Massino, Jill - Constructing The Socialist Worker - Gender, Identity and Work Under State Socialism in Braşov, Romania

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Constructing the Socialist Worker:

Gender, Identity and Work under
State Socialism in Braşov, Romania
Jill Massino
ABSTRACT
Utilising socialist legislation, propaganda and oral history interviews, this article anal-
yses how women’s identities and roles – as well as gender relations – were reformu-
lated as a result of women’s participation in paid labour in socialist Romania. Although
some women regarded work as burdensome and unsatisfying, others found it intel-
lectually fulfilling, personally rewarding and, in certain respects, empowering. For ex-
ample, work improved women’s economic position and offered them an array of social
services, which, although inadequate in a number of ways, were welcomed by many
women. Moreover, work increased women’s physical and social mobility, which in
turn provided them with greater freedom in directing their own lives and in choosing
a partner. Finally, the experience of being harassed by male co-workers and of combin-
ing work outside the home with domestic responsibilities motivated some women to
rethink their status both within the workplace and the family, and to renegotiate their
relationships with male colleagues and partners. Although women never achieved full
equality in socialist Romania, by creating the conditions for women’s full-time engage-
ment in the workforce, state socialism decisively shaped the course of women’s lives,
their self-identities and their conceptions of gender roles, o en in positive ways.
KEYWORDS: everyday life, gender, paid labour, Romania, state socialism, women
Introduction
‘Everyone worked. In the first place it was policy to create jobs for women to also enter
into the labour force, in the second place because a man’s salary was not sufficient to
provide the basic necessities for a family.’1 This quote offers two reasons for women’s
paid employment outside the home, one ideological, the other practical. According to
aspasia Volume 3, 2009: 131–160

doi:10.3167/asp.2009.030107
132 JILL MASSINO
Corina, during the socialist period work was a political tool: a medium through which
the state sought to garner support by, at least officially, advancing women’s economic
autonomy. At the same time, it was a pragmatic response to economic need. For many
scholars of gender and state socialism, such as Hilda Sco , Gail Lapidus and Doina
Pasca Harsanyi, this quote underscores one of state socialism’s major shortcomings:
the disconnect between ideology and everyday life.2 The socialist state, they argue,
was interested in women’s economic equality with men only in so far as their pro-
gramme of mass industrialisation could be realised and support for the state could
be garnered. Seen from this perspective, the economic autonomy of women was a
by-product of, not a motivating force for, socialism. Thus, while socialist policies such
as guaranteed employment and universal education and health care may have been
beneficial to women and their families, because these policies were more strategic than
genuine, they were not accompanied by concerted efforts to transform patriarchal at-
titudes and practices as they played out in the home and at work.
Although certainly representative of some women’s lives, such interpretations fo-
cus more on how the socialist state acted upon individuals than on how individuals
responded to state policies and lived with them as an everyday experience. To be sure,
women’s mass employment under socialism did not culminate in gender equality as
August Bebel, Friedrich Engels, Clara Zetkin and other early socialist theorists had
envisaged.3 This was due to the privileging of class over gender and the emphasis
on women’s productive roles over their domestic (in particular reproductive) ones.4
It was also rooted in the belief that women’s full participation in paid labour outside
the home would naturally culminate in equal gender relations.5 However, despite the
shortcomings in Marxist approaches to women – both as theorised and as practised – it
remains the case that women’s participation in the labour force did dramatically alter
women’s roles, self-identities and relations with men – o en in positive ways. While
some women found paid work exhausting, time-consuming and wholly unfulfilling,
others found it empowering, intellectually stimulating and personally validating. On
a very basic level, in Romania state socialism broadened women’s social and cultural
worlds, luring them away from the countryside and into industrial towns and cities.
These realities, coupled with the monetary benefits of work, offered women greater
freedom in directing their lives and choosing a partner. This in turn increased women’s
self-confidence, emboldening some to challenge patriarchal a itudes and practices
and renegotiate relations with their husbands and male colleagues. Work also offered
women a vast array of social services and benefits such as paid maternity leave, pro-
tective legislation for pregnant women, and child care services, which, despite their
shortcomings, decisively affected women’s ability to support themselves and their
families.6 Although state efforts to promote gender equality through women’s par-
ticipation in paid labour were rooted more in pragmatism than in genuine concern
for women, this does not negate the positive impact of socialist policies on women’s
lives. As a corollary to this, while state socialism forced people into particular moulds
and roles – such as worker, socialist activist and, in the case of women, mother – not
all women unquestioningly embraced these roles, nor did they necessarily view them
as oppressive or limiting. In the end what is clear is that women in Romania experi-
enced life under state socialism in diverse, complex and o en contradictory ways. As
GENDER, IDENTITY AND WORK UNDER STATE SOCIALISM IN ROMANIA 133
a result, the question, ‘Did socialism liberate women?’ can no longer be considered
rhetorical, but requires a ending to multiple voices and stories.
Drawing upon these stories and voices as well as recent scholarship on gender, so-
ciety and everyday life in the Soviet Union and socialist Eastern Europe, this article ap-
proaches women labourers in socialist Romania from the perspective of everyday life.
I begin with an analysis of socialist policy and propaganda, exploring how women
were officially represented as workers. Because work served as the basic determinant
of what constituted a loyal and respectable socialist citizen, it offers a rich site for
analysing how the relationship between the state and the individual was constituted,
represented and elaborated.7 Moreover, because both gender and actual women were
essential to the socialist project in Romania, an examination of work offers insight into
how ideas about gender shaped socialist labour policies and how these policies, in
turn, shaped women’s lives.8 Scholars such as Wendy Goldman, Lynne A wood and
Eva Fodor, among others, have demonstrated the central role played by gender in the
organisation of the labour force, in the elaboration of labour policies, and in the nature
of social relations between men and women on the factory floor under state socialism.9
For instance, in their effort to conscript women into the labour force socialist propa-
gandists o en appealed to women in highly gendered terms. Moreover, policy makers
thought in gendered terms when organising the labour force and instituting labour
polices. For example, although women were codified as equal socialist citizens, as a
result of protective legislation they were restricted from participating in certain jobs
and were the targets of gender-specific family policies – such as maternity leave – that
reinforced rather than challenged essentialist notions of gender.
Yet, while gender was useful in the construction of labour policies and in mobilis-
ing women into the labour force, it was also a basic lens through which individuals
interpreted, negotiated, resisted and in some cases wholly ignored these discourses.
Thus, a primary focus of this article is to examine how work shaped women’s experi-
ences, a itudes, self-identities and relationships – both at home and on the shop floor.10
In this respect, I draw on the work of Lynne Haney, Donna Harsch and Shana Penn,
who have examined not only how women were affected by, but also how women re-
sponded to state policies and practices in their daily lives in socialist Eastern Europe.11
Lynne Haney, for example, has explored how women, through interactions with social
workers and by mobilising their identities as mothers, workers and heads of house-
holds, succeeded in securing welfare benefits for themselves and their families in so-
cialist and post-socialist Hungary. Shana Penn has reconstructed how Polish women,
active in the core circles of Solidarity, organised ordinary women and their homes into
housing networks that harboured the underground’s activities and actors during the
1980s martial law period. Finally, Donna Harsch has examined how ordinary women
and men ‘domesticated’ state policy in East Germany by pu ing pressure on the state
to a end to their consumerist, marital, and familial needs.
I also build upon the work of social and cultural historians such as Padraic Kenney,
Stephen Kotkin and Sheila Fitzpatrick, who have analysed state socialism from the
perspective of Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life).12 By focusing on ‘actually
existing socialism’, their work has challenged the totalising narratives of the Cold War,
and replaced them with more nuanced portraits of state socialism that explore every-
134 JILL MASSINO
day aspects of life, such as grocery shopping, relations with colleagues, and leisure
from the perspective of ordinary individuals. In addition, by highlighting the role of
average individuals in adapting to, negotiating, and in some cases resisting the sys-
tem, their work has complicated the notion that intellectuals and dissidents were the
motivating force in resisting communism. Finally, by focusing on women from an ev-
eryday life perspective, I seek to go beyond the repressive effects of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s
reproductive policies, recognising that reproduction was an important, but not neces-
sarily the most important, aspect of women’s lives under socialism in Romania.13
In my examination of women labourers, I utilise a variety of sources including
those relating to socialist policy and legislation, official Communist Party newspapers
and magazines, and oral history interviews. The official women’s monthly, Femeia (The
woman, published by the Romanian Communist Party from 1947 to 1989), with its edi-
torials, personal profiles, advice columns, short pieces of fiction, and fashion spreads
and advertisements, in particular provides valuable insight into state-mediated con-
ceptions of gender in Romania as well as other countries in the Soviet bloc and in the
West.14 Instead of dismissing socialist policy and propaganda as token nods to gender
equality, I examine how they offered women new ways of thinking about work and
their roles and identities as workers. Thus I recognise that for some women, socialist
discourse was genuinely meaningful, serving as an important frame for interpreting,
representing and reflecting on their lives in socialist Romania. Moreover, rather than
viewing tradition and socialism as opposing forces, I consider how they worked in
harmony, acknowledging that the state rejected some aspects of tradition while pro-
moting others.
The interviews featured in this article were conducted in 2003 and followed the
life history approach.15 Eighty-five subjects were selected using the snowball method
and were interviewed by myself and three students of sociology from the University
of Transylvania in Braşov. Although guided by a questionnaire that included roughly
sixty open-ended questions dealing with a wide range of issues including childhood,
education, work, marriage, family relations, sexuality, leisure, politics, ethnic relations
and the post-communist transition, I began each interview with a general question
about childhood and family and simply let the subjects narrate their lives. At the time
of the interviews, my subjects were between the ages of thirty-three and eighty. During
the socialist period they were employed in various realms including skilled and semi-
skilled industry, the socialist bureaucracy, medicine and engineering, and education
and the arts. While some began working in the early 1950s, during the period of rapid
industrialisation, the majority entered the labour force in the 1960s and 1970s when
efforts to promote women in male-dominated fields intensified and Ceauşescu’s pro-
natalist schemes were instituted. Since my study focuses on the city of Braşov proper,
the experiences of rural women are not examined; however, because many of my re-
spondents were raised in rural areas, I consider how their upbringing affected their
adaptation to life in an urban se ing.
Like Luisa Passerini, I view oral history as a rich source for exploring the everyday
aspects of life under socialism as well as the larger political, economic and sociocul-
tural world of socialism. Indeed, considering the degree to which the socialist state
influenced the writing of history, oral history, as Krassimira Daskalova has noted, ‘is
especially a ractive in its capacity to preserve unofficial, non-institutionalised knowl-

