The Rites of Women: Oral Poetry, Ideology, and the Socialization of Peasant Women in Contemporary Romania

Abstract

ROMANIA IS A COMMUNIST COUNTRY ideologically dedicated to equality between the sexes. While women do represent an increasingly significant factor in the wage labor force (45 percent of the total labor population), this has not really altered their status in the family, rural or urban. (Slightly more than half the population lives in rural areas). Instead, it has accentuated the double burden situation for women.1 This paper is a preliminary treatment of aspects of the socialization of women in Romanian peasant society, a peasant society that is changing due to the socioeconomic demands imposed by the goals of communist state planning. These goals reflect the production mentalities of state planners whose priorities have focused on effecting rapid transformation in the economic, political, and social realms; cultural transformation has been considered an essentially derivative phenomenon. However, recent studies stress the need to devote serious attention to this residual realm as a means of gaining insight especially into the persistence of traditional patriarchial values and behavioral norms in the face of otherwise dramatic change (owitt 1974; Moskoff 1982). Within the family, the traditional hierarchical structuring of relations between the sexes and among members of the same sex continues to be reproduced. Thus, it is to the traditional that we turn. Traditional peasant society is structured upon generalized sex-bound delineations of public/private domains of activity that reflect separately organized spheres of productive relations (Kligman 1981). Men tend to deal