Romanian Women’s Activism in Cluj during the Interwar Years

Abstract

In the post-1918 political context and in a city with a specific demographic landscape, women’s activism was shaped by ethnic and religious criteria, as well as by other specific objectives. Applying this typology to Romanian women’s societies, the study offers a view on some of the most prominent associations from Cluj, through a series of monographic notes that retain their most important defining elements: objectives, activity and significant accomplishments, also listing the individual particularities of each society. The short histories include micro-biographies of the leadership – some of the most important representatives of the Cluj women’s movement. Going from description to analysis and by discerning the particular elements of each society, their leadership and also their discourse, the study emphasises the local particularities of interwar women’s activism; originating in the pre-war era, Romanian women’s interwar activism maintained the line of a national militancy, served through piety, charity and emancipation. This context left little interest for radical emancipation ideas; therefore, militancy for women’s rights centred on the objective of feminine emancipation as the ultimate purpose is not witnessed. Considered on a regional and national scale of female interwar activism, Romanian women’s activism from Cluj is part of a regional current of the feminist movement, with a traditionalist moderate tendency inside the larger Romanian feminist movement. The local Cluj branch of the Romanian Women’s Group (Gruparea Femeilor Române), who followed the model of their mother-society, promoted a distorted interpretation of women’s rights, in an anti-democratic authoritarian ideological construct marked by strong nationalist accents. On the other hand, after 1918, within new political and state realities, the activities of Cluj women established their objectives in tight connection to the main determining factors of the specific local realities of the era (demographic, economic, social, and cultural factors), and in the service of asserting and consolidating the newly found Romanian identity of the city.