edge, to revive and re-establish marginalised and forgo en voices, to write history
“from below”, from the point of view of the “ordinary people”’.16 Thus, I place subjec-
tivity at the heart of my analysis, exploring the wide-ranging meanings of work and
focusing on issues that were important to the women I interviewed. More generally,
my analysis is informed by the belief that there is no simple, coherent or even repre-
sentative narrative of women’s lives under state socialism; instead there are multiple
and competing ones, none of which should be privileged.
At the same time, I also recognise that oral histories, like other historical sources,
represent a particular construction of the past, based on stories about, for example, the
family, the state, the self, and other topics that the subject has chosen to share with me.
These stories are thus mediated by the various discourses that the subject had access to
in the past (for example, socialist slogans regarding women’s equality, religious beliefs
and family practices) as well as discourses she currently has access to (such as liberal
individualism, the market economy and political pluralism). These stories have also
been shaped by individuals’ everyday experiences of the transition to post-socialism,
which for some has been characterised by – at least until the recent changes brought
about by accession to the EU – poverty, social alienation, and more generally dissatis-
faction with the market economy. Such dissatisfaction can translate into veneration of
the socialist past, or what some scholars term ‘communist nostalgia’.17 While important
to keep in mind, at the same time, it cannot be assumed that people’s experiences of the
transition have significantly influenced or completely misshaped all their memories of
the socialist past. For example, women’s frustration over the loss of what they consider
basic, civic rights (guaranteed work and state-subsidised vacations and child care) is
not so much evidence of nostalgia for the past as it is an unsentimental response to a
real sense of displacement, economic uncertainty and loss of community.18 While it is
impossible to determine the degree to which the recollections analysed in this project
have been shaped by experiences of the present, it is important to acknowledge this as
a potential factor. Yet, at the same time, such possibilities should not be seen as wholly
determining or undermining the investigation and analysis at hand.
The Industrialisation of Braşov
A commercial, publishing and cultural centre boasting a few fledgling industries in

the interwar period, during the Second World War Braşov and the surrounding area
were the site of bombings and heavy fighting19 (see Figures 1 and 2). Thus, the new
communist government was faced not only with the tasks of consolidating power, na-
tionalising the economy and building industry, but also had to rebuild parts of the city.
Braşov’s rapid industrialisation was not simply an ‘achievement of the socialist state’,
but especially the product of human labour power. Women were essential in the drive
to industrialise, and many of them were employed at Steagul Roşu (The red flag) and
Tractorul (The tractor), the country’s largest truck and tractor factories, both situated
in Braşov. Founded in 1947, these factories served as the city’s primary employers for
both native Braşovians and the many people who relocated to Braşov from various
136 JILL MASSINO
parts of the country, particularly rural Moldavia. Thus, the industrialisation of the city
was accompanied by a dramatic rise in population (from 82,984 to 314,645 people be-
tween 1948 and 1981), a good portion of which was not originally from the region.20 By
1950, just prior to the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan (1951–1955), Braşov
was the second largest industrial city in Romania, boasting fi y-two factories.21 In-
deed, so important was the Soviet model of industrialisation that Braşov became a
poster city for these ideological goals: from 1951 to 1961 the city was officially known
as Oraşul Stalin (Stalin city) and the Soviet leader’s name was spelled out in fir trees on
Tâmpa, the tallest peak overlooking the city. The industrialisation of the city was also
followed by the construction of apartment buildings and the development of working-
class neighbourhoods such as Tractorul, Saturn and Steagul Roşu.
By 1966, according to official statistics, 40 percent of Braşov’s labourers were
women.22 Although women’s participation in industry was not unique, the scale on
which women were employed in socialist Eastern Europe far exceeded that of the
West. For example, by 1970 74.9 percent of working-age women (aged twenty to fi y-
nine years) were employed outside the home in Romania; 76.6 percent in Poland;
76.3 percent in Czechoslovakia; and 61.6 percent in Hungary. Meanwhile, in Western
Europe women’s level of employment was as follows: the United Kingdom, 54.2 per-
cent; France, 51.2 percent; and Sweden, 49.8.23 This was due in part to the fact that many
women in the West worked either temporarily, or for ‘the duration’, that is, during
periods of crisis such as the First and Second World Wars.24 At the end of the Second
World War, in particular, many
women in the West lost their jobs
to accommodate returning vet-
erans. In addition, women’s em-
ployment was influenced and
legitimated by Cold War ideol-
ogy. While in the capitalist West,
returning women to the kitchen
was designed to re-establish the
prewar gender order and show-
case the affluence of the West
(women did not ‘need to work’),
in the Soviet bloc pu ing women
to work in the factories was de-
signed to highlight the progres-
siveness of the socialist project.25
Consequently, in the West wom-
en’s civic identities were prem-
ised upon their roles as good
mothers and homemakers, while
Figure 1. Map of Contemporary Romania. in the socialist bloc they were
Source: C.I.A. Fact Book h p://www.ece.gov.nt.ca/Maps/
premised on their roles as good
World%20and%20Canada%20Maps%20Publish/factbook/ workers – though women’s roles
print/ro.html as mothers were also important.
Figure 2. Bra ov’s main square, Piaţa Sfatului.

Source: Virtual Tourist h p://members.virtualtourist.com/m/6629b/7f239/
‘A Remarkable Force in the Development of Our Country’:

The Construction of the Socialist Woman Worker in Policy and Propaganda
For the most part, countries in Southeastern Europe, such as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria
and Romania, were highly agrarian.26 As a result, during the socialist period indus-
trialisation in this region, in comparison with the more advanced countries of Central
Eastern Europe such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, was undertaken more
rapidly and on a more massive scale.27 Constituting over half the population of Roma-
nia, women were a potentially enormous labour pool, crucial for the modernisation
of the country. Officially the goal of all socialist states included the full employment
of women and a complete transformation of gender relations. But since rapid indus-
trialisation was the key to socialist progress, the primary reason behind pronounce-
ments about women’s full employment was strategic rather than genuinely directed
at women’s emancipation. All the same, by encouraging female paid employment the
socialist state could (theoretically) kill two birds with one stone: advance on a path of
rapid industrialisation, while at the same time actively promote female liberation.
However, considering the rural and patriarchal character of the country, the mass
participation of women in industry, at least in the 1950s, was jarring since it threatened
to disrupt traditional values and belief systems. Although in the regions that constitute
present-day Romania women had worked for centuries in farming, sewing, cra s and
138 JILL MASSINO
other co age industries, because this work occurred within the larger domestic realm,
it did not challenge the traditional gender order.28 And, while from the turn of the
twentieth century women were increasingly engaged in light industry and fields such
as medicine, law and journalism, pre-existing notions about gender roles and behav-
iours continued to shape popular a itudes about women well into the state-socialist
period. Beyond this, to most individuals ‘communism’ was an abstract concept and
Soviet import – not the type of ideal that inspired one to take up factory work. The na-
tion, on the other hand, was much more meaningful. Indeed, as Katherine Verdery has
argued, the socialist state ‘constructed its “nation” on an implicit view of society as a
family headed by a “wise” Party’.29
Thus, in order to make both socialism and the notion of women industrial workers
palatable, socialist propagandists in Romania drew on traditionally feminine qualities
such as sacrifice and devotion, urging women to fight against fascism and the ‘war-
mongers in the West’ by engaging in industrial labour. As one woman commented in
Scânteia (The spark) in the early 1950s: ‘I commit myself to fight with all my energy to
fulfil or even surpass the norms … being convinced that only in this way can I give the
most decisive response to the plo ing American and English imperialists who want
to stop us on the road [to socialism] and who threaten world peace.’30 By connecting
women’s labour productivity to the greater ‘struggle for peace’, the Party refashioned
work as an urgent, national necessity—the only humane and reasonable response to
capitalist-imperialist forces, who, according to propagandists, were bent on world
domination. As such, work became the basis for peace. In addition to such pronounce-
ments, readers of Scânteia were told that women in the West ‘make 50 percent less
than males and have to resort to prostitution to feed their children’.31 By accentuating
the dismal lives of women in non-socialist countries, the Party created a standard by
which its citizens could evaluate their own lives. More insidiously, by making constant
reference to capitalist barbarity and invoking the imminent threat of war, the Party
sought to deflect a ention away from the terror, chaos and overall suffering its people
were facing and, at the same time, highlight the virtues of the socialist system.
In the early years of socialist rule, women’s capacities in farming and heavy indus-
try were glorified. The intention was to overturn sexist arguments regarding women’s
lack of physical strength and stamina and thus challenge male dominance in this area.
Indeed, according to Gail Kligman, by the mid-1950s women’s roles as labourers tem-
porarily replaced their roles as mothers – at least in official discourse.32 In Romania the
emblematic symbol of female emancipation and socialist success was Mita the tractor
driver. As one of my respondents, Valeria, a former nurse, wryly recounted:
Yes, there was Mita the tractor driver, there is even a song [about her] … this
tractor driver … she was very robust: was able to work three shi s. She was
also a heroine mother who had ten children. She received diplomas, medals,
she probably also received money.33
Despite her veneration by Party propagandists, who presented her as the quintes-
sential socialist superwoman, Mita’s image outside of official spheres was much less
fla ering. She was commonly referred to as a floozy, blond bombshell, simpleton and
country bumpkin. Thus, unlike the Amazonian female Stakhanovite glorified in Soviet
lore, Mita, because she retained her feminine qualities, was not upse ing to the tradi-
tional gender order.34
While Mita was more fiction than fact, such ‘heroine workers’ became the yard-
sticks for socialist success, part of the legitimating myth of both socialism and female
liberation.35 Although essentially a socialist superwoman, the heroine worker was pre-
sented as a model; her ability to exceed quotas was not due to some inherent, genetic
proclivity for hyper-productivity, but rather the result of diligence, devotion and, of
course, the Party. This was evident in the autobiographical tales that she ‘wrote’ for 8
March (International Women’s Day) editions of Scânteia during the 1950s and 1960s.
Like many of the stories that appeared in the Soviet Union, these stories charted wom-
en’s journey from shy, illiterate, peasant girl to a well-read, efficient and confident
factory director. For instance, in one article a female Stakhanovite employed in the
wool industry described her work experiences prior to the war, when women’s labour
was ‘cheaper’ and ‘we were missing elementary rights’, ‘but now,’ she continued,
‘under the popular democracy we know liberty, we can be happy about the rights
we have, which any citizen in our country has. Today I number among those work-
ers in our country who carry the title of heroine worker. For this I thank my Party
and government’.36 According to this scripted story, personal skill and diligence alone
were clearly not sufficient for the realisation of one’s productive capacity. Rather, the
proper political and social conditions were first required to create an environment in
which such qualities could be expressed and officially acknowledged. Another auto-
biographical sketch in Femeia told the story of Sanda Herghelegiu, a woman from rural
Moldavia who trained as an electrician in 1950, an occupation, she noted, formerly
‘reserved only for men’. Within a mere six months she became one of the best work-
ers in her group, for which she had her ‘Party and the Socialist Republic to thank’.37
Although on the surface reminiscent of the typical American stories about the self-
made-man, these socialist Bildungsromanen were distinctly different in that it was not
the self (and capitalism) but the Party (and socialism) that ultimately made such suc-
cesses possible.
In contrast to the uncertainty and fear that permeated life under Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej, during the early years of Ceauşescu’s leadership, according to many
of my respondents, Romanians experienced a rise in living standards, an increase in
material goods – even from the West – and a greater degree of autonomy (control
over reproduction not included). Such measures, in particular the material palliatives
and the glorification of national art and culture, had become increasingly common
throughout the Soviet bloc by this period, employed by a number of post-Stalinist
leaders in Eastern Europe in an a empt to maintain support for the Party and stave
off popular discontent.38 A shi was also apparent in women’s visual representation
by the socialist press. Whereas under Dej images of burly tractor drivers or plain-
looking textile workers were the norm, a er Ceauşescu took power in 1965, images of
female labourers became increasingly beautified and glamorous (see Figures 3 and 4).
The beautification of the female labourer was the definitive visual symbol of mature
socialism. Like the cosmetics and fashionable dresses advertised in department stores
and on the pages of Femeia, the glamorous and modern worker was intended to sig-
140 JILL MASSINO
nify progress without sacrifice.39 Rather than

