CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Ghit, Alexandra |
|---|---|
| Title | Loving Designs: Gendered Welfare Provision, Activism and Expertise in Interwar Bucharest |
| Summary | In the early 1920s, Bucharest brimmed with the war-victors-enthusiasm of local elites. Afterwards, between 1929 and 1933, to an even greater degree than before, underemployement, irregular or informal work defined the quotidian of most of those living in Bucharest. The next eight years saw little economic redress, but authoritarianism flourished. During this entire period, Bucharest was the site of various experiments in social assistance provision and small-scale social research studies on standards of living. These were initiated by women involved in what Linda Gordon has termed “welfare activism”. This dissertation analyses the development of austere welfare provision in 1920s and 1930s Bucharest and uncovers the (not always progressive) role of women welfare activists in the process. It argues that wavering political commitment of governments and growing international financial constraints hampered the creation of broad-coverage social policies, forcing women (especially proletarianized women) into increasingly strained combinations of paid and unpaid work to ensure the survival of their dependents (children, extended families). The low-spending context created by national level politics and geopolitical constraint, combined with electoral law concessions obtained by suffrage feminists, also left open a space of municipal social intervention for the women politicized as feminists or professionalized in the context of the early 1920s feminist, social reformist and internationalist moments. The text presents politicized and professionalized women as part of a coherent network of welfare activists in Bucharest, and as either active in the local (internationally connected) feminist movement or among the growing number of professional women initially working at the margins of “social” domains, such as social research, social assistance, or public health. Differently from all previous studies on gender and welfare in Romania, it also points to the role of social-democratic, communist, and Jewish women and their organizations in the strained development of public social assistance in the city. Also, distinctively from previous studies, it reconstitutes the on the ground, practical operation of social assistance policies created by welfare activists, analysing the intended and unintended effects of social research and social assistance practices on the impoverished families who were eligible for the minimal, inconsistent public social assistance available. This work is a left-feminist revision of the dominant “modernity paradigm” interpretation of the interwar period in Romania (especially the focus on eugenics). It also contributes to challenging the prevailing institutionalism and masculinist bias in studies on welfare provision in Eastern Europe. It claims that welfare provision in Bucharest was an ill-funded gendered mixed economy, in which state and voluntary associations, paid and unpaid work, as well as repression and ignorance of visible need both helped and hindered the social reproduction of various social groups. The dissertation unpacks how contests over expertise and quotidian practices of social knowledge making but also of insuring subsistence were crucial to the operation of this mixed economy. |
| Supervisor | Zimmermann, Susan Carin |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/ghit_alexandra-maria.pdf |
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