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Alexandra Ghiț, "Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest" (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.
- [00:51]
Alexandra Gietz
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:54]
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- [01:04]
Alexandra Gietz
Cause there's always something new.
- [01:05]
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- [01:23]
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Alexandra Gietz
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Marshall Poe
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com.
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Alexandra Gietz
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Fairy Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates Excludes Massachusetts.
- [01:51]
Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:55]
Roland Clark
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Roland Clark and I'm here today talking to Alexandra Gietz about her new book, Welfare Work Without Welfare. Alexandra does a postdoctoral research at the University of Vienna where she's working on interwar anti militarism and pacifism in Central and Eastern Europe. She's also an incoming Mary Skodovska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe from Leipzig. Her research interests include women's labor history, the history and sociology of social policy, the social history of state socialisms and post socialisms, and the history of women's social movements. So welcome to the podcast, Alexandra.
- [02:37]
Alexandra Gietz
Thank you for inviting me, Roland.
- [02:40]
Roland Clark
Alexandra, there's a lot going on in this book, but by way of introduction, could you tell us a bit about one of your main characters, a woman by the name of Marijuara? What was her life like and why is she interesting to historians?
- [02:55]
Alexandra Gietz
Mariora is a 33 year old single mother of two young children living in one of the 1920s Bucharest poor, muddier neighborhoods. She earns a living working from a barely furnished rented room doing piece rate work. Essentially she makes leather parts for shoes using two sewing machines she has in her home. She had learned this craft from her partner. The man left her and the two children. And Mariana makes shoes at home together with a 13 year old niece that she hosts. Mariara has migrated to Bucharest from a rural area, possibly from a smaller town, sometime in the early 1920s. Her parents had little land and could not support the family, with many siblings entirely. Denise has a similar story. Many other people in Bucharest do at the time. In November 1929, Mariara's situation comes to the attention of a social worker and thus a case file is drawn up. And this is how we know more about her. From the case file we learn that although Mariara overexerts herself to earn money and to care for her children, she's increasingly sick. The family is in debt. So by the autumn of 1929 they do not have money for medicine, for firewood, and more importantly for the lease payments for the two Singer sewing machines that are so crucial for the family survival. The social worker tries to help Mariana to handle this complicated situation. And I should point out that the presence of the social worker is quite extraordinary and experimental, and the fact that we have a sort of detailed case study or case file even more so. I think that for historians, Mariara's life story shows how women sought to juggle paid and unpaid care work in the 20th century in the capital city of an agrarian country such as Bucharest, or such as Romania. And at the same time, this case file allows us to question and perhaps revise what we think we know about state building in the interwar period in Romania and beyond. It allows us to see that very little of the burden of ensuring others well being was attenuated. Or affiliated. Or affiliated, sorry, alleviated. I meant through the welfare programs or laws of a purportedly centralizing or expanding state. So the well being of those who were vulnerable was somehow insured through gendered forms of unpaid and underpaid work of various kinds. And in My book I call these forms of work austerity welfare work. So Maruara E is a kind of austerity welfare worker, as is the social welfare worker who visits her in a different way.
- [05:44]
Roland Clark
So if someone like marijuana needed help, who could they turn to? Like who was providing welfare and social assistance in interwar Romania?
- [05:54]
Alexandra Gietz
That's a great question. So Mariana could piece together various forms of support and small amounts of money from private and state subsidized, but private organizations. So she received some support from, for example, the association of the Romanian Clergy initially, thereafter from the Prince Mircea Society for the Protection of Children, from Bucharest City hall, via the social worker who visits her home, from the craft corporation to which she belongs and where she's insured, which is quite unusual for a woman at the time, from a pharmacist in the neighborhood and from several doctors, from her sister, from other poor women in the neighborhood. Interwar Bucharest has a very special thrive thriving landscape of associations dedicated to social reform and otherwise to welfare provision to social assistance. The role of the church, historically important, is decreasing. The role of the so called private initiative associations is increasing. Whereas classical or well established conceptualization of welfare states and social assistance is that social assistance is a form of publicly funded support for those who cannot benefit from insurance, the historical reality is that social assistance in Bucharest was a kind of state subsidized, but privately run patchwork of programs supporting a vast population that simply does not have access to social insurance. So in this Bucharest is not atypical at the time. What is unusual is that women welfare activists are quite influential, but the public money to be spent is quite limited. So Mariara E and people, especially women in her situation, you could say, have many door to knocks to doors to knock on, but in fact very few systematic avenues of support.