signs of bourgeois decadence, such images
were now evidence of socialism’s success.
In such a climate, even women’s lifestyles
were changing, as a writer for Femeia noted:
‘women are reared much differently today,
education has expanded; books, radio, tele-
vision are everywhere; on the whole, life is
much richer’.40
Yet, despite the outward appearance of
liberalisation, from a gendered perspective
these discursive changes masked a larger
and more troublesome change, namely the
state’s reconceptualisation of women’s roles.
With the criminalisation of abortion in 1966,
women’s civic identity in socialist Roma-
nia was reformulated, and women were
evaluated according to both productive and
reproductive output. Like work and po-
litical agitation, motherhood also became a
civic duty and was evaluated according to
Figure 3. Vasilica, a typical textile worker, (re)productive levels. This was evident in
Femeia, January 1959, vol. 12, no. 1 the increased glorification of heroine moth-
ers and the material and monetary incen-
tives granted for women’s reproductive output. Other inducements to reproduce were
enshrined in Ceauşescu’s new social welfare benefits, which included a (nearly) four-
month maternity leave and prenatal and post-partum care. This was accompanied by
a new Labour Code that spared pregnant women from heavy labour, night shi s, and
work in toxic environments.41
The dual demands placed on women reflected – and also served to perpetuate –
Ceauşescu’s strategy of appropriating well-established beliefs about women and the
nation in order to legitimate his national version of socialism. By utilising socialist
discourse in conjunction with previously elaborated conceptions and myths regarding
women’s traditional and essential roles, Ceauşescu a empted to reconcile and garner
support for the demands he placed on women as both producers and reproducers. In
addition to being a source of physical beauty, in the media motherhood was presented
as a source of psychological well-being and diligence as low levels of labour produc-
tivity were, at least officially, correlated with small family size.42
Accompanying the glorification of motherhood were efforts to promote women
labourers. To this end, in the late 1970s Ceauşescu introduced a massive promotional
scheme to level the occupational playing field. Although officially designed to promote
women in fields such as engineering, science and politics, its primary function was to
legitimate Elena Ceauşescu’s increased influence in the Party leadership and as the
head of the National Council on Science and Technology.43 Presented simultaneously
as ‘comrade, academician, doctor, engineer … and prominent personality … with
qualities as a … scientific figure, a wife

