The Hungarian wives who mass-poisoned their husbands

In the early 1900s, in the Hungarian village of Nagyrev, men died in their hundreds — and that’s excluding those already killed in World War I. The cause? A sisterhood of women tired of cruel, violent, negligent husbands.

These desperate women, some of whom even killed their own infants, were not witches, not evil entities. They were driven to the brink of their own humanity.

It’s a story that could believably be fiction, but it happened, a story pieced together here by journalist Hope Reese. Knitting the yarn of court documents, legal records, archival newspaper articles and the voices of experts, Reese outlines the dark history of a poisonous sisterhood. More than that, she digs deep into the cultural context of why they did what they did.

The Women Are Not Fine is the true story of these women.

Explains Reese at the beginning: “It is also a story about what happens when women are neglected, when women are abused, when women are living on the edge of poverty with little legal recourse for improving their lives. It is a story of what happens when women search for an escape. It is what happens when women come together.”

Over two decades, the community of women in the village are thought to have killed over 300 men. Midwife Zsuzsanna Fazekas (referred to often as Auntie Zsuzsi) helped bring forth new life, but also ended it.

She is thought to have been at the centre of the scandal. Her instructions to the women who sought her counsel was to soak flypaper in water and skim the arsenic from the top before serving it to an unsuspecting husband.

As Reese lays bare, the smalltown Hungarian society in which they lived was not one that fostered the safety, agency or autonomy of its female population.

It’s glaringly obvious in the likes of the quoted Hungarian proverb “Az asszony verve jó” which translates to “A wife is good when beaten”. Sociologists at that time held that: “Women are of less value than men; they cannot even be compared.”

Despite being vital to the dayto-day running of farms and businesses, women had few rights and were even told where they were allowed to eat in the home.

Divorce was legally difficult and expensive, applicable only in the rarest of scenarios, and it was socially disallowed, reflecting poorly on the woman in the marriage. Widows, however, were accepted.

The setting may be the turn of the 20th century, but there is an urgent message that runs underneath the narrative: there are women alive today who share these struggles. It’s a historical account, certainly, but it is rooted in the reality for many in modern society too.

Reese’s storytelling is colourful, painting a picture of homesteads and courtrooms with stark clarity and shadow. Every aspect is meticulously researched, and there is a chorus made up of journalists, sociologists and historians who can corroborate even the most unbelievable truths.

Perhaps on account of the depth of the book’s research, it is quite dense considering its modest length. That means there is a lot of background to cover before getting to the core of the story, and readers may feel as though the meat of it is being withheld at times.

But while it stalls the momentum at certain points, the context given is necessary to fully understand the sociological landscape of Nagyrev.

The subject is grim but not unnecessarily heavy, and it is handled carefully by Reese, who is adept at seeing the humanity in even the darkest acts.