Private Lives

Budapest's Szabad Nep (Free People) buckled down to the job of educating its readers on what it calls the "Private Life of a Communist."

Said Szabad Nep: "A Communist is a Communist not only in the party but in his home life. He must ... be a model husband, wife, father or mother who cares for his children and educates them to become faithful members of the working class." One particularly important duty of the model father or mother: rejection of the "bourgeois slogan" of free love.

While upholding the new puritanism, Szabad Nep also upheld the importance of being pretty. In reply to a woman reader who remarked that she had no time to think about her looks, the fashion editor wrote sternly: "In your opinion, Comrade, it is a waste of time if a woman desires to express by a spotlessly laundered blouse or neatly groomed hair that she lives and works in a healthy and free country . . . You are 35, married, and have a child . . . Did you ever think what it would mean to your husband* if he could see you at home in a clean hostess gown of multi-flower print, your cheeks and hands smelling fresh? . . . And, I implore you, don't stand at the hot stove in the same dress you come home in. Put an apron around your waist, one of those plastic aprons with ruffles. They don't have to be washed . . .

"And don't talk about that symbol of 'elegance' for the working-class woman, the white blouse. To hell with the white blouse . . . Those polka-dotted or checked blouses are now the vogue. You can get them for 47 to 59 forints ($4 to $5) in every department store . . . Don't tell me you can't afford it ...

"And wash your hair before you go to the hairdresser, because it is cheaper that way . . ."

Turning briefly from its concern with private lives, Szabad Nep discussed the matter of private deaths. It severely criticized the editors of Hungary's Statistical Year Book for printing a chart listing "Deaths by hanging, deaths by shooting, etc." Said Szabad Nep: the publication of such statistics is not "necessarily in the public interest."

* The husband would have to watch himself, too. The boss of the Hungarian tailors' cooperative recently called on Hungarian shops to ban "all men's suits of American style . . . and American-style neckties."

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