and mother’, by the late 1970s Elena
Ceauşescu became one of the new sym-
bols of socialist womanhood, replacing
the many anonymous heroine workers
and heroine mothers of the 1950s and
1960s.44 Similarly, statistics, alongside
personalised stories of advancement,
became the measure for gauging wom-
en’s progress under socialism during
this period. Yet, both efforts glossed
over continued gender inequity and
served as a supportive companion to
such vague and otherwise unsubstan-
tiated statements as this one voiced in
Scânteia by Ceauşescu in 1984: ‘a sector
does not exist where women do not act
in the same way as men’.45
In their efforts to validate female
employment, socialist propagandists
sought to increase female labour, in-
stil a sense of duty and loyalty to the
state, fashion a positive public identity Figure 4. Identity and glamour through work, Fe-
for women and deflect a ention away meia, August 1965, vol. 18, no. 8
from daily realities. Yet, although so-
cialist propaganda was an instrument of power politics, and was frequently excessive,
hyperbolic and distorted from a contemporary vantage point, it remains the case that
women interpreted and responded to socialist propaganda in manifold ways. To what
degree did women internalise or incorporate such sentiments into their own concep-
tions of work and, more particularly, gender equality and self-identity? Were these
discourses and their accompanying images empowering for women, instilling in them
a sense of autonomy and the self-confidence to persevere through harassment by male
colleagues and the arduous twelve-hour shi s? Or did women recognise the propa-
gandistic messages and ignore or a empt to subvert them? Although it is difficult to
gauge the impact of socialist propaganda on women’s self-perceptions, their experi-
ences in the labour force affected them in diverse and o en ambiguous ways. The fol-
lowing section explores women’s recollections of work, considering in particular how
work shaped their self-identities, their ideas about gender roles and the family, and
their experiences of life under socialism more generally.
‘Building Socialism’ or ‘Just Getting By’?: Women’s Experiences of Work
As the quote at the beginning of this article suggested, women worked because ‘it was
policy’, but also because their husbands’ salaries were insufficient for providing the
142 JILL MASSINO
basic necessities. To be sure, many women were guided by pragmatic reasons such as
economic need and access to social services. However, a variety of other factors also
influenced their choice to work. For one, increased educational opportunities allowed
some women to pursue jobs that they considered personally, intellectually or cre-
atively fulfilling. Indeed, many of my respondents who worked in skilled trades and
professions that required a university degree, creativity or technological know-how
claimed they genuinely enjoyed their work.46 Additionally, some women worked for
ideological reasons, be they socialist, nationalist or humanist. A desire to stave off so-
cial isolation also played a role in women’s decision to work outside the home. Finally,
since productivity was the measure of civic worth in socialist Romania, some women
worked to be a part of the greater socialist community and/or to avoid being labelled a
‘social parasite’ or otherwise stigmatised. As Clio, a translator, sardonically remarked:
‘All women had to have jobs; if you did not have a job you were looked down upon
because you had to participate in the construction of communism, you know.’47
Women’s position within the labour force both challenged and reinforced essen-
tialist beliefs regarding women and work. On the one hand, women’s increased access
to vocational training and secondary and higher education facilitated their entry into
professional fields such as social work, education (particularly at the elementary level)
and medicine. For example, in 1974, when women made up 45.2 percent of the total
labour force in socialist Romania, women constituted 72 percent of those employed in
public health and social services, 63.3 percent of those employed in education, culture
and the arts (collectively) and 75.7 percent of those employed in the textile indus-
tries.48 On the other hand, because this type of work was considered to be an extension
of women’s traditional roles as domestic caregivers and housekeepers and because
these jobs were considered either low-skilled or bourgeois (requiring brain rather than
brawn), they assumed a lower status than did the heavy, manual-labour jobs typically
idealised by the state in sectors such as mining, construction and metallurgy. As a
result, jobs in heavy industry, along with directorship and administrative posts, gar-
nered some of the highest wages under state socialism and were overwhelmingly per-
formed by men.49 For instance, in 1974 men constituted 91.3 percent of those employed
in construction, 88.5 percent of those employed in the ferrous metallurgical industry,
and 66.5 percent of those employed in administration.50 The privileging and gendering
of heavy industrial and administrative jobs and the concomitant devaluation of semi-
skilled and mid-level professional posts thus undermined efforts for full occupational
equality in socialist Romania – and other countries in the Soviet bloc.51
Nonetheless, according to my respondents, women engaged in physically de-
manding work and were subject to many of the same schedules, conditions and norms
as men. Typically, factory work was preceded by or occurred in conjunction with a
training programme; however, in the early years of socialist rule people o en had no
preparation or prior training. Such was the case of Regine, who began working for the
national railroad company (CFR) in 1951. She recalled:
From the first day I began to work like a man, because the men [on my team]
said ‘if a woman has the same rights as we do, they should do the same work’.
We worked as switchmen for the direct trains where I was a signaller or the
local trains where you had to climb in between the cars, which had to be as-
sembled in each station, and the wagons that remained had to be taken out of
the station … And these local trains were very difficult for women … but we
didn’t make a fuss, we had to work alongside men … One day I was at the sta-
tion at Buzau … the two male switchmen stood at the station while I, a woman,
had to climb from one car into another. And the ladder was crooked and I
wanted to climb it while it was moving … I managed to grasp the ladder and
climb up and the locomotive didn’t run over me. This situation lasted about a
year. Finally they [her employers] noticed that regardless of what happens a
woman remains a woman and a man a man. And then they withdrew the team
of women from circulation.52
Regine began working during the first decade of socialist rule, a period character-
ised by mass industrialisation, but also mass repression, poverty and uncertainty. She
was one of many who suffered such repression, having spent five years in Ukraine as
a forced labourer in a scheme organised by the Soviet government that mandated war
reparations to the USSR in the form of human labour.53 Grateful to survive the ordeals
in the Soviet Union, Regine returned to Romania to find that she had a ained full
equality with men, which, more than anything, meant that she had to work as hard
as – if not harder than – a man. Even though Regine had engaged in heavy labour
alongside men in the Soviet Union, she was clearly shocked by her male colleagues’
lack of sensitivity to the fact that, for a woman, performing such work was difficult.
Indeed, her male colleagues’ insistence that she work like a man since women and
men were ‘equal’ seems to mask a more general displeasure on the men’s side over
being forced to work alongside women. The responses of her male co-workers, which
included standing idly at the station while she completed their share of the work, may
indicate a desire to ‘break’ their female colleagues’ willpower and force them out of
the job. Although such subversive behaviour should have a racted the a ention of the
authorities, or resulted in a reprimand or suspension, Regine’s boss instead responded
by disbanding the female team of switch operators. Fortunately for Regine, he also
recognised that she was a hard worker and found her another position. Nonetheless,
the actions of Regine’s male co-workers reflect an effort to maintain the masculine
character of their jobs as well as the established work hierarchy, regardless of the con-
sequences for their female counterparts.
Because the diversification of employment made it difficult and o en dangerous
for women to perform at the same levels as men, posing real challenges to bosses and
workers alike, the Labour Code was revised in 1965.54 This, however, did not spare
women from double shi s, arduous activities and unreasonable quotas, as Maria,
who began work at a ball bearings factory a er being a housewife for fi een years,
recalled:
It was very difficult because we were required to meet the norms. I had no
skill or training, seventh grade [education]. They put me to work sorting ball
bearings. In order to make the schedule/plan, we always worked twelve hours.
That is, we worked twelve hours at night and during the day. There was a first
144 JILL MASSINO
and second shi . And [we worked] Saturdays and Sundays. Not every Sun-
day, but on Saturday it was required.55
Even during the height of Ceauşescu’s epoca de aur (Golden era) in the 1980s, many
women worked long and laborious shi s, six days a week, as the recollections of Eva,
an electrician in her late thirties, illustrate:
I worked about ten hours a day. Many times I came in for the first shi and
returned home at one in the morning, I worked very much. I didn’t really have
free time. We worked on the holidays, Christmas, Easter … In this period I was
not married and when I came home from work I would take a bath and sleep.
That was my daily routine when I got home.56
Regine’s, Maria’s and Eva’s memories of work are in conformity with standard,
Cold War accounts of work under state socialism as oppressive, exhausting and gen-
erally unfulfilling.57 However, although representative of some women’s experiences,
they cannot be generalised to all women workers. In dramatic contrast, Tatiana, who
began working in a textile factory in the early 1970s, stated that ‘work was good’, cit-
ing the short eight-hour shi , which le her time and energy for other activities, as the
primary explanation:
For me, I have the impression that the period was good … it was very good …
I was taught to work at a young age … I believe that, regardless of the regime,
if you are diligent and you work, you will live well. I liked it because I worked
eight hours … I came home … I put a meal on the stove … and I had time to
read … I read a lot then … I led an ordered life. Yes … we worked on Saturday
and sometimes Sunday, but to be honest that didn’t disrupt anything. It was
more of a pretension than anything else in those days.58
Taken at face value, these words could be cited simply as proof of the effectiveness of
socialist propaganda at inculcating its ideology of work as fulfilling and the true key
to happiness. This, however, would ignore the broader context surrounding Tatiana’s
entry into the workforce and the impact this had on her life. Having grown up on a
farm in northern Moldavia, one of the poorest regions of Romania, Tatiana welcomed
the opportunity to earn a living wage rather than the meagre subsistence one that
farming provided her family. Additionally, the regularity of factory work provided her
with time for cooking, cleaning and leisure. Beyond such practical benefits, work was
connected to broader social and cultural changes. Her move, at the age of eighteen,
from a small village in Moldavia to a large industrial city in Transylvania introduced
Tatiana to new cultural milieus such as the theatre as well as people from different eth-
nic and regional backgrounds.59 Additionally, work was emancipating for Tatiana: she
was earning a living wage, developing new social networks, and was no longer under
the direction of her family. For Tatiana work thus symbolised a ticket to freedom, an
escape from the arduous, insular and restrictive life of the countryside. Although criti-
cal of the food, electricity and heating shortages, which were endemic to life in 1980s
Romania, because work was inextricably connected to many positive life changes Ta-
tiana experienced, she considers this period to be the most rewarding and fulfilling
time of her life.
At the same time, it should be noted that Tatiana’s a itude towards the past has
been shaped by the political and economic changes that have ensued as a result of the
collapse of communism. Since the mid-1990s, Tatiana and her husband have been in-
volved in small-scale retail, which consumes almost all of their time. While at the time
these interviews were conducted, in 2003, she still managed to put food on the table,
Tatiana was frustrated by the thirteen-hour work days, and the lack of time – and
money – for travel and other leisure activities. Her high regard for the socialist system
was thus also connected to the political and economic changes that have occurred
since 1989 and that have significantly affected her quality of life. As she remarked in
2003:
I hoped that it would be be er, but, sincerely, I am not satisfied … I have the
impression that they destroyed everything that was good . . . I worked eight
hours, I came home and spent time with my family and my children. I had
enough time. Now what do I do? I leave at five or three a.m. everyday and
return at four or five or even later, deathly tired. It wasn’t be er then? Every-
thing I have I received under Ceauşescu: my car, my house, my furniture. I just
want to be healthy and live a decent life .60
While Tatiana commented on the orderly schedule and balance that her job under
socialism provided her with, Elvira referred to the economic and interpersonal ben-
efits of work. She recalled:
Work … oh, it was very good. We were well paid … we worked with pleasure
because of our co-workers … we had an extraordinary relationship. It was a
collaborative effort. Everybody collaborated and when work is like that it ap-
pears easy. Also we saved money … there were two salaries coming in and we
were able to put one salary into the bank and off the other salary we lived very
well, we went to plays and to restaurants.61
In Elvira’s recollections, work provided her with companionship and a sense of pur-
pose and belonging. Work was not only a place where stories could be shared and
complaints could be aired, but also a place where individuals felt as if they were mem-
bers of a collective, or even a type of second family. Moreover, work was personally
validating for Elvira, allowing her to contribute to the family’s well-being in a socially
recognised, quantifiable manner. Although Elvira resigned from her position shortly
a er the collapse of communism, her fond memories of her colleagues and her pride
in having contributed to the family’s well-being reveal that, far from mind-numbing
drudgery, work was an important facet of her life – and her identity – during the so-
cialist period.
For Tatiana and Elvira respectively, it was job stability, social interaction and eco-
nomic self-sufficiency that were at the forefront of their memories of work. By con-
146 JILL MASSINO
trast, Luana’s recollections of work were related to the intellectual fulfilment and social
prestige that her position as a historian conferred on her. She recalled:
It was the most beautiful period of my life. I worked on numismatics and mod-
ern history. I put on many expositions, I researched local history, I wrote, I
published articles, books … it was very satisfying work. And what happened?
They say that history under Ceauşescu was not properly studied and substan-
tiated. It’s true that, in these years, including in the museum, you were not
able to always say what you wanted, but I repeat, because I didn’t deal with
contemporary history, I did not write a book based on alternative realities.62
For Luana, the memories of wearing a coat and gloves while se ing up exhibitions
and conducting guided tours, or of moonlighting as a tutor in order to supplement
her income, did not taint her memories of this period. Indeed, her defensive tone in
discussing the monographs she wrote during the socialist period reveals the degree to
which she was intellectually and emotionally invested in her work – and also perhaps
the degree to which she was loyal to the Communist Party.63 Although her ability to
overlook the grimness of material life was certainly linked to the intellectual satisfac-
tion she received from her work, it may also indicate a need to legitimate the regime
and the Party, and, by extension, her scholarly work.
Luana’s case, for sure, is not unique. Livia, who worked as a statistician at the Local
Statistics Bureau, also recalled, with li le regret, the sacrifices she made for her job:
I liked this work very much, even if, at certain times, I had to neglect my fam-
ily because I had to stay at work so late. Sometimes we stayed as late as nine
o’clock or even into the next morning. I would go home, maybe I’d only clean
up, change and go back again.64
Considering the importance of family to women’s self-identity in Romania, this is a

