‘In this country, women are also soldiers’: interrelations between age and gender in the women’s section of the Romanian Legionary Movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the interrelations between age and gender in the Romanian Legionary Movement. The Legionary Movement, also known as Iron Guard, was an ultranationalist and antisemitic movement founded by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in 1927. The movement was one of the major protagonists on the Romanian interwar political scene. Its political development followed a complex path marked by extraordinary successes and dramatic crises. Several works have explored the Legionary Movement’s history, but a systematic analysis from the standpoint of gender relations and women’s participation is still at an incipient stage. This article wants to contribute to this analysis by following the development of the legionary women’s section during the movement’s political history. Gender is used as a category of analysis in its interaction with age, in particular by exploring the concept of youth and its practical consequences for women’s participation. After the introduction, the first section analyses the concept of youth and its importance in the construction of legionary ideology. The second section will explore the foundation and development of the women’s section through the lenses of youth and gender. Women’s participation and political activity was often the result of the gendered elements constitutive of the concept of youth. From the ideological standpoint, the construction of women’s youthfulness interacted with and was limited by marriage and motherhood; at the same time, however, in the movement’s political practices these limits proved to be more flexible and reshaped by experience.