Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania
204
Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania
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Overview
What is it like to be a woman living through the transition from communism to democracy? What effect does this have on a woman’s daily life, on her concept of herself, her family, and her community? This book presents the stories of women in Romania as they describe their experiences on the journey to democratic citizenship. In candid and revealing conversations, women between the ages of 24 and 83 explain how they negotiated their way through radical political transitions that had a direct impact on their everyday lives. Women who grew up under communism explore how these ideologies influenced their ideas of marriage, career, and a woman’s role in society. Younger generations explore how they interpret civic rights and whether they incorporate these rights into their relationships with their family and community.
Beginning with an overview of the role women have played in Romania from the late eighteenth century to today, Birth of Democratic Citizenship explores how the contemporary experience of women in postsocialist countries developed. The women speak about their reliance on and negotiations with communities, ranging from family and neighbors to local and national political parties. Birth of Democratic Citizenship argues that that the success of democracy will largely rely on the equal incorporation of women in the political and civic development of Romania. In doing so, it encourages frank consideration of what modern democracy is and what it will need to be to succeed in the future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253038487 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 204 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Maria Bucur is the John V. Hill Chair of East European History and Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her books include Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania, Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania, and Gendering Modernism: A Historical Reappraisal of the Canon.
Mihaela Miroiu is Professor of Political Science at the National School for Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania. Her books include Guidelines for Promoting Equity in Higher Education, Drumul Catre Autonomie (The road to autonomy: feminist political theories), and Nepretuitele Femei (Priceless women).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Women from Romania's Past into the Present: A Short Historical Overview
In the last two decades, historians and other scholars have started to delve into the history of women in Romania. Some have published research on the feminist movement, while others started to integrate gender into their social and political analyses of the recent past (Bolovan et al. 2009; Bucur 2017; Cheschebec 2005; Jinga 2015; Massino 2007; Vacarescu 2014). However, to date, no comprehensive history of women in Romania exists. Therefore, what follows provides specific context for our study and offers a sketch of what a history of women in modern Romania might look like. This overview examines the institutions (political, religious, legal, and cultural) and practices (social, economic, and cultural) that structured women's participation in Romanian society from the eighteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Without this context, the institutional framework that helped define gender norms and limited women's agency remains obscure. Throughout the rest of the book, we will reference moments on this timeline that help clarify our interviewees' responses.
Pre-1859 Wallachia and Moldavia: Women's Legal Subordination
Before 1859, when the Great Powers recognized the Romanian principalities' autonomy, there was no political entity named Romania. In the eighteenth century, the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia paid a tribute to the Ottoman Empire and in return the Porte left their internal administration and elites relatively untouched. During the same period, Transylvania, which became part of Romania after World War I, was a territory of the Habsburg Empire. While Transylvania enjoyed some autonomy, it was thoroughly integrated in Habsburg administrative structures. These political regimes used religious identity, as well as class/economic status and ethnicity, to define women's legal personhood, their rights and property protections, and the social expectations placed on them.
In Wallachia and Moldavia, the state's interests were closely linked to those of the ruling prince and local elites. As in most of the Ottoman Empire, notables here displayed little enthusiasm for women's education, rights, or any form of fundamental social change. In addition, the state apparatus was weak and its functions personalized and limited in scope (Vintila-Ghitulescu 2004). For most individuals in the principalities, the Orthodox Church represented the main, if not the only, institution in their daily lives. Thus, while women's fortunes hinged on the whims of the male ruling class, they depended even more on the teachings of the Orthodox Church — a veritable bastion of tradition and male privilege.
Church doctrine was the basis for laws governing all aspects of an individual's life, including marriage, property, and inheritance. The church gathered its teachings on these subjects into a compendium in 1652: Îndreptarea legii: Pravila cea mare (Setting the law: The great codex) (Radulescu et al. 1962). These laws pertained only to Orthodox Christians in the principalities, the majority of the population. They did not apply to Jews, Catholics, or Muslims. (Protestants had a significant presence only in Transylvania.) Implicitly, members of these religious minorities were subject to the traditions and restrictions of their respective denominations.
Îndreptarea legii represented women as a fundamentally different category of people than men, in terms of their nature, identity, obligations, and rights as members of this flock. The church described women's nature as weak and bent on sinning. It taught that women's reproductive functions and sexuality drove their behavior and that they possessed an inferior ability to reason (Radulescu et al. 1962). The gender norms and regulations that governed every aspect of human interaction, from marriage to economic activity, stemmed from these assumptions.
The church stipulated that all individuals marry and that this represented the most important contract they would enter over the course of their lives. Marriage also served as a means of controlling women. Consequently, the church recommended steering girls toward marriage early on — it deemed a twelve-year-old to be adequately grown-up, as menstruation often begins at this age, while by sixteen the bride's purity might come into question (Radulescu et al. 1962). By advising parents to marry their daughters young, the church made sexual activity the decisive element in determining female gender norms. It implicitly reduced women to their biology. In contrast, the church counseled men to marry later, ideally between ages eighteen and twenty-four. As heads of their household, men needed to demonstrate good judgment and Christian moderation, moral qualities they were implicitly considered capable of developing, unlike women. By contrast, the church and society seem to have placed little importance on women's emotional or intellectual capacities.