highly revealing quote. While many women who worked overtime emphasised the
sacrifices they made, such as depriving themselves of sleep to ensure that domestic
duties were a ended to and their children and husbands were taken care of, Livia
claimed outright that the demands of work caused her to neglect her family – some-
thing that she seemingly did not regret. This a itude was most likely related to her
job as a statistician. Since statistics were essential for legitimising state policies under
Ceauşescu, Livia’s position as director of the local statistics bureau was a prestigious
one that positively shaped her professional identity. Consequently, she considered work
to be as important as – and perhaps even more important than – her role as a mother
and caregiver. Because of her important function within the socialist bureaucracy, she
could thus more easily justify neglecting her family, both to herself and others.
Although work decisively affected the course of women’s lives, it was not always
in a positive fashion. For instance, Elizabeth was unable to find work for over five
years because she failed to complete her repartitie (state-assigned first job).65 Mean-
while Clio’s mother, a trained pianist, was kicked out of the music school and placed
in a job pu ing up telephone lines because of her unhealthy (read ‘bourgeois’) social
origins. This class malady even filtered down to Clio, who was denied a position as
a French translator at Radio Romania because her grandfather had been imprisoned
by the communist government and her aunt had fled the country a er the communist
takeover.66 Beyond possessing healthy social origins, pile (connections) were also very
important in securing work or a place at a university. Stela, for example, remembers
wanting to a end art school, but the stiff competition, combined with her lack of con-
nections made it, in her words, ‘worthless to even think about’.67
Relations with Colleagues and the Gendering of the Labour Force
Due to the instability of the labour market, male workers in the West have o en viewed
women’s entry into the labour force as threatening, fearing that women’s status as
‘cheap labourers’ might lead to a reduction in men’s salaries or displace them from
their jobs and from their roles as breadwinners.68 However, since the command econo-
mies of the socialist bloc were always desperate for additional workers, this should
have been of li le concern to men in Romania. While my interviews do not suggest
that men perceived women labourers as economic threats per se, some men did view
them as a threat to their self-identities as well as the traditional gender order.
Men’s sexist a itudes were manifest in behaviour that (at least by the early 1980s)
would be termed harassment in the West. But because this concept did not officially
exist in socialist Romania, it was nearly impossible for women to articulate their griev-
ances when such acts occurred. In such a context, women devised clever ways for
defusing tense situations and fostering social harmony among their male colleagues.
For instance, when Maria, who worked as an electrician from the early 1970s to 1990s,
went to apply for her first job at a dra ing cooperative, she recalled that the foreman
looked out the window at her with an expression of complete dread. Recognising that
he would not receive her because of her sex, she stoically shouted to him: ‘Hey, don’t
throw yourself out the window! It isn’t necessary’, implying that he need not resort to
suicide since she was not interested in the job anyway.69 Although she finally landed
a job at Steagul Roşu, she fared li le be er there, at least initially, as she was the sole
woman specialty electrician in a team of thirty:
You know it was a personality conflict; it was a continual ba le working with

men. In the first place it was very difficult to demonstrate to them what I knew
and that I knew to do it very well … that nobody else needed to follow me, a
man for example, to put the work right again once I had finished. A er they
got used to me then they treated me with dignity. They never talked in an ugly
or vulgar way with me because I would not permit it … and there was equi-
librium. I had two choices: either to act like I didn’t know anything or to be
unusual. I preferred to be unusual. And I did very well.70
Maria’s difficulty with her male colleagues, though rooted in what she refers to as a
‘personality conflict’, was in essence a gender conflict. This conflict stemmed from her
expertise in her field, which many of the men she worked with found unse ling since
148 JILL MASSINO
they viewed skill as a masculine preserve. Although Maria was eventually accepted
by her team as a capable and talented worker, she never became ‘one of the boys’.
She might be an equal from a professional standpoint, but in the end she was still a
lady and too sophisticated and refined for engaging in the vulgar banter of her col-
leagues. In their eyes she was an unusual and wholly exceptional woman, an identity
she embraced rather than pretend to be a ‘stupid woman who needed her male col-
leagues’ help’. Accustomed to dealing with ‘egotistical men’ who ‘thought they were
be er than women’, Maria assumed the identity of the unusual or oddball woman,
downplaying her gender – a strategy that can be read as a form of resistance or self-
preservation, what historian Alf Lüdtke dubs Eigensinn.71 This allowed her to excel at
her trade without threatening her colleagues’ sense of masculinity. Her cleverness and
strength underscore the active role played by women, not only in defusing tense situ-
ations and fostering social harmony among colleagues, but also in staking out their
places as equals in the socialist workforce.
Like Maria, Doina, a moulder who also began working during the mid-1970s, also
had problems with her male colleagues:
I was in the first group of women promoted to moulding … and the men were
astonished and they made problems so that we wouldn’t succeed … so we
wouldn’t know our job, because this wasn’t a job for women [according to]
those [male workers] that were older. In the beginning it was very difficult.72
Though Doina, like Maria, was eventually able to convince her male colleagues of her
competency as a moulder, what is revealing is that the older male workers were most
resistant to working alongside women. Because she says nothing of younger male
colleagues, it can be inferred that either she worked only with older men or that men
of her own age were more willing to tolerate – and perhaps even welcome – women
in their section. If this is indeed the case, it suggests that men’s willingness to accept
women as equal workers may have been generational in nature: younger men who
had been exposed to socialist slogans of gender equality their entire lives and were
accustomed to working and interacting with women in a variety of realms were less
hostile towards and more accepting of women as colleagues than men who had been
raised during the interwar period.
While Doina’s and Maria’s experiences were by no means exceptional, not all
women who worked in predominantly male sections faced criticism or harassment.
Indeed, some got on be er with male than female colleagues, as the case of Angela,
who began working as a woodworker in 1985, illustrates:
There were not many women in my section … but I can say that in my group
women were envious of me … because they saw that I was ge ing on be er
than them and I was younger than them … but I did not let that bother me. Of
the group I got on much be er with men. They were much more accepting of
me than the women and when I needed help, if I needed something or if I just
wanted to talk, I looked to the men … In general I have always go en along
be er with men than women.73
A few other women also remembered ge ing on well with the men in their section or
even being taken care of by men. For example, Eva, the only woman in a team of nine
workers, remembers being treated kindly and at times even indulgently by her male
colleagues. In particular, she recalled an instance in the late 1980s – during the height
of the heat and electricity shortages – when her colleagues told her ‘to rest, take a
break and warm up with some wine’, while they completed her work. This behaviour
indicates not only that there was a good deal of camaraderie between male and female
colleagues, but also that some men retained chivalrous a itudes toward women – even
within the context of the factory. In this case such behaviour was triggered and rein-
forced by both generational and gender differences. Significantly younger than many
of her colleagues, Eva was looked a er by her male colleagues most likely because
they viewed her as a type of younger sister or daughter figure.
The Labour Code forbade sex discrimination; however, no clause or article ex-
isted with regard to harassment.74 As a result, it is difficult to determine if the state
made efforts to curb or rebuke sexual discrimination. However, what is clear is that
harassment played out on a number of occupational levels and in various shapes and
forms. In their discussion of promotion, a number of women I interviewed referred to
bosses who ‘manipulated their positions’ by granting a promotion to women who ‘of-
fered certain favours’. Although some women noted that their colleagues had offered
up such favours in exchange for promotions, none admi ed to doing so themselves.
On the contrary, a few women recalled passing up promotions because, among other
things, they would not submit to their boss’s will. For example, Viorica, who began
training as a professional actress in the late 1960s, was told by her acting coach that if
she, as an a ractive young woman, hoped to advance, she would have to make cer-
tain ‘compromises’. Though Viorica said such ‘advice’ was commonly given to young
actresses – and frequently followed – she was unwilling to compromise her moral
and bodily integrity for a career in acting and thus went on to work as a high school
teacher.75
Taken collectively, these stories reveal that men were generally ambivalent about
women’s participation in the work force – especially in predominantly male positions
where men seemingly found working alongside women unse ling or threatening.
Although the media paid occasional lip service to harassment and sexist practices,
proclamations were followed neither by legal measures nor suggestions of how to
eradicate harassment, the assumption being that such behaviour did not occur in so-
cialist nations.76 Hence, men and their behaviour were not targeted for change, neither
in the public nor in the private sphere. Thus it seems likely that behaviour we would
currently consider sexual harassment was tolerated in Romania, as it had been in the
Soviet Union, as a safety valve, ‘a culturally, if not politically acceptable target for male
frustration and anger’.77
Overall, sexual harassment was simply one symptom of a larger problem: the
continued influence of patriarchal values in the organisation of the labour force. As
Romania moved from incipient to mature socialism and from an industrial to a tech-
nological society, women were increasingly being trained in engineering and in the
electronics industry. However, women still dominated unskilled and semi-skilled jobs
such as food distribution and textile manufacturing and a variety of low-level cleri-
150 JILL MASSINO
cal and bureaucratic positions.78 In addition, although women dominated the medi-
cal and educational realms, even there they were most visible in the lower-ranking
and lower-paid positions, working as paediatricians, general practitioners and pri-
mary and high school teachers, rather than surgeons, gynaecologists and university
professors. Finally, the continued demands of home and family caused many women
to decline party membership, which was typically the key to upward mobility in the
socialist system.79 These factors, combined with the privileging of heavy industry, re-
inforced occupational and wage disparities, leaving women with lower salaries and
less influence in the labour force.
Work, Equality and Family Relations
As the previous sections illustrate, under socialism women’s occupational and profes-
sional advancement remained behind that of men. Whether the result of sexist hiring
practices, the disparity between male and female wages, discrimination and harass-
ment, or responsibilities in the home, even by the mid-1980s full gender equality had
yet to be realised in Romania. The various promotional policies and legislative efforts
designed to increase women’s participation in male-dominated fields failed to abolish
traditional mentalities, practices and behaviours as they played out in the workforce.
Although state efforts to promote gender equality through work might be considered
failures, they were not necessarily felt or perceived as such by all women. Indeed, a
number of women considered women equal to men, citing work as the ultimate gen-
der equaliser. For instance, when queried: ‘were men and women equal under state so-
cialism?’, some women responded in the following manner: ‘In my opinion they were
equal. They held leadership positions; they could work in any industry, even if it was
men’s work. I would say they were equal … including the salary.’80 Others responded
in the following manner:
During the Ceauşescu period we had equal rights with men. In my opinion
they [women] were appreciated because women also worked … there were
women who worked very arduous jobs, in foundries, in forging. [Some]
worked be er than men.81
Almost all of us were in the same boat, regardless if you were a man or
woman. Sex didn’t ma er, that is being a man did not mean you were privi-
leged. Women could also achieve what they wanted, if they wanted, if they
had ambitions, a ended the Party school, not a problem, they could make it
anywhere.82
These women’s remarks are intriguing in that they echo Engels’s theory of women’s
full-time employment as the key to gender equality. Although it is impossible to know
if these perspectives were shaped by the experience of earning a living wage, inter-
acting socially with men, and/or socialist propaganda, it appears that some women
viewed work as one realm in which gender equality was realised.
Other women conceived of work more broadly, stressing women’s disproportion-

