Professionals’ and amateurs’ pasts: a decolonizing reading of post-war Romanian histories of gendered interwar activism

Abstract

This article provides an illustration of a decolonial and gendered approach that can shape ‘new global labour histories’ by re-reading histories of Communist women’s interwar activism produced in state-socialist Romania with attention to the power context in which they were created and the clues about the work of social reproduction during the interwar that these histories provide. After discussing the main concepts and rationale in the first section, in the second section the author shows that women’s history and women historians were marginalized in Romania after 1958 despite promising post-war beginnings. She shows that this evolution was made possible by the symbiosis between nationalist historians and autochthonist politicians in search of a break with Stalinist policies. She then hones in, in the third part of the paper, on the content of the Revue des Etudés Sud-Est Européenes (RESEE) and two women’s history volumes, as publications issuing from the conditions described in the second part. With regard to the standalone volumes, the author shows that in this body of work, the interwar period is described as one of women’s increased activism within the social-democratic or Communist movements. On the other hand, the period is also described as one of worsening living conditions for proletarians. The intersection of these two narratives creates in this rather limited historiographical body the surprising effect of granting high visibility to reproductive labour.