As heads of their households, men legally controlled the fortunes of minors and wives in their homes. Women entered marriages as their husbands' obedient followers, bringing a dowry with them to cover their expenses. Though the dowry technically belonged to the wife, the law obliged her to relinquish control of it to her husband, as he was responsible for her economic welfare. More generally, women had little or no legal power over the wealth/property of their marital home. For example, though a wife could directly inherit property left to her by a deceased parent, she could not sign contracts or exercise other forms of legal expression without her husband's consent (Vintila-Ghitulescu 2004, 2009).
Divorce was not a realistic option for most women. In Wallachia, fewer than two hundred divorce cases were filed in the eighteenth century. Since the principality's population had grown to 700,000 inhabitants by the end of that century, this statistic suggests that divorce was greatly frowned on and seldom attempted. Women, however, initiated far more of these cases than men. They generally brought charges of abandonment (e.g., the husband had disappeared for years and the woman was unable to sell her dowry or other property) or abuse (e.g., the husband beat his wife). Women's complaints tended to fall on the deaf ears of the priests (and occasionally princes, if the aggrieved party was a boyar) who adjudicated such matters. Wives were often told to patch things up with their abusers, some of their accounts were questioned, and sometimes women were publicly humiliated; none had recourse to appeal. In rare cases when a woman prevailed in court, there was no reliable enforcement of the decision. To pursue her husband, the aggrieved wife had to draw on her personal finances. If she could pay a vataf to successfully return her properties, the divorcée could attempt to start her life over, though she would still have to contend with the general opprobrium against divorce and especially divorced women.
As most women married early and never divorced, they remained legally and economically dependent on their fathers, husbands, and occasionally sons. Îndreptarea legii dictated that women could only dwell under the roof of either their father or their husband (Radulescu et al. 1962, 243). Only widows could hope to inherit their own houses. Thus, for most of their lives, women were relegated to a subordinate status in their own homes. Any authority women might have had within the household was informal and transitory, as it lacked legal recognition. The Orthodox Church, moreover, advised men to beat their wives often both to remind them of their inferior social position and to eliminate evil ideas from their minds (Radulescu et al. 1962, 119). No church teachings advocated for women to become self-sustaining human beings.
Women received very little education. Illiteracy rates among women were extremely high in the principalities and did not dip below 90 percent until the twentieth century (Murgescu 2010). Nearly all rural women were illiterate, as were most men. When educational institutions began to develop in the early nineteenth century, they were designed exclusively for boys (Tipei 2016). Only after the founding of a Romanian state in the second half of the nineteenth century (1859) did girls' education become a matter of public concern and policy. Consequently, women possessed very little knowledge of the law, state institutions, or written culture. The knowledge communicated by Orthodox priests on Sundays was likely the closest most women came to formal education.
Women's days were filled with the work of production and reproduction. Well into the twentieth century, women worked the fields, producing a variety of agricultural goods ranging from cheese to tuica (plum brandy). A small number of landowners controlled most of the land, and those dwelling on such properties, regardless of gender, toiled day in and day out (Hitchins 1996). In some communities, peasants held land, and there women worked next to men in the fields and at home (Stahl 1980). Some women participated in the cash economy through small-scale artisan work, including weaving, embroidery, and foodstuff. But profits reaped from market transactions belonged to the household and, therefore, to the husband.
The kind of live-in service work that provided young women in Western Europe greater social and economic autonomy starting in the early modern era did not develop in the principalities. Such arrangements violated Orthodox moral codes that mandated women live with their fathers or husbands. Among women, only slaves and serfs worked in the homes of others. The church condoned the institution of slavery and was the largest slave owner in the principalities. Though we have partial body counts, travelers' observations, and some court documents about beatings, these women left no records. Consequently, we know very little about the daily lives of slaves, the quality of their existence, or the abuses they suffered (Achim 1998).
Slaves, who were almost exclusively Roma, were traded and used for various forms of labor, including sex work (Achim 1998). Roma women worked in households and fields owned by boyars, the Orthodox Church, and the state. Îndreptarea legii and a number of other church records refer to the legal and moral status of slaves in terms of marriage, inheritance, and property rights. Women who were born or fell into slavery had no protection whatsoever from rape or any other form of physical abuse. In contrast, their owners could act as aggrieved parties if another free person damaged their "property."
Toward a Modern State: Women's Explicit Exclusion from the Polis
Though in the mid-eighteenth century Constantin Mavrocordat abolished serfdom in the Romanian principalities, illegal practices continued to tie propertyless peasants to the land until 1864. Consequently, on the large estates that dominated the countryside, men and women used for their labor were often abused.
Despite recorded abuses, serfdom and slavery persisted until after the election of the abolitionist Alexandru Ioan Cuza as prince of both Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859 (Hitchins 1996). In 1864 Cuza pushed through a civil code that emancipated the slaves, outlawed any means for continuing informal serfdom, and expropriated much of the Orthodox Church's land. Cuza was deposed five years later largely due to the unpopularity of these reforms and his disregard of the church's economic and political power.