ate responsibility for household labour, in evaluating gender equality – or the lack
thereof – under state socialism. As Doina commented:
Equal … never have women been equal to men. My opinion is that women
work much more than men. You have to work, you have quotas … you could
be an intellectual in an office, a worker at a machine in a factory, it’s all work.
You come home and then you have to take care of the family … It is true that
men were be er paid because they could handle more heavy/difficult work.
Equality was only formal.83
According to Doina, work encompassed much more than the state was willing to ac-
knowledge. While women may have enjoyed relative equality with their male counter-
parts on the shop floor, men’s unwillingness to assume their fair share in the household
reveals that full gender equality had yet to be realised in socialist Romania and that
official claims to the contrary were mere rhetoric.
In some cases, women’s recognition of the double burden led them to challenge
familial roles and demand help from their husbands. As Corina remarked:
The mentality was no different: the woman at the frying pan, the man is the
leader … but I did not accept it … I did not want to accept it, I said, in the first
place we are both people, we both work, we both bring in money, we will do
everything together.84
Did the experience of working outside the home prompt Corina and other women to
renegotiate their domestic relationships with their husbands? Certainly, the time and
energy spent at the factory, research lab or high school made housework and child
care far more burdensome for women than had they simply been housewives. From
a practical standpoint – that of time and energy – then, women’s requests, and in
some cases demands, for help from their husbands were rooted in the need for self-
preservation. However, because this entailed (at least potentially) a fundamental trans-
formation of traditional marital roles, such acts reveal that women not only recognised
the inequality of existing relations, but possessed the self-confidence to confront their
husbands about them. Thus, the very experience of working outside the home, per-
forming socially recognisable work and earning a living wage, combined – to varying
degrees – with the elevation of women’s public identity via prevailing media represen-
tations, empowered some women to renegotiate familial roles.85
Conclusion
Although some feminist scholars have portrayed work under socialism as burden-
some and unsatisfying, my material shows that some women found work to be em-
powering, intellectually stimulating and personally validating.86 Whether the benefits
were economic self-sufficiency, access to social services, freedom from strict, patri-
152 JILL MASSINO
archal codes of behaviour, intellectual or creative fulfilment, or the opportunity for

social engagement, for many women working outside the home significantly shaped
the course of their lives under socialism. In addition, state socialism offered women
alternative identities as workers, agitators and equal socialist citizens, and thus new
ways of imagining their lives. It is not surprising, therefore, that some women were
supportive, and even enthusiastic, about this aspect of life under state socialism.
The stories these women told also reveal that identity was not something thrust
upon unwi ing individuals by an all-powerful state, but rather the product of constant
negotiation and reformulation, both in the public and private spheres. For example,
women’s experiences of working alongside men and earning a living wage, com-
bined – to varying degrees – with the elevation of women’s public identity via pre-
vailing media representations, emboldened some women to challenge patriarchal
behaviours and a itudes and renegotiate relations with both their male colleagues
and spouses. In this sense socialism was emancipating for some women, empowering
them to appeal to their husbands for help with domestic duties. On the other hand,
the fact that women had to make such pleas at all is evidence of socialism’s ultimate
failure to abolish patriarchal a itudes and practices and to provide adequate social
services. Though certainly not all women who made these demands were successful,
the very fact that they made these demands reveals that women played an active role
in shaping their experiences under state socialism. As such, Engels’s conception of
liberation through women’s full-time engagement in the labour force may have in part
been realised in socialist Romania, but inadvertently so.
At the same time, women’s positive recollections of work under state socialism
are not necessarily indicative of blind faith in or even support for the regime. Nor are
they simply rooted in nostalgia for the communist past. Rather, women valued work
for a number of understandable reasons. These might be ideological, but they were
o en practical and personal. Thus, women’s endorsement of the communist regime
should be considered with reference to personal reasons—a corollary to, rather than a
primary factor in, this process of self-representation. Indeed, the degree to which work
was personally validating for some women was especially evident in Maria’s reflec-
tions on the socialist period:
In the communist period they guaranteed work … It did not ma er if you

were well paid or just sufficiently paid, each person was important in their
own way. We led a very industrious life. Now I feel awful because it is very
difficult to pass from a period full of activity to a period where time is dead.
Now I am looking for work so that I won’t go crazy.87
Although she had been forced into early retirement in the mid-1990s, at the time of the
interview in 2003, work continued to be a strong source of identification for Maria. Un-
fortunately, with the shi to a market economy and the devaluation of the industrial
sphere, the basis upon which Maria’s professional identity was formed and validated
has evaporated. In addition to circumscribing her economic autonomy and hamper-
ing her ability to provide for her family, the transition has essentially negated Maria’s
identity as a talented and dedicated worker.
By exploring how women constituted their identities as workers vis-à-vis the state,
their husbands, and other institutions and individuals, women appear not simply as
helpless or passive victims of a repressive regime but as active agents, working not only
to get by, but also to make life be er, both for themselves and their families. This reveals
that the story of women’s lives under state socialism is more complicated and messy
than it was once believed to be. As a corollary to this, my research also demonstrates
that, while state socialism forced people into particular moulds and roles – such as
worker, socialist activist, and in the case of women, mother – not all women unques-
tioningly embraced these roles, nor did they necessarily view them as oppressive or
limiting. Essentially, the fact that efforts to liberate women were state mandated and
directed should not blind us to the reality that some women experienced increased au-
tonomy and personal fulfilment under state socialism. Finally, the stories discussed here
illustrate that state socialism decisively shaped, and continues to shape, how individu-
als think about the government, society, themselves and the socialist past. Understand-
ing women’s complex relationship to the past thus requires a more nuanced approach
to state socialism as it was lived and experienced by individuals. In this way, we may
discover that the resurgence in what some have referred to as ‘communist nostalgia’ is
rooted as much in the failures of the present as it is in the successes of the past.
p
Acknowledgements
This article has benefited greatly from critical readings by Benjamin St. John, Maria
Bucur, and the editors of and anonymous reviewers for Aspasia. Funding for this proj-
ect was provided by the IIE Fulbright Program.
p
About the Author

