National Consultation 2018 : Protection of families (Part 1)

Abstract

Women have been targeted in demographic discourses and policies for more than 200 years due to the unquestioned premise that the “natural fact” of procreation is women’s primary concern and, consequently, they are the primary causative agents of demographic imbalances. As an important element of this process, women’s “fertility behavior” and “childbearing willingness” have become indicators of demographic research. This limited perspective contributes to the maintenance of a particular gender regime and implicitly implies that women’s emancipation is the cause of the Western phenomenon of low reproductive rates. The gender regime (Walby 2001, 2004, 2011; Connell 1987) is a pattern of social relations that is linked to reproduction and gender-based division of work, though in different forms, in every society. The “National Consultation 2018: Protecting Families” text is one of the typical examples of today’s Hungarian gender regime. The current study is the first part of that analysis which uses the methods of discourse analysis to examine the text of the national consultation launched in the autumn of this year, in particular its questions.