- [07:46]
Roland Clark
Yeah, it's a tough situation for her to have been in. Can you tell us a bit more about women's work in general? Were women in Bucharest able to get the same sorts of jobs as men with similar wages?
- [07:58]
Alexandra Gietz
So women's work patterns in inter Bucharest resemble those of women in other cities across the globe at the same at the time, especially industrializing cities that are quite different from the patterns or the work patterns for men, whether in Bucharest or elsewhere. So a growing number of women become wage workers as part of a post World War I trend. Across Europe, however, a significant number of women continue their income generating activities by working from home as they had done before. So doing laundry, taking in borders, doing piece rate work at home, like Mariara, or especially working in Other people's homes as servants. So the 1930 census shows that there were around 400,000 adults working in industry. Some 13% of these adults were women. In an overwhelmingly agrarian country of around, I believe, 17 million at the time. So 90% of the population around is in rural areas, and some 400,000 adults work in industry. Thirteen percent of these are women. However, there are 250,000 adults, according to the census, who work as servants. And Here it is 89% who are women in this, what is at the time a very large occupational sector. So it's a very different type of work that women do when they do work in factories or in small workshops. Childcare needs and pregnancies are a systematic, significant dimension structuring women's employment. So when they do work in factories and do full time work, women's wages are 50% lower usually than those of men, but they do different kind of work. So it's very hard to compare. So comparing men's and women's wages is only part of the story. Women did different kinds of paid work because they were expected especially to do a lot more care work. So this care work is usually unpaid, or as in the case of many servants, nannies, but even some white women. So white collar women, women in white collar professions, or in the caring professions, social work, this is badly paid work. So let's say women earn a lot less than men, but importantly, they do different kinds of paid work, which they mix with significant amounts of unpaid care.
- [10:27]
Roland Clark
Work, even if they're doing different kinds of work. 50%. Still ridiculous. Were there laws protecting women in the workplace?
- [10:37]
Alexandra Gietz
It depends how you define a workplace. Again, and I should say the 50% wage differential is sort of typical in Europe at the time. There's a slight improvement in wages in Europe, but it's very much the norm. Right. But again, it depends how you define a workplace. And if you worked as a servant, for example, servant woman, your employment was not governed by a typical labor contract, what we might think of as a typical labor contract now, but by a rather archaic, at the time, servant code, or servant master code, meaning you were largely the servant of your master and your employer into the 1930s. So this meant you could work under widely variable conditions in someone's home if you worked in a large factory, but few women did. Comparatively, from 1928 on, women workers in Romania were covered by laws that were in principle aligned with international labor organization conventions on maternity leave, meaning that there was a maximum of six weeks of leave before birth and the mandatory six weeks after birth, and you were covered by a prohibition on women's night work. But there were many possible exceptions to this. I should also say that technically employers weren't allowed to dismiss a woman who was on maternity leave, but in practice this happened frequently. Beyond exceptions, there was actually little enforcement. Labor inspection was sort of notoriously weak and toothless in the interwar period. So women labor activists in Romania had called for better labor protection and especially for equal pay for equal work since the 1910s. But equal pay for equal work in fact becomes a legal principle only in 1948, essentially.
- [12:30]
Roland Clark
But there are people around who are doing philanthropy and advocating on behalf of women. And one of the most prominent philanthropists in Turbo, Romania is the Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino, who's a leading figure in the Orthodox National Society of Romanian women. How does she approach welfare?