Jill Massino received her Ph.D. in East European and Cultural History from Indiana
University in 2007. She was a visiting professor in the department of history at Ober-
lin College and a visiting instructor in the Program of Gender and Women’s Stud-
ies at Bowdoin College. Her publications include: Gender Politics and Everyday Life in
State Socialist East and Central Europe (co-edited with Shana Penn), New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, forthcoming, 2009; ‘Gender as Survival: Women’s Experiences of Deporta-
tion from Romania to the Soviet Union, 1945–1950’, Nationalities Papers no. 36, vol. 1
(March 2008): 55–83, and ‘Humanizing Imprisonment: Religion, Tradition and Gender
Identity in the Narratives of Women Prisoners in Communist Romania’, in Conditia
Femeii in Romania in Secolul XX: Studii de caz (The condition of Romanian women in the
twentieth century: case studies), eds. Ghizela Cosma and Virgiliu Târau, Cluj-Napoca:
Presa Universitara Clujeana, 2002, 179–198. E-mail: jillmassino@gmail.com
p
Notes
1. Interview with Corina, a former legal adviser, born in 1956 and married with two chil-
dren. Interview conducted by the author in the summer of 2003.
154 JILL MASSINO
2. See, for example, Barbara Wolfe Jancar, Women under Communism, Baltimore and Lon-
don: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; Hilda Sco , Women and Socialism: Experiences
from Eastern Europe, London: Allison & Busby, 1976; Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet
Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978;
Sharon L. Wolchik and Alfred G. Meyer, eds., Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1985; Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp and Marilyn Young, eds., Promis-
sory Notes: Women and the Transition to Socialism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989. For
Romania see Doina Pasca Harsanyi, ‘Women in Romania’, and Mariana Hausleitner ‘Women
in Romania: Before and a er the Collapse’, both in Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflec-
tions from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, eds. Nane e Funk and Magda Mueller,
New York: Routledge, 1993, 39–52; 53–61; Doina Pasca Harsanyi ‘Participation of Women in the
Workforce: the Case of Romania’, in Family, Women, and Employment in Central-Eastern Europe,
ed. Barbara Lobodzinska, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995, 213–218; and Gail Kligman,
The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceauşescu’s Romania, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998.
3. According to Bebel, Engels and other early socialist thinkers, the abolition of private
property and women’s wide-scale and equal participation in the labour force were key to their
liberation. In addition, they believed that men’s recognition of women as equal workers would
automatically abolish patriarchal behaviours and a itudes as they played out at work and in
the family. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Honolulu:
University Press of the Pacific, 2001 (originally published in 1884), and August Bebel, Woman
and Socialism, New York: New York Labor News, 1904 (originally published in 1879).
4. While acknowledging women’s reproductive roles and domestic responsibilities, Engels
tended to see these activities, particularly the la er, as a source of oppression and believed
that communal kitchens, laundries and nurseries were necessary if women were to achieve full
liberation.
5. For discussions of Marxism and the woman question see, for example, Hilda Sco , Does
Socialism Liberate Women?, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974; Heidi Hartman, ‘The Unhappy
Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’, in Women and Revolu-
tion: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent, Boston,
MA: South End Press, 1981, 1–41; Joan Landes, ‘Marxism and the Woman Question’, in Promis-
sory Notes, eds. Kruks et al., 15–28; Janet Sayers, Mary Evans and Nanneke Redcli , eds., Engels
Revisited: New Feminist Essays, London: Tavistock, 1987; Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression
of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983; and
Alfred G. Meyer, ‘Feminism, Socialism, and Nationalism in Eastern Europe’, in Women, State,
and Party, eds. Wolchik and Meyer, 13–30.
6. In Romania women received 112 days paid maternity leave, and, beginning in 1985,
families were granted allowances, based on their monthly wage, for each child born (although
these allocations usually did not offset the cost of supporting an additional child). The state
also subsidised nursery schools and kindergartens; however, in the case of nursery schools
popular demand far exceeded supply and only a small fraction of families could actually se-
cure spaces for their children in them. For a detailed discussion of maternal and child policies
in Ceauşescu’s Romania see Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 73–75 and 79–81. According to
state law, socialist firms were required to intervene in cases of reported incidents of domestic
violence. Unfortunately, there is no research on how effective firms were in helping mediate
disputes and in protecting women from spousal abuse.
7. To quote the Romanian feminist philosopher Mihaela Miroiu: ‘One could be born at the
[state] firm’s hospital, grow up in the firm’s apartment, be educated in the firm’s school, sleep in
its dormitories, work at the firm for a whole career, spend free time at the firm’s playgrounds,
resort hotels, and cultural houses, eat in its “restaurants”, repair shoes there, be appreciated or
punished there, meet colleagues, neighbours, spouses, friends and enemies in the same small
world, raise children, retire, and even be buried by comrades at the firm.’ Mihaela Miroiu, ‘The
Costless State Feminism in Romania’ (conference paper), Women, Gender and Post-Commu-
nism, Indiana Roundtables on Post-Communism, Bloomington, IN, April 2005.
8. My conception of gender follows Joan Sco ’s definition as the socially and culturally
produced ideas about differences between the sexes and their reproduction and perpetuation
in discourses, institutions and social relations. Moreover, like Sco I believe that experiences are
shaped and mediated by discourses; however, in the case of socialist Romania it is important
to keep in mind that the discourses that women had access to were comparatively limited as a
result of state censorship. See Joan W. Sco , ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’,
The American Historical Review vol. 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–1075; and Joan W. Sco , ‘The
Evidence of Experience’, Cultural Inquiry vol. 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 773–797.
9. See Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender
and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997; Lynne A -
wood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 1922–
1953, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999; Choi Cha erjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival
Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939, Pi sburgh, PA: University of Pi sburgh Press, 2002;
Melanie Ilic, ed., Women in the Stalin Era, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; Melanie Ilic, Su-
san Reid and Lynne A wood, eds., Women in the Khrushchev Era, New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004; Diane P. Koenker, ‘Men against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia: Gender
and Class in the Socialist Workplace’, The American Historical Review vol. 100, no. 5 (December
1995): 1438–1464; Eva Fodor, Working Difference: Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Aus-
tria, 1945–1995, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003; Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to
Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe, London: Verso, 1993;
Lobodzinska, ed., Family, Women, and Employment; and Funk and Mueller, eds., Gender Politics.
10. Although I regard gender as essential for understanding women’s lives under state
socialism, I do not privilege gender as the primary identifier for the women I focus on, acknowl-
edging that factors such as age, socioeconomic status and educational level, religious and ethnic
background, and sexual and political orientation intersect with and can be equally or even more
important than gender in women’s identity formation and self-perception.
11. See Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary, Ber-
keley: University of California Press, 2002; Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women who De-
feated Communism in Poland, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005; Donna Harsch,
Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007; Eszter Zsófia Tóth, ‘Shi ing Identities in the
Life Histories of Working-Class Women in Socialist Hungary’, International Labor and Working-
Class History, no. 68 (2005): 75–92; Basia A. Nowak, ‘Constant Conversations: Agitators in the
League of Women in Poland during the Socialist Period’, Feminist Studies vol. 31, no. 3 (Fall,
2005): 488–518; and Martha Lampland, ‘Biographies of Liberation: Testimonials to Labor in
Socialist Hungary’, in Promissory Notes, eds. Kruks et al., 306–322.
12. For works on everyday life in the Soviet Union and socialist Eastern Europe, see Stephen
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia
in the 1930s, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Padraic Kenney, A Carnival
of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002; and David
Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, Oxford:
Berg, 2000. For exemplary work on Central and Western Europe, see Maureen Healy, Vienna and
156 JILL MASSINO
the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004; Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences
and Ways of Life, trans. William Templer, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; and
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002.
13. In this regard, I both build on and depart from the work of Gail Kligman, who has writ-
ten extensively on the topic of women, reproduction and state socialism in Romania, and whose
work has been crucial to understanding the anxiety and suffering experienced by women and
their families as a result of Ceauşescu’s repressive pro-natalist policies. For an in-depth analysis
of these policies – which were introduced in 1966 and became increasingly draconian over the
course of communist rule – and their tragic effect on women and their families, see Kligman,
The Politics of Duplicity.
14. Because Femeia was the mouthpiece of the National Women’s Council (the Communist
Party’s women’s organisation) it can safely be assumed that the le ers and autobiographical
sketches, though perhaps wri en by ordinary women, were censored by the journal’s editorial
staff.
15. Fi y-five interviews were conducted by myself and thirty by my research team. All the
interviews were conducted in Romanian, without an interpreter. The female to male ratio was
72:13.
16. Krassimira Daskalova, ‘“Voices of Their Own”: Between Oral History and Gender His-
tory’, in Voices of Their Own: Oral History Interviews of Women, ed. Krassimira Daskalova, trans.
Elitsa Stoitsova and Ralitsa Muharska, Sofia: Polis Press, 2004, 9.
17. See Doh C. Shin and Peter McDonough, ‘Nostalgia for Communism vs. Democratic
Legitimation in Eastern and Central Europe’, Central European Political Science Review vol. 3, no.
8 (Summer 2002): 20–46; Joakim Ekman and Jonas Linde, ‘Communist Nostalgia in Central and
Eastern Europe: A Ma er of Principle or Performance?’, paper presented at the Nordic Political
Science Association’s Annual Meeting, Aalborg Denmark, 15–17 August 2002; Svetlana Boym,
The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2002; and Kristen Ghodsee, ‘Red Nostalgia?
Communism, Women’s Emancipation, and Economic Transformation in Bulgaria’, L’Homme:
Zeitschri für Feministische Geschichtswissenscha vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 23–36.
18. For example, Daphne Berdahl found that women in Kella, a town in former East Ger-
many, considered job loss a er the transition more of a punishment than a form of liberation
since work provided them with an income, a strong sense of self-identity, and a forum for so-
cialising with other women. See Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Iden-
tity in the German Borderland, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 193–195. See also
Jill Massino, ‘Identities in Transition: Gender, Nostalgia, and Everyday Life in Post-Communist
Romania, paper presented at the 37th annual American Association for the Advancement of
Slavic Studies Conference, Salt Lake City, UT, November, 2005.
19. Braşov is located in southeastern Transylvania, in the heart of the Carpathian moun-
tains, about 166 km from Bucharest.
20. By 1970, of the city’s 350,000 residents, 120,000 were from Moldavia. Braşoveanul (The
Braşovian), no. 3 (December 2000). Many native Braşovians refer to this phenomenon, o en
disdainfully, as the ‘moldovisation’ of their city.
21. Braşovul in Cincisprezece Dimensiuni (Brasov in fi een dimensions), Braşov: Comitetul
Judeţean de Cultură şi Artă, 1969, 42–43.
22. Ibid., 36.
23. Yearbook of Labor Statistics, Geneva: International Labor Office, 1975; Jiřina Šiklová, ‘Are
Women in Central and Eastern Europe Conservative?’, in Gender Politics, eds. Funk and Muel-
ler, 74–83.
24. See, for example, Margaret R. Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World
Wars, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987; Nicoleta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men,
Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War, New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2004; Susan Kingsly Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993; and Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern
Europe, eds. Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2006.
25. See, for example, Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
Era, New York: Basic Books, 1988; Margot A. Henricksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and
Culture in the Atomic Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; and Susan E. Reid,
‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet
Union under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review vol. 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 211–252.
26. In 1930, 75 to 80 percent of the populations of Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were
agrarian. By comparison, the percentage of the population working in agriculture in Poland,
Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1930 was 59 percent, 52 percent and 34 percent respectively.
Andrew Janos, ‘The One-Party State and Social Mobilisation in Eastern Europe between the
Wars’, in Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-Party Systems,
eds. Samuel P. Huntington and Clement H. Moore, New York: Basic Books, 1970, 204–238.
27. By 1965 the percentage of the population in Romania dependent on agriculture was 57.4,
in Yugoslavia 49.7, and in Bulgaria 44.9. Gregor Lazarcik, ‘Comparative Growth, Structure, and
Levels of Agricultural Outputs, Inputs, and Productivity in Eastern Europe, 1965–1979’, in East
European Economic Assessment, Part 2, Regional Assessments, Joint Economic Commi ee, Wash-
ington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981, 592.
28. See Ştefania Mihăilescu, Din istoria feminismului Românesc: Antologie de texte, 1838–1929
(From the history of Romanian feminism: Anthology of texts, 1838–1929.), Iaşi: Polirom, 2002,
15–30.
29. Drawing on the traditional family pa ern of rural Southeastern Europe, Verdery refers
to this model as the ‘zadruga-state’. See Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes
Next?, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
30. Scânteia, 8 March 1953.
32. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 44.
33. Interview I.9.a., Summer, 2003.
34. Conversation with Maria Bucur, Summer, 2004.
35. Beginning in 1951, these Romanian Stakhanovites were honoured every 8 March in the
press and in International Women’s Day festivities. Celebrations in honour of heroine workers
usually occurred in the workplace and included a public ceremony in which they received the
Ordinul Muncii (Order of Labour) medal and various material and/or monetary rewards. In
addition, their photograph, name, town of origin and production level appeared in the local
newspaper, and, for the lucky few, the national party daily. Yet, with the exception of monthly
recognition in Femeia, 8 March appears as the only other token time when heroine workers,
mame eroine (heroine mothers), and women more generally received significant praise from the
state. In contrast, the male hero worker was glorified on a regular basis in Scânteia and in the
Braşov socialist party daily, Drum Nou (The new path).
37. Femeia, August 1965.
38. A er the death of Stalin consumer goods, rather than military force, become an impor-
tant tool for quelling popular discontent in a number of socialist countries. For example, with
the advent of ‘goulash socialism’ in Hungary during the early 1960s, János Kadár significantly
158 JILL MASSINO
expanded the consumer sphere in an effort to distance himself from the immediate post-1956
period of mass repressions, to a ract popular support, and to relegitimate the socialist project
more generally. Additionally, a er the suppression of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in
1968, Gustáv Husák sought to pacify and placate the population by offering it a range of con-
sumer goods and a measure of privacy in exchange for official displays of acceptance of the
regime. See, for example, Paulina Bren, ‘Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp and the Poli-
tics of Private Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia’, and David Crowley, ‘Warsaw Interiors: The
Public Life of Private Spaces, 1949–65’, both in Socialist Spaces, eds. Crowley and Reid, 123–140;
181–206; and Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen’.
39. For a discussion of the use of beauty, fashion and other consumer goods as a source of
regime legitimation, see Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Cul-
ture in East Germany, Oxford: Berg, 2005; Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen’, and David Crowley
and Susan E. Reid eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern
Europe, Oxford: Berg, 2000.
40. Femeia, April 1966.
41. Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 80-81.
42. Ibid, 127.
43. See Mary Ellen Fischer, ‘Women in Romanian Politics: Elena Ceauşescu, Pronatalism,
and the Promotion of Women’, in Women, State, and Party, eds. Wolchik and Meyer, 121–137.
44. Scânteia, 8 March 1981. Women working in the fields of science and technology in par-
ticular were to look to Elena for inspiration.
46. Similarly Ashwin and Bowers, in their interviews with Russian women, found that
women who were employed in jobs that required skill or creativity were more satisfied with
their work during the socialist period. See Sarah Ashwin and Elain Bowers, ‘Do Russian Women
Want to Work?’, in Post-Soviet Women from the Baltic to Central Asia, ed. Mary Buckley, Cam-
bridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1997, 21–37.
48. Aneta Spornic, Utilizarea eficientă a resurselor de muncă feminine în România (The efficient
use of female work resources in Romania), Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1975, 82; 96; and
Yearbook of Labor Statistics, 1975.
49. Under state socialism, women earned on average 25 to 30 percent less than men. See Bar-
bara Einhorn and Swasti Mi er, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Women’s Industrial Participation
during the Transition from Centrally Planned to Market Economies in East Central Europe’, in
The Impact of Economic and Political Reform on the Status of Women in Eastern Europe, Proceedings
of a UN Regional Seminar, Vienna, 8–12 April, 1991; and Renata Siemienska, ‘Women, Work,
and Gender Equality in Poland: Reality and Its Social Perception’, in Women, State, and Party,
eds. Wolchik and Meyer, 305–322.
50. Spornic, Utilizarea eficientă a resurselor de muncă feminine în România, 82 and 96.
51. On the feminisation of labour in socialist Eastern Europe, see Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to
Market; Women, State, and Party, eds. Wolchik and Meyer; Gender Politics, eds. Funk and Mueller;
and Family, Women, and Employment, ed. Lobodzinska.
53. On 6 January 1945, the Allied Control Commission (under Soviet aegis) ordered the
arrest and deportation of Romanian citizens of ethnic German descent for ‘work’ in the USSR.
Because Regine was of German descent, she was one of the 80,000 to 90,000 individuals who
were deported from Romania to the Soviet Union in 1945 for forced labour. See Theodor Schie-
der and Werner Conze, Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mi eleuropa. Band.
111: Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Rumänien (Documents on the expulsion of Germans from
east-central Europe. Volume 111: The fate of the Germans in Romania), ed. Berlin: Bundesmin-
isterium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte, 1957, 80; Doru Radosav, Donbas:
o istorie deportată (Donbass: a history of deportation), Ravensburg: Sathmarer Schwaben, 1994;
and Jill Massino, ‘Gender as Survival: Women’s Experiences of Deportation from Romania to
the Soviet Union, 1945–1950’, Nationalities Papers vol. 36. no. 1 (March 2008): 55–83.
54. The Labour Code of 1950 mandated that only women who were pregnant or breast-
feeding were exempt from overtime. With the revision of the Labour Code in 1965 this applied
to all women, however, the rule was o en ignored in practice. In addition, in 1965 there was a
shi in the definition of work from ‘a duty of all people able of working’ to ‘every citizen capa-
ble of work’. See Elena-Simona Gheonea and Valentin Gheonea, ‘Statutul femeilor în legislaţia
României comuniste (1948–1989)’ (The status of women in the legislation of communist Roma-
nia [1948–1989]) in Femeile în România comunistă: Studii de istorie socială (Women in communist
Romania: studies in social history), eds. Christina Liana Olteanu, Elena-Simona Gheonea and
Valentin Gheonea, Bucharest: Editura Politeia-SNSPA, 2003, 144–224.
57. See, in particular, Harsanyi, ‘Women in Romania’ and Hausleitner, ‘Women in Roma-
nia’, and some of the other essays in Gender Politics, eds. Funk and Mueller.
59. Historically, Moldavia has been considered one of the poorest and most backward areas
of Romania while Transylvania has been considered the most Westernised and cultured.
60. Interview I.10.a., Summer, 2003. The perception that life was be er during the com-
munist period was shared by about a third of individuals polled by the Romanian Academic
Society in 2000. For instance, when asked: ‘When in the last 100 years did things go be er for
Romania?’ 8.5 percent of the respondents said life was be er a er 1989, 18.4 percent said it was
be er in the 1980s, and 34.4 percent said it was be er from 1965 to 1979. The poll was published
in 22, 28–30 March 2000.
63. Luana’s defensiveness about her job during the socialist period occurred later in the
conversation when she spoke of the transition period and claims, made by both Romanian and
Western historians, regarding the falsification of history during the Ceauşescu period. Inter-
view I.39.a., Summer, 2003.
64. Interview IV.1.a., Summer, 2003.
68. See, for example, Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation
to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans with Terry Bond and Barbara Norden, Ox-
ford: Berg, 1989, 23–24; Sonya O. Rose, ‘Gender Antagonism and Class Conflict: Exclusionary
Strategies of Male Trade Unionists in Nineteenth Century Britain’, Social History vol. 13, no. 2
(May 1988): 191–208; Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in
Germany, 1850–1914, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996; and Laura L. Frader and Sonya
O. Rose, eds., Gender and Class in Modern Europe, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
70. Ibid.
71. See Alf Lüdtke, ‘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: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
160 JILL MASSINO

