LOVING DESIGNS: GENDERED WELFARE PROVISION, ACTIVISM AND EXPERTISE IN INTERWAR BUCHAREST By Alexandra Ghiț Submitted to Central European University Department of Gender Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Comparative Gender Studies Supervisor: Professor Susan Carin Zimmermann Budapest, Hungary 2019 CEU eTD Collection Table of Contents Table of Contents............................................................................................................................................................i Copyright Notice ......................................................................................................................................................... iii Abstract.........................................................................................................................................................................iv Ackowledgements ........................................................................................................................................................vi List of Figures and Tables ......................................................................................................................................... viii List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................................................ix Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 - Periphery Welfare Provision, Social Expertise-Making and Gendered Intimacy Work: Paradigms, Concepts, and Historiography ..................................................................................................................................... 18 1.1 Post-socialist Historiographical Paradigms - the Need for Gendered Social History ...................................... 18 1.2. Social Policy and World Ordering Crises in the 1920s and 1930s ................................................................. 23 1.3. Transnational Expertise and Urban Social Knowledge-Making Practices ...................................................... 38 1.4. Patterns of Women’s Work: Paid, Unpaid, Productive, and Socially Reproductive Labor and the Complications of Intimacy ...................................................................................................................................... 50 1.5. Methods and Sources ...................................................................................................................................... 58 Chapter 2 - National Government and “Private Initiative” in Romania’s Constrained Politics of Welfare ................ 62 2.1. Never Quite the Right Time: Governing Politicians’ Stances on Welfare ..................................................... 64 2.2. Limited, Disadvantaging for Women, Heterogeneous: National-level Social Policies in Urban Context ...... 81 2.3. Subsidies, Laws, Rules, Grand Plans: Government Frameworks for Social Assistance Provision ................ 99 2.4. An Unaddressed Housing Question .............................................................................................................. 111 2.5. Legal Frameworks for Women’s Involvement in Bucharest Municipal Politics (1919-1938) ...................... 116 Chapter 3 - Women Welfare Activists in Bucharest. Organized Women’s Forms of Expertise in the Struggle for Public Authority ........................................................................................................................................................ 123 3.1. Upper-Class Women and Their Organizations ............................................................................................... 125 3.2. Left-Liberal Social Scientists .......................................................................................................................... 142 3.3. Progressive Feminists ..................................................................................................................................... 165 3.4. Jewish Organizations ...................................................................................................................................... 181 3.5. Social Democrats and Communists ................................................................................................................ 194 Chapter 4 – Women’s Welfare Activism in Local Politics and Its Gendering Effects on Municipal Social Assistance CEU eTD Collection Provision .................................................................................................................................................................... 207 4.1. Suffragist Women Making Their Way into Bucharest’s Municipal Administration .................................... 208 4.2. Councilwomen as Initiators and Shapers of the Municipality’s Assistance Practices ................................... 219 4.3. Poverty Policy and Social Assistance Between 1920 and 1929.................................................................... 237 4.4. Social Assistance Between 1929 and 1938 .................................................................................................... 247 i Chapter 5 - Unprotected, Suspect but Worth Rescuing: Women in Domestic Service, Social Control and Welfare Activism .................................................................................................................................................................... 262 5.1. Transnational and Global Aspects ................................................................................................................. 264 5.2. Policing of Domestic Service and Marginalization of Servants in Bucharest ............................................... 275 5.3. Women Welfare Activists Protecting Young Domestics – Intervention Tactics and Investigative Tools ..... 290 5.4. Domestic Service as Experienced by Servant Women in Bucharest ............................................................. 309 Chapter 6 – Women’s Wage Work and Household (Dis)Organization in Bucharest-based Survey Research .......... 317 6.1. Transnational Social Research on Women’s Work ...................................................................................... 319 6.2. Politics, Policy and Research: The Factors Leading to Social Surveys on Working Women in 1930s Bucharest ............................................................................................................................................................... 321 6.3. Wage Work and Women’s Role in Social Reproduction in Bucharest Surveys of the 1930s ....................... 337 6.4. The Flip Side of Investigative Assistance ...................................................................................................... 349 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................................. 354 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................................. 363 CEU eTD Collection ii Copyright Notice Copyright in the text of this dissertation rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or in part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Central European University Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author. I hereby declare that this dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions and no materials previously written and/or published by another person unless otherwise noted. CEU eTD Collection iii Abstract In the early 1920s, Bucharest brimmed with the war-victors-enthusiasm of local elites. Afterwards, between 1929 and 1933, to an even greater degree than before, underemployement, irregular or informal work defined the quotidian of most of those living in Bucharest. The next eight years saw little economic redress, but authoritarianism flourished. During this entire period, Bucharest was the site of various experiments in social assistance provision and small-scale social research studies on standards of living. These were initiated by women involved in what Linda Gordon has termed “welfare activism”. This dissertation analyzes the development of austere welfare provision in 1920s and 1930s Bucharest and uncovers the (not always progressive) role of women welfare activists in the process. It argues that wavering political commitment of governments and growing international financial constraints hampered the creation of broad-coverage social policies, forcing women (especially proletarianized women) into increasingly strained combinations of paid and unpaid work to ensure the survival of their dependents (children, extended families). The low-spending context created by national level politics and geopolitical constraint, combined with electoral law concessions obtainted by suffrage feminists, also left open a space of municipal social intervention for the women politicized as feminists or professionalized in the context of the early 1920s feminist, social reformist and internationalist moments.