- [12:50]
Alexandra Gietz
That's a great question. So Alexandria Cantacuzino is a princess in the sense that she has an old aristocratic title which is not exactly bestowed to her by the existing royal family at the time in Etoro, Romania. But she's part of a so called old Boyar family, and she is is independently wealthy and by the 1930s, I believe already a widow. She travels extensively, she's educated in France, she has many international contacts and is very influential politically, as far as I could tell. Cantacuisino believes social assistance should modernize, but that women philanthropists, such as herself and her Orthodox National Society and many others charities she presides upon, believes that these societies in general should continue to have a strong say in creating welfare policies, at least at municipal level. She is religious, but also someone who is very active in the international women's movement, at one point president of the extremely influential International Council of Women. She is what a French historian or historian of France has termed a feminine expert. So she does not have a degree in any of the new caring professions. She's not the a social worker per se, but she has contacts across the world, is knowledgeable on social issues. She's certainly perceived to be an expert and a person of influence by many others involved in politics at various levels in Romania and internationally. She believes women, and especially girls, should be better protected through social programs and services, but is not particularly interested in the emancipation of lower class girls per se. She believes those who benefit from any sort of public welfare should be respectable and show a clear willingness to work and to be reformed. By the 1920s. This is a socially conservative approach already, albeit by no means very old fashioned. So she's at once A modernizer and someone who believes the noblesse oblige type of charity work that she had been doing for decades should be allowed to continue and even encouraged, perhaps in partnership with the state.
- [15:13]
Roland Clark
But she's not the only person out there. And another key institutional player you talk about in the book was the Superior School of Social Assistance, which works really closely with the Section for Feminine Studies at the University of Bucharest and involves people like Calypso Botes, Venturia Manuela and Xenia Costaforto. How did these women approach welfare?
- [15:37]
Alexandra Gietz
So you are right, Trolen, that Cantacuzino is not the only major player, and realizing this was one of the more interesting aspects of researching this dissertation. So Calypso Botes, Vetturia Manuela and Ksenia Costaforu are involved in the Section for Feminine Studies of the Romanian Social Institute, which is affiliated to the University of Bucharest, but different kind of think tank type of organization, and they are different from Cantacuzino and also different among each other. So Calypso Botes is a feminist suffragist. She's interested in improving women's civil and political rights, but also in securing better working conditions for white collar working women, for example secretaries. Vettor Emanuela, on the other hand, is a trained social worker, having graduated from courses in social work at Johns Hopkins University in Baltim in the mid to late 1920s. Like Cantacuisino, she and Votes are quite suspicious of women who apply for social assistance in general, thinking that women and men who wish to benefit from any kind of assistance should demonstrate a willingness to work and to become autonomous, to no longer be so called dependent on welfare. The Superior School for Social Assistance that Manila founds and the younger Costa Foro later runs is consequently very fond of detailed home investigations, but also of neighborhood surveys in order to establish who is deserving, but also what are the economic circumstances that create sort of poverty and these situations of dependence. Until World War II, at least, these three somewhat strange allies, Bottas, Manuela and Costaforo, see poverty and need as linked both to individual failures and failures of character, a bit like how Cantacuzino saw it, and to broader economic trends, and this the latter to a greater extent than Cantacuzino.
- [17:55]
Roland Clark
You mentioned a minute ago that Manuela, but also Costa Fordo and others were trained in American universities and they had connections with the Rockefeller Organization as well. To what extent do you think that their foreign ties shaped their approach to welfare?
