son, showing some concern that the surname continue on to the next generation, which it might not be if their son's only have daughters.
But to not value their daughters? To not speak of them, to have no pride in them, to act as if they had never been born?
No way!
While the women of my family in the previous generations were raised to be wives and mothers, and thought that this was the most important thing they could do with their lives, they were also not educated to have meaningful work or careers, and then if they went to work for pay, it was after the children were launched into adulthood. Still, their work was valuable to the family. In their households, boys and girls performed tasks that were assigned by gender. This, however, doesn't seem to be exclusively Hungarian.
It also seemed to be about living in the city, rather than the country. Country living, agricultural living, is hard work for both sexes. Many tasks that were "Women's Work" in the Old Country or In the Country, would be considered by some to be not especially feminine.
For instance, breaking the neck of a chicken (killing it), plucking the feathers, butchering it, and turning it into food, isn't work that most people do now. The last person I ever met who did it was an immigrant born in the 19th century.
It might be that the husband and boys were supposed to do the yard work and the wife and girls do the housework and cooking, but what I witnessed was that husbands were also stuffing home-made sausages, "manning" the outdoor grill, and wives were heading out , driving cars, to buy groceries.
C 2015 Magyar-American BlogSpot
