Disregarding the history of women as violent perpetrators is not only detrimental to a truthful account of how the far-right came to power in the last century, but also to understanding how the past can reverberate into the present. With this major theme as background, Andrea Pető focuses her original analysis on a seldom documented part of Hungarian history, the female members and supporters of the Hungarian far-right Arrow Cross Party (ACP), which came to power shortly before the end of the Second World War. As Pető asserts and proves throughout her highly readable book, women that played active roles in the ACP, including perpetrating violent crimes, were rendered invisible both during and after the war.
Pető's account of women in far-right movements fits a limited but substantial literature on female perpetrators of war crimes and atrocities, that started with the debate between Gisela Bock and Claudia Koonz about the interpretation of German women's support for the Nazi Party and includes analysis of similar far-right movements in central and eastern Europe, such as the Croatian Ustaša and the Romanian Iron Guard. Pető's unique contribution is that she seeks to build on this previous literature while simultaneously adding her own interpretation through what is an almost detective-like work of revealing the context and, most importantly for her, motivations of female members and supporters for joining the ACP.
In the first chapter, Pető provides a double introduction about the history of ACP and the literature that explains how and why women perpetrators were invisible in the past century. Here Pető makes a particularly important point in calling out “fatal mistakes” (2–3) due to oversimplification or reductionism of mainstream explanations for the appeal of far-right ideology for women in Hungary and elsewhere. An example of such a mistake, made now and during the last century, is interpreting such movements as being antithetical to women's interests and aims.
In the next four chapters, Pető develops her account of women and the ACP by relying on never explored historical records (archives, the press, court cases, and records of the People's Tribunal, pictures, and her own interviews). The main essence of these four chapters is to lay out an idea expressed at the beginning of the book that “remembrance is not a descriptive category, but a concept actively constructed by those who remember in relation to the context and the space of remembering” (7). While necessary to the ACP, and thus allowed to participate in certain party endeavors, including violent ones, active women did not fit the gender rhetoric of male leaders, who struggled to explain “the paradox of being a woman and an active political agent in a party that expects a woman to be a mother above all” (28) and thus ignored or erased them. Pető shows in the third chapter, where she explores the multiple roles played by women in the ACP as political actors, supporters, wives, lovers, or devotees, how the first stage of the invisibilization was completed.
In the fourth chapter, the author looks at the how the women of the ACP were treated by the People's Tribunal established after 1945 to peruse war criminals and Nazi collaborators, which marks the second stage of the invisibilization. Pető shows that the new communist regime, through its courts and press, tried to describe women as victims of male ACP members and leaders, thus rewriting again history for the benefit of maintaining gender hierarchies. Finally, Pető focuses on the invisibility of women from recorded history, describing how women perpetrators are absent from photographs and other visual representations of the Second World War.
Throughout the book, Pető does not shy away from directly addressing any parallels that can and should be drawn between her research and recent debates regarding the increasing number of women supporting far-right parties and movements in Europe and US. But it is the final concluding chapter, which feels more like an open invitation from her to other researchers to continue investigating how women are invisibilized, that manages to convey in just a few pages the urgency of gendering the research of the far-right of the past and present. Pető's analysis of the ACP shines a light on how this invisibility encourages the type of extremist resurgence that central and eastern Europe have witnessed after 1989 by providing present day far-right leaders with an opportunity to resurrect their memory and to connect a deceptively reconstructed past with the present.