- [18:11]
Alexandra Gietz
To a great extent, although I will say sort of the Rockefeller foundation provides fellowships, but does not necessarily directly influence the direction of their studies or their approach. In fact, Manila pays for her studies herself, while her husband, famous statistician Sabine Manuela, is a Rockefeller Fellow in the US but she herself is not a direct fellow. In any case, in Baltimore, Manuel is influenced by Mary Richmond and the Charity Organization Society, the COS and the COS seeks to systematize charity and practice so called constructive social assistance. Costaforo, on the other hand, from a quite old progressive family in Bucharest, is a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s. She eventually develops a monographic method for researching families. So again, this preoccupation with families and the household and these methods are partly rooted in social work methods linked to the United States. Potes is affiliated to the International Women's Suffrage alliance, but by the mid-1930s is also importantly the main correspondent of the Correspondence Committee on Women's Work of the International Labor Office. So this is a Geneva connection. In 1935, the Correspondence Committee sends to Romania and other places questionnaires on women's working conditions and experiences, seeking to compile a large transnational report. Botes, Manuela, the Superior School of Social Assistance, team up to gather the statistical data they are asked to provide. And this is how the T neighborhood, which is a popular neighborhood in Sector 1 at the time called Sector Yellow of Bucharest, becomes the epicenter of data collection on women's work in urban settings in Romania. So these interactions, facilitated by exchanges in the section for Feminine Study at the Romanian Social Institute, deeply shape how these welfare activists, Manila, Costaforo, Botes and many others do social work. And they realize that work, welfare and care, work and gender are interlinked in the background. I should say fear of communism and international communism and to an extent also international social democracy, shapes the views of the social reformer who are rather center left, center right, increasingly right wing on social issues. So in my book I tried to make quite clear the fact that left wing practices and ideas about welfare and women's work are kind of shadowy pole in a debate that is largely carried out by sort of pragmatists and moderates in Bucharest.
- [21:07]
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Alexandra Gietz
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- [23:08]
Roland Clark
However, the communists themselves also have quite a lot to say about women's welfare and women's work, which is another whole topic. But you write that it was primarily women and female council members who are most involved with welfare. Why do you think that was? Did men just not care about other people or.
- [23:27]
Alexandra Gietz
No, certainly not. It was not because men did not care. Rather it had something to do with the long history of women's social authority that is rooted in their charity work and quite a lot to do with electoral politics and electoral laws. So certain categories of women can vote in local elections in Romania from 1929, which is a relatively late development in Central European perspective. Even before women could elect and be elected for municipal office, they can be co opted into local councils, especially if they have somehow distinguished themselves through charity work. So in 1929, 1930, a first cohort of women is elected in various boroughs and sectors. But previously there had already been quite a few women who had been co opted or nominated to local councils by 1930, some of the women who are elected to the local council, so called cohort of councilwomen, some of them are members of the National Peasantist Party. Some of the others are loosely affiliated with the rival National Liberal Party. So cantacuisino, but also botes, for example, become councilwomen in 1930. So there is a link between doing social reform and various more or less formal fora and then becoming local politicians. Because of the historical precedent of nominations to local councils, on account of merits for charity work, but also because most council women had been effectively involved in various large private initiative organizations, they are delegated. They are appointed to deal with social assistance and social issues by the general mayor, by their fellow council members, and so on. Council women themselves see this as a domain they are good at and in which they can be effective. Yet they are also, of course, pushed into this kind of responsibility because men politicians are not exactly willing to concede authority over many other domains. This one. It's hard to argue that when women say, well, but we've been doing this for a while, we do it quite well. And of course, what is interesting is that municipal welfare is a dynamic and transforming field. And by 1930, Bucharest is beginning to see relatively high unemployment because of the Great Depression. There's plenty to do in this field. So there's both a sort of a choice involved in why council women do this and a kind of sort of being assigned, partly based on gendered notions about what women do in public, being assigned this domain of care and public assistance.
- [26:22]
Roland Clark
What's the difference between the types of social assistance provided by the city council and the sort you'd get from private charities, like the sort of thing that Cantagazino runs?
