American Girls, Danubian Currents: Rezső Török’s Vadevezős and the Fate of the New Woman in Interwar Hungary

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In 1920s-1930s Budapest, the subculture of the “wild rower” (vadevezős) flourished on the banks of the Danube. Tens of thousands of people crammed in rowboats and boathouses for purely leisure purposes—in direct contradistinction to the regimented, exclusive athletic rowing clubs that previously dominated the shore. In contemporary popular culture, “wild rowing”—and the Budapest Riviera at large—was often presented in periodicals and film as a scene geared toward young women: symbolized as a zone of personal mobility and Jazz-Age media consumption. Its most emblematic work was Rezső Török’s bestselling 1937 novel Vadevezős, which captured the spirit of Budapest’s freewheeling waterfront lifestyle. Its heroine, Anna Széker, an independent but directionless New Woman, is transformed by rowing and romance into the domesticated partner of a fellow sportsman.
Historians Balázs Sipos and Barbara Papp have argued that the antebellum New Woman, that archetype of feminist independence on the Anglo-American pattern, did not simply disappear with the conservative turn in Hungary after 1919. Rather, the New Woman—or, in one of her manifestations, the “American Girl” (amerikai lány)—merged with the traditionalist visions of femininity of the Horthy era into something “hybrid” and complex. My paper offers a close reading of Török’s novel in this context, by way of comparison with the iconic film Meseautó [Dream Car] (1934, dir. Béla Gaál), to explore the fate of the “American Girl” in a contested age.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Andrew Behrendt is Associate Teaching Professor of History at the Missouri University of Science & Technology. He received his PhD in 2016 from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a historian of modern East Central Europe, with specialization in the cultures and societies of Hungary, Austria, and the Habsburg Empire, particularly in the interwar period. He currently serves as Chair of the AHEA Membership Development Committee. His work has appeared in Hungarian Cultural Studies, and his chapter on interwar Austrian-Hungarian tourism appears in the volume Das Erbe der Habsburgermonarchie in den Nachfolgstaaten, published January 2025.