Abstract
Although many scholars, policymakers, and ordinary people have repudiated state socialism as a political and socioeconomic system, as the above quote illustrates, socialism, as a way of life, decisively shaped and continues to shape how individuals think about their government, society, and themselves. Some might write such reflections off as nostalgia; however, it must be remembered that state socialism offered women opportunities for constructing their identities outside of the home and family. This was the case for Maria, the woman quoted above, who lost her job as an electrician in the early 1990s as a result of economic restructuring. While her family was still able to get by on her husband’s income, when I interviewed her in 2003, it was clear that work continued to be a strong source of self-identity for her. Moreover, work strongly influenced how she thought about her role as a woman, mother, and citizen and about the socialist past more generally.
How was our life then? The fact that we found work, we were promoted and we got raises … it didn’t seem difficult to me … it didn’t matter if you were well paid or just sufficiently paid, each person was important in their own way. We led a very industrious life. I came home from work, I washed, I ironed, I made food … and I still had time to embroider and knit. I led a very active life. Now I feel awful because it’s very difficult to pass from a period full of activity to a period where time is dead.1
An earlier and longer version of this article appeared in Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History vol. 3 (2009). I thank the Aspasia editors for allowing the republication of the text herein.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Barbara Wolfe Jancar, Women under Communism (Baltimore, 1978)
Hilda Scott, Women and Socialism: Experiences from Eastern Europe (London, 1976)
Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley, 1978)
Sharon L. Wolchik and Alfred G. Meyer, eds., Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe (Durham, NC, 1985)
Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism (New York, 1989)
Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceaus¸escu’s Romania (Berkeley, 1998).
See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884; Honolulu, 2001)
August Bebel, Women and Socialism (1879; New York, 1910).
For discussions of Marxism and the woman question see Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women? (Boston, 1974)
Janet Sayers, Mary Evans, and Nanneke Redclift, eds., Engels Revisited: New Feminist Essays (London, 1987)
Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983); and Alfred G. Meyer, “Feminism, Socialism, and Nationalism in Eastern Europe,” in Women, State, and Party.
On women workers in state socialist Eastern Europe see, for example, Barbara Lobodziknska, ed., Family, Women, and Employment in Central- Eastern Europe (Westport, CN, 1995)
Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April, 1999): 399–425
Eva Fodor, Working Difference: Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945–1995 (Durham, NC, 2003); and Eszter Toth’s and Basia Nowak’s chapters in this volume.
See, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999)
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)
Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, 2002)
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in The Eastern Bloc (Oxford, 2002)
Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2000).
Luisa Passerini, ed., International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories: Volume I: Memory and Totalitarianism (New York, 1992).
See, for example, Margaret R. Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz, eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT, 1987)
Nicoleta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York, 2004)
Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington, IN, 2006).
Ştefania Mihăilescu, Din istoria feminismului românesc: Antologie de texte, 1838–1929 (Bucharest, 2002), 15–30.
For a discussion of the use of consumer goods as a source of regime legitimation, see Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union underKhrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 211–52; Paulina Bren, “Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp and the Politics of Private Life in Post- 1968 Czechoslovakia,” and David Crowley, “Warsaw Interiors: The Public Life of Private Spaces, 1949–65,” both in Crowley and Reid, Socialist Spaces.
On the feminization of labor in socialist Eastern Europe, see Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (London, 1993); Wolchik and Meyer, Women, State, and Party; and Lobodzinska, Family, Women, and Employment.
It is estimated that anywhere from 80,000 to 90,000 Romanian citizens of ethnic-German origin were deported to the Ukraine in the immediate postwar period. See, for example, Doru Radosav, Donbas: O Istorie Deportată (Ravensburg, Germany, 1994)
Jill Massino, “Gender as Survival: Women’s Experiences of Deportation from Romania to the Soviet Union, 1945–1950,” Nationalities Papers 36, no. 1 (March 2008): 55–83.
The Labor Code of 1950 mandated that only women who were pregnant or breastfeeding were exempt from overtime. With the revision of the Labor Code in 1965, this applied to all women, however, it was often ignored in practice. See Elena-Simona Gheonea and Valentin Gheonea, “Statutul femeilor In legislat¸ia Romaniei comuniste (1948–1989),” in Femeile in România comunista: Studii de istorie socialia, ed. Christina Liana Olteanu, Elena Simona Gheonea, and Valentin Gheonea (Bucharest, 2003), 144–224.
See Doina Pasca Harsanyi, “Women in Romania,” and some of the other chapters in Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (New York, 1993).
See, for example, Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca, 1996)
Laura L. Frader and Sonya O. Rose, eds., Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, 1996).
See Alf Ludtke, “Organizational Order or Eigensinn? Workers’ Privacy and Workers’ Politics in Imperial Germany,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia, 1985).
The 1965 constitution officially forbade job discrimination on the basis of sex and the penal code made such an act subject to a fine of 100–500 lei. Ana Gluvacov, Afirmarea femei în viat¸a societat¸ii (Bucharest, 1975), 89–91.
Diane Koenker, “Men against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia: Gender and Class in the Socialist Workplace,” American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (December 1995): 1438–65.
William Moskoff, “Sex Discrimination, Commuting, and the Role of Women in Rumanian Development,” Slavic Review 37, no. 3 (1978): 441–49.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2009 Shana Penn and Jill Massino
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Massino, J. (2009). Workers under Construction: Gender, Identity, and Women’s Experiences of Work in State Socialist Romania. In: Penn, S., Massino, J. (eds) Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101579_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101579_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37751-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10157-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)