- [26:34]
Alexandra Gietz
So there is less of a kind of a difference than a continuum. So there is a continuum between what the city council could provide and what charities could provide. There was a long history of what we would now call private public cooperation in assistance, especially for the poorest or for children. And also at the time, some women were councilwomen, so they were serving in office. The city council could be a direct or an indirect provider of social assistance and services. Social services as a direct provider. It could sell or distribute firewood cheaply in winter. It could provide small cache aids for those considered needy according to various changing criteria. It could step in to open soup kitchens, the unemployed. It could fund orphanages and shelters for the homeless. And it could consider all of this the duty of the municipality. Significantly, with the exception of firewood and the night asylum, there's actually a lot of change and discontinuity in methods and principles, in the methods and principles through which sort of the city councils of various districts and the city council of Bucharest provide direct welfare indirectly. At the same time, the city council can provide subsidies for so called indoor assistance, that is for residential institutions such as orphanages or boarding school for girls that are then run by private charities, most of those run by women. In turn, private charities, such as the ones that I don't know Cantacuzino runs, or many of these other women support, can run clinics, orphanages, schools, and they can draw on funding from the central government, from private donations, but also very often from the local government in order to do especially municipal urban setting work. In 1930, for example, there are 105 charitable societies active in the so called Old Kingdom of Romania. So the part of Romania that had been the Kingdom of Romania before 1918 took. There are 105 charitable societies. 88 of these are in Bucharest. So there's a very large field of social assistance and charity work in the city. And most of these organizations are run by women or rely on the voluntary work of women. And several of the largest ones have as their specific mission the protection of women and girls. So. So there is a kind of, you could say, difference between what the private and public assistance could be. But in practice, in fact, there is a lot of continuum and a lot of cooperation with shifting attributions and duties and the kind of ping pong about whether this is to be taken up by the city hall or by the charities, or by a mix of the two.
- [29:41]
Roland Clark
And say you're a Pole woman and you want assistance, what would you have to do in return?
- [29:47]
Alexandra Gietz
You would have to work especially, or promise to work. And before receiving aid, you would usually have to demonstrate that you were poor and deserving, that is that you were respectable enough. And I think in the background, of course, there were many other criteria related to ethnicity and religion, but these are more difficult to detect at the moment, or at least they were for me. But I'm quite sure that if you were Orthodox, for example, or you were ethnically Romanian or identified as such, you'd be probably a little bit more favored in receiving welfare. In any case, this general focus on a willingness to labor and on respectability across the board is not unusual or particular to Bucharest. In most liberal capitalist settings from the 19th century, welfare provision becomes linked to wage work. In interwar Bucharest, however, there is little money for expensive welfare provisions. So this idea of idea that the poor should work for what they receive is even stronger in a sense, and beyond economic constraint. This notion of this bent toward austerity and low social spending is embedded in the local political culture or ideology or mentality, if you wish. So by the interwar internationally, you could say, or within the ilo, for example, there's a growing sense that sickness, parenthood or old age are parts of the human condition and insurance and social assistance should be of help during those periods of life. Similarly, there are older notions in Orthodox Romania that charity is a Christian duty, that you shouldn't expect anything in return. Yet despite this, the fact that there are alternatives at the time, and there are historical alternatives of thinking about charity and welfare, among politically influential social reformers in Bucharest, including many of the women I talk about, the prevailing idea is that there should not be so called indiscriminate giving. So even after the worst of the Great Depression has passed and municipal assistance budgets are no longer extremely low and overburdened, the Mayor of Sector 1 of Sector Yellow asks that the women who receive small amounts of cash from the city, that they knit socks at home. There's no very clear economic sort of sense to asking them to do this. Yet somehow the mayor. Mayor decides that this is what should be done. If you receive welfare, you should be knitting socks at home. So essentially the idea is that there is no such thing as social assistance without it being immediately paid back in a way by the individual or the specific family who is helped. And this is quite different from the outlook that we hopefully tend to have today, that welfare provision functions at scale, that it distributes risk across all those insured. And this notion that the. The poor should be respectable and work in return from what they receive is rather an older form of so called poverty politics that was quite widespread across Europe, but also everywhere, the British Empire especially reached.
