‘Not the Right Moment!’ Women and the Politics of Endless Delay in Romania

Abstract

The history of gender policies and feminism in Romania and, more generally, in Eastern Europe, bears little resemblance to its history in older and stronger democracies. Even though feminisms emerged in Eastern Europe around the same time as in the West, here they encountered a non‐modern society. Then as now, Romanian feminists operated with western knowledge in a very different context. The patriarchy of the peasant society and that of the political class proved much stronger than their stuggle for rights. In post‐communist times, after the fall of ‘state patriarchy’ (read: communism), the feminist lobby of the author’s generation (women around forty to fifty years old) proved much weaker than the internal conservative pressure towards the old gender status quo, as well as later on, weaker than the ‘paternalism’ of the European Union, to which feminists owed at least their current ‘room service’, costless state feminism.