However, Cuza was no friend of women's rights. The civil code he helped pass remained largely intact until the communist takeover. It more explicitly rendered women second-class citizens — further limiting their property rights and granting them no political rights. It was only in 1932 that married women in Romania gained the ability to control their property and sign contracts without their husbands' approval (Ciocalteau 1936).
While the legal and political situation of women did not improve between 1864 and the 1930s, they enjoyed new educational opportunities thanks to the efforts of feminists like Eugenia Reuss Ianculescu (1866–1938). Women's schools (primary and secondary) opened in larger urban centers like Bucharest and Iasi, and affluent families sent their daughters abroad to receive further training. For example, Alexandrina Cantacuzino (1876–1944), who became a prominent feminist leader after World War I, was part of this early generation of aristocratic women with the means to study in France (Cheschebec 2006).
In the late nineteenth century, most feminists focused on women's education. Their efforts garnered more public support than the ambitious suffrage agenda of smaller factions (Bucur 2007; Mihailescu 2002). Education-oriented feminists had radical goals, including increased public expenditure for women's education beyond the "traditional" female disciplines (e.g., music, languages, literature, home economics). They also fought for women to have access to a variety of new professions linked to the modernizing state. Thus, women passed exams not only to become teachers in girls' schools but also to practice as doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers. Romanian women did not lag behind their German or American counterparts in this respect. Especially from the 1890s on, Romanian, Western European, and American women's struggle for educational and professional equality bore a significant number of similarities.
Sarmiza Bilcescu (1867–1935) was one of the most ambitious and, in some respects, successful feminists of the period. She challenged the interdiction against women pursuing a degree in or practicing law. A brilliant pupil, at seventeen she was the youngest and only female student admitted to law school at the Sorbonne. In 1890, she returned to Romania a celebrity, having become the French institution's first female graduate (Ciupala 2003). Despite adamant opposition from the male establishment, she put in an application to join the Ilfov county legal association. Her credentials surpassed those of most male members, making it difficult to articulate a persuasive argument barring her from practice. Yet a prolonged legal battle and public debate on women's place in the profession ensued. While her eventual victory testifies to her extraordinary professional and human capacities, the outcome disappointed Bilcescu and other feminists. Unable to attract clients (most likely because she was a woman), Bilcescu worked to help other women receive an advanced education. Not until two decades after Bilcescu's suit did another woman, Ella Negruzzi (1876–1949), successfully begin practicing as a lawyer and even then only after numerous legal battles from 1914 to 1920 (Bucur 2006a).
Entering the law profession was more than a matter of personal ambition. Feminists like Negruzzi, Bilcescu, and their contemporary Calypso Botez (1880–1933) understood that the male ruling class used the law to exclude women from numerous areas of public and economic activity, including the vote. Their professional trajectories essentially challenged the civil code that rendered women subordinate to men (Bucur 2001b). Serious tests to this code, such as Negruzzi's, first appeared during World War I. Like other women of her time, Negruzzi realized that unless women made and adjudicated the law alongside men, the legal institutions, practices, and values of the Romanian state would remain a two-tier gender regime.
During World War I, the extreme limitations the civil code and other legislation imposed on women grew increasingly apparent. Legally, women could not manage their husbands' affairs without explicit consent (Alecsandru [1865] 2011, 65). This included selling agricultural and industrial goods. Thus, while the wife of a mobilized soldier could harvest their fields, she could not hire help or sell their crops, even those reaped from her dowry land, without her husband's written permission. The impact of these restrictions was devastating, as more than 80 percent of Romania's inhabitants dwelled in the countryside and most were illiterate.
Romania mobilized more than one million men during the war (half when it entered the conflict in 1916), approximately 13 percent of the total population, or the equivalent of the entire male population between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Given the average size of the Romanian family at that time, around one million women and three to four million minors, or 63 percent of the population, was left in an untenable situation. When their husbands left for the army, married women had few means of income. Though wealthy women could sell some personal assets, most had far fewer resources. To sustain their families, women had to barter their limited belongings or enter into informal agreements, trading labor for food and heating supplies. Some were reduced to scavenging (Bucur 2006b).
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsList of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Women from Romania's Past into the Present: A Short Historical Overview
2: Men: Working through Gender Norms at Home
3. Children: The Most Beautiful Accomplishment of My Life
4. Work and Personal Satisfaction.
5. Communities: Beyond the Family
6. Communism as State Patriarchy
7. Facing Capitalism and Building Democracy
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
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Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu have each done seminal work on the politics of gender in Romania and the broad topic of gender and post-communism. This book represents a major collaboration between them. Combining history, ethnography, and political analysis, Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania is a tour de force. Because it speaks powerfully to questions that are being currently debated in Romania, Poland, and Hungary, it is a book that all who are interested in post-communist Europe will want to read. And because it analyzes the themes of women, power, and democracy, it is a book that will be of interest to the broadest possible readership among scholars and the general reading public.
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