- [33:04]
Roland Clark
Yeah. Even if we can't find evidence in the files that people discriminated against or in favour of ethnic Romanians and in religiously Orthodox people, you see in the petitions that they do that the people appealing for aid clearly thought that that was something that the authorities would want to hear. Because they say in their own petitions, give me this because I'm Orthodox and I'm Romanian and I'm a good person.
- [33:33]
Alexandra Gietz
Precisely. And in the very few petitions I could find in the archives, it really seems that neighbors vouching for people petitioning for a bit of aid from the municipal mentality, or the petitioners themselves, they will mention old age, they will mention gender, they will mention need, but also would tend to mention ethnicity or religion as well, or perhaps silence it. I should point out that there's archival material that Shows that social workers, for example, in Bucharest, at least to the mid-1930s, some of them were very preoccupied by sort of Jewish inhabitants of Bucharest as well, Maybe not as much as they should have been.
- [34:19]
Roland Clark
One of the main professions that welfare workers encouraged poor, uneducated women to join was domestic service, which you mentioned before. The association of Women Friends of Young Girls in particular, tells girls that working as servants was an honorable occupation. But when you look at the police files and the newspapers, they see servants as potentially dangerous groups of people.
- [34:40]
Alexandra Gietz
People.
- [34:41]
Roland Clark
How did journalists talk about female servants?
- [34:45]
Alexandra Gietz
So by the 1930s especially, there is great concern in Romania, but truly across Europe, that servants are internal enemies. So they live in their employers houses. They are privy to all kinds of secrets. They can poison or rob those living in the house. Yet here they are indispensable and I believe on the background of the Russian Revolution, but especially of greater labor militancy across Europe. Many middle class employers, including in Romania, but also as far away from Bucharest as in England and London, for example, they have to grapple with the fact that a peasant girl or a lower class young woman they know not much about will be living under the same roof and possibly harboring bring great resentment towards them because of bad treatment, but also sort of class resentment. And in Bucharest, this perception is, as you point out, hyped by rumors and the press, who tend to over report on crimes of servants, on a murder that happens at some point and so on. This unfortunately hides a sort of troubling labor and welfare reality. Because rather than modernizing servant employment conditions away from the servant code framework, Romania, with greater virulence than other countries in the region, doubles down. But using modern means. And this notion that servants might be criminals or murderers is really serving this kind of harsher treatment of servants and domestic personnel. So servants are. Are controlled and surveilled through an office for the control of servants, which fingerprints and photographs them. In the 1930s, and I should point out fingerprinting, for example, is a very new technology. At the time, women, but not men, are required to undergo medical examinations. And it seems, in the very building of the office for the control of servants. And this is based on a suspicion that women are sort of carriers or frequent carriers of venereal diseases or infectious diseases such as tuberculosis doses. Domestic service is a deregulated occupation where the employer has a clear legal advantage that is enshrined in the servant code. And consequently it is an increasingly unappealing occupation as well. Many young women would rather do 10, 12 hours of factory work and night shifts than work for a master. Because of this deregulated character. And during the Great Depression, the Association Women Friends of Young Women, Amica Latina Rarfete in Romanian, they run a hostel and a job placement office. And this is when they try to persuade educated but jobless women to take up domestic work, arguing that it is an honorable profession. But they have little success because public opinion really tends to associate domestic service with something quite unsavoury and dubious. I should point out that the paradoxically, perhaps the main mission of the Association Friends of Young Women is to protect young girls and women from being trafficked into coerced sex work. Because domestic service is such a frequent occupation for young women who migrate from the countryside to the city. And it is such a sort of. It is so likely that the Women Friends of Young Women are going to have to help these young migrants. They have to deal with a lot of women who have actually experienced sexual abuse and harassment within the houses of their employers where they worked as domestic servants. So the anti trafficking model of this Friends of Young Women's organization is never fully suited to grapple with the fact that in a sense, the call is coming from inside the house that the deregulated character of domestic service is what enables forms of sexual abuse and what makes domestic service not only a kind of dishonorable occupation, but truly a quite dangerous occupation for many women who are left unprotected by labor codes and by employers.