74. 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 femeii în
viaţa societăţii (Women’s empowerment in social life) Bucharest: Editura politică, 1975, 89–91.
75. Interview III.2.a., Summer, 2003.
76. See Femeia, April 1973.
77. Koenker, ‘Men Against Women’, 1462.
78. Indeed, even by 1989, well over a decade a er Ceausescu’s promotional schemes were
introduced, women constituted 62.5 percent of those in the service industry, 75 percent of health
care workers and nearly 60 percent of those in arts, culture and education. Anuarul statistic al
României (Statistical yearbook of Romania), Bucharest: Institutul Naţional de Statistică, 1990,
116.
79. William Moskoff, ‘Sex Discrimination, Commuting, and the Role of Women in Ruma-
nian Development’, Slavic Review vol. 37, no. 3 (1978): 441–449. Party membership required
participation in long meetings a er work and other work-related activities. Many women, rec-
ognising they could not juggle long hours at the factory and party meetings with child care and
domestic responsibilities, chose to forgo party membership.
80. Interview II.7.a., Summer, 2003.
84. Interview IV.1.a., Summer, 2003.
85. For an examination of changes in marital pa erns, practices and family relations under
state socialism in Romania see Jill Massino, ‘Something Old, Something New: Marital Roles and
Relations in Socialist Braşov’, Journal of Women’s History vol. 22, no. 1 (Spring 2010).
86. See the literature listed in note 2.

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Constructing the Socialist Worker:

aspasia Volume 3, 2009: 131–160

especially a ractive in its capacity to preserve unoﬃcial, non-institutionalised knowl-

The Industrialisation of Braşov

A commercial, publishing and cultural centre boasting a few fledgling industries in

Figure 2. Bra ov’s main square, Piaţa Sfatului.

‘A Remarkable Force in the Development of Our Country’:

nify progress without sacrifice.39 Rather than

qualities as a … scientific figure, a wife

‘Building Socialism’ or ‘Just Getting By’?: Women’s Experiences of Work

Considering the importance of family to women’s self-identity in Romania, this is a

Relations with Colleagues and the Gendering of the Labour Force

You know it was a personality conflict; it was a continual ba le working with

Work, Equality and Family Relations

Other women conceived of work more broadly, stressing women’s disproportion-

archal codes of behaviour, intellectual or creative fulfilment, or the opportunity for

In the communist period they guaranteed work … It did not ma er if you

About the Author

72. Interview I.5.a., Summer, 2003.

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