The Hungarian Patient is a comprehensive study of political life in Hungary over the past decade or so. The collection of essays offers a precise and detailed case study of the emergence of an illiberal democracy, a new life form proliferating on the international political scene. I have lived in Hungary for the past ten years and am an avid reader of the news, yet I learned a great deal from this volume about the ways in which the political regimes and their oppositions take shape, function, and succeed or fail.

The editors dedicate a few chapters to political efforts targeting “beleaguered groups” (p. xiv), one of which is women. Agnes Kover’s interesting albeit somewhat impressionistic discussion of the political discourse on what are typically considered women’s issues (care work, quotas, domestic violence, rape, and abortion) supports the claim of “traditionalism” spelled out more explicitly by Jon Van Til in the conclusion, i.e., a society where “women’s role is primarily only in the establishment and maintenance of the family” (p. 370).

In this short comment I’d like to complicate this claim further. Specifically, I want to argue that rather than simply succumbing to “traditional” views on women’s role in society, Hungarian illiberal democrats are bringing about a society surprisingly similar to that promoted by many Western liberal feminists, one where women, like men, are becoming proper citizens in a neoliberal capitalist economy. There are two basic dimensions of this status. First, women must participate full time, without interruption in the paid labor market. And second, they must form increasingly “private” living arrangements (households of any variation) which then effectively take over the social provisions vacated by the state and local communities.

According to an old anecdote, when in 1990 a western journalist asked the young Viktor Orban, whose small, fiery, liberal party was just elected into Parliament, what kind of role he expected women to play in their ranks, he looked somewhat confused by the question but after some hesitation responded: “Well . . . we do like women a lot.” Fidesz’ politicians, young and old, refuse to learn “western” table manners and the way they talk about women, gender relations, and family life reeks of sexism and misogyny couched in nationalistic, religious, populist terminology. But there is a stark contrast between the no-doubt rather disturbing sexism carelessly (or perhaps purposefully) manifested by key politicians in words, even in legislative documents, and most of the actual policies passed by the Fidesz government. Notably, these nationalist, religious, and otherwise populist discourses hide the scramble to discipline women—along with men—into enthusiastic participation in an increasingly precarious market economy. Far from a “traditional” role restricted to the household, women are expected to work for pay, meager and unstable as that pay may be.

A few pieces of data may serve to support this point. Between 2006, the peak manifested during the Gyurcsany government, and 2015, the most recent year from which data are available, women’s employment rate increased by 11 percent (while men’s only by 8 percent) and now stands at 62.1 percent, which is only 3 percentage points lower than the EU average (Eurostat data). The labor market reorganization ignited by the global economic crisis of 2008–2010 had an impact on this but so did a number of policies introduced by Fidesz explicitly to increase women’s labor force participation. These include the professionalization of work done on a voluntary basis before (such as in the case of fostering) and more importantly, the introduction of parental leave policies to lure especially middle-class and lower middle- class women back to the workplace before the end of their three-year maternity leave. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly given its verbal insistence on mothering and family life, the Fidesz government has built exactly twice as many nursery school slots in the past five years than the previous government did during its five-year reign and did so amidst declining or stagnating birth rates.

This is not to applaud Viktor Orban’s government for its enthusiastic support of the feminist revolution. Far from it. Women in Hungary are becoming the reserve army of global labor: most of them working in semi-precarious jobs making barely above the minimum wage while proudly aspiring to become the token female CEOs of Forbes 200 companies whose pictures greet them from the pages of otherwise unaffordably-overpriced international women’s magazines.

A growing number of people live outside of what is defined as “families” by the National Statistical Office (married or partnered heterosexual couples with and without children), age at first birth increased radically over the past decades, and an ever increasing percentage of women raise children without a partner even though their chances of poverty is immense and growing. This is hardly a “traditional” society: these are the social consequences of living in a resource-poor country within the global capitalist economy.

Our illiberal democrats are modern-day neoliberal feminists in disguise—much as they would shudder at this characterization. They occupy the political and policy space that liberal feminists would normally take and this is one reason why persuasive alternatives—real policy alternatives—are few and far between. Perhaps we should indeed return to a “traditional” society, only we should choose our traditions well. Perhaps matrilocality, as among the Navajo? Or a third gender, like the Hijra in India? Or the gender equality of hunter-gatherer societies which researchers now claim was an evolutionary advantage (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists)?

While these suggestions are obviously impossible, in order to regain the momentum for a feminist alternative, societal and ideological changes are needed that must go well beyond the model offered even by the otherwise highly gender-sensitive Sustainable Development Goals of the UN. In Hungary, especially, it is not enough to encourage women to join the labor market while giving birth to and raising more and more children, certainly not amidst the devaluation of care work, a sizeable wage gap with overall low salaries, the denigration of women’s political contributions, or threats to restrictions to reproductive freedom. Questioning gendered norms, gender itself, rethinking the notion of work and how it is valued, a new understanding of the concept of care as well as the household: family and sexuality are areas where progress may be sought, but these changes are well beyond the ambitions of illiberal, and even many liberal, governments.