- [39:08]
Roland Clark
Of course, you mentioned before that while these organizations are helping women, they're also researching them. And the Superior School of Social Assistance in particular does a lot of research in the time that it's engaging with some of these poor women. What did they conclude about how women entering the workforce was impacting men's authority within the family? Because that's something that men are always worried about once women start getting jobs, right?
- [39:36]
Alexandra Gietz
And I think the research shows that men needn't have been. So to. To kind of explain the bigger story on the background of cooperation between the Superior School of Social Assistance and the International Labor Office's Correspondence Committee for Women's Work, the school conducts some surveys in the Tay neighborhood. And they find out that there is a growing number of women who do paid work. And they realize that it's mostly informalized work and in bad conditions, and some of it is factory work, but a lot of it is sort of working by the day somewhere and so on. The interesting twist of what they discover and what they conclude is that women overwork because their partners are unemployed or unsupportive so paid work for many of these proletarianized women is not a form of liberation or self actualization meant to counter or undermine patriarchal authority. Rather, it seems it was perceived as a kind of what these women say was a painful necessity. So men's authority declines because men cannot provide, but also because men leave. And the surveys note the kind of disorganization of the family. But unlike social hygienist doctors, so eugenicists, and Bucharest who tend to fault feminism and women's work and desire for work for this disorganization, these social workers from the superior school of social assistance existence cautiously conclude that it's about men and the economy rather than women and their paid work ambitions. And I think these surveys that I also discuss quite a bit in the book should lead us to more carefully examine any whiggish narratives about women's entry into the paid workforce, and instead lead us to immediately ask under what conditions that entry into the paid for work workforce occurred. For different categories of women, and I mean of course, for many working class women, paid work was a source of pride and eventually of household authority. But in the mid to late 1930s in Bucharest, these surveys shows that this paid work was part of a much more complex process, economically and effectively, that was much more about survival and making do and safeguarding what there was left of some sort of patriarchal organization of families under economic conditions that didn't allow for that anymore.
- [42:13]
Roland Clark
Finally, you've told us a story about these women who were doing both welfare work and sociological research, and who were working overtime, both through city councils and through private charities, to help Bucharest working poor, who themselves were working overtime to support their husbands. What impact did all of their work have on state building and the creation of a welfare state in remainder mania?
- [42:37]
Alexandra Gietz
So foremost, the various kinds of austerity welfare workers I discuss in the book, within their ideological and practical limits, were, as you pointed out, essential for social reproduction, for keeping things going for surviving during the Great Depression especially. And this contribution is of course easier to theorize than to quantify. But what limited evidence we do have, such as the survey from the late 1930s that shows, for example, that working women in Bucharest supported a very high number of so called dependent through their paid and unpaid work. So what data we do have corroborates this notion that women who worked carried a lot of the load of subsistence during tough economic times. For the long term, the contribution to what we might understand as the history of the development of so called welfare states and Romania is less visible and Others associated with the superior school were key policy actors in the Antonesc regime during World War II. So in 1945 it was important for the post war transitional governments to devise a new system of social assistance to replace the old working principles in social assistance and especially to move away from the reprehensible goals that such social systems, settings and principles had served during World War II, especially complicity in the Holocaust. We know from research on Argentina, for example, that the disjointed system of welfare provision that was built in Buenos Aires, for example, by women's organization in the interwar, was incorporated into an expansive welfare state. So we could imagine that had there not been a sort of World War II and its horrors and massive regime change in Romania afterwards, that we could have had a similar genealogy where these women's organizations and private public disjointed cooperations would have been institutionalized in a similar way. Perhaps. But there was simply different historical conjuncture in post war Romania with fewer continuities. And that was for the better, I would say. But that is perhaps something to be argued with.
- [44:59]
Roland Clark
So that's about all we have time for today. But thank you so much for talking us through this really interesting topic and I would recommend grabbing a hold of the book and finding out more of the details, all of which are in there.
- [45:11]
Alexandra Gietz
Thank you as well, Roland.