MSCA Project Blog

#1 Starting from the Rough Edges: On Researching Mid – 1940s Brochures and the History of Postwar Romania
In post-World War II Romania gendered cultural transformation felt like rough, grainy paper. Notebook-sized brochures destined for women’s non-formal education were the cheap, effective, transitional format for an incipient, eventually decades-long, process of change. 

For the »transitional period« 1944–1948 such brochures – testifying to postwar penury and indexing an older history of socialist organizing – are essential sources. They reflect an ideologically diverse, locally rooted, transnationally connected, practice of education and agitation. Despite their flimsiness and relative obscurity, they are indispensable for understanding women politicians’ and grassroots activists’ influence on postwar reconstruction.

Between August 1944, when the hitherto Axis-member Kingdom of Romania concluded an armistice with the Allies, and December 1948, when the Kingdom became a People’s Republic, women’s political rights evolved. All women over 21 years of age, regardless of education or professional background, could vote as of July 1946; many cast their first votes in that November’s elections. 

Women’s citizenship became strongly associated with activism.[i] Thousands of young women were mobilized as volunteers for anti-famine and anti-malaria relief work in eastern Romania. Just as many became part of the Union of Antifascist Women of Romania (UFAR), a »women’s mass organization« helping gain women’s support for the left-wing Bloc of Democratic Parties (BPD) but, with equal commitment, organizing social assistance and small-scale relief work in various towns. Many of the grassroots activists mobilized in this way conducted ad-hoc literacy campaigns and reading circles, where important articles might be read out loud. 

Brochures were a crucial tool in non-formal adult education for literacy, as well as in what might be called in retrospect »education for citizenship«. Their style and format had precedents in other places in Europe, but just as much in the socialist and social-democratic worker education initiatives and print cultures of pre-1944 Romania. For instance, in 1945, the publishing house of the Social Democratic Party would print in its »Socialist Library« series the seventh, revised, edition of a brochure titled The Class Struggle.[ii] Authored by anticommunist social-democrat Tatiana Grigorovici,[iii] the 26-page booklet provided an accessible introduction to the concept. It had first appeared in 1909, and was steadily reprinted, with various revisions, since.

Original, short, quasi-ephemeral, publications were born of necessity as much as of the quest for political efficacy. A crisis of printing paper in 1944–1947 likely made the printing of brochures, rather than of textbooks or books, more feasible and affordable for various women’s organizations. With rare exceptions, brochures aimed at women readers were printed on dark, rough, acidic paper, without illustrations or significant graphic features – but were generally carefully typeset. They were written in clear and simple language, in short sentences, with plots and settings meant to seem immediately familiar to readers and listeners. For example, a 1946 booklet on women’s vote begins with a conversation between two women from the same village, about dealing with women’s issues in their community; the discussion about suffrage is intertwined with details about traditional, communal wool spinning.[iv]

Brevity, minimal aesthetic qualities and negative association with propaganda obscures brochures’ distinctiveness as a corpus of sources. Yet for a period when political instability is far easier to spot than any policy trends, the titles and content of such small format publications reveal clear priorities and policies for gendered reconstruction. 

The 1944 brochure Words for Women, authored by social-democrat Eugenia Deleanu Rădăceanu, reissued at least three times by 1945, proves that social-democratic demands from before the war were restated and integrated into what would become key promises in the BPD’s 1946 Platform-Program and policies in the future People’s Republic.[v] The 1945 The First Congress of the Union of French Women (including details on the international preparatory congress for the founding of the Women’s International Democratic Federation),[vi] and the Woman and Child in the Soviet Union (comprising two texts, by UFAR president Alexandra Sidorovici and Minister of Health Florica Bagdasar) reflect the rapid multilateral re-internationalization of women’s politics after the war, besides the growing influence of Soviet policy models.[vii]  The 1946 brochures From Disregard to Equality by »fellow-traveller« Theodosia Graur,[viii]We Too Are Voting by communist writer Elisabeta Luca,[ix] or Gabriela Deleanu’s Woman and the Right to Vote testify to the significant rhetorical production around women’s suffrage and underscore the political stakes of this expansion of citizenship.[x]

After 1948, commemorative brochures, such as [Women Comrades] Fallen in the Struggle and Spain – They Will Have to Account for their Deeds focus on women heroes of the communist movement, in Romania and abroad.[xi] Such narratives mark the end of the short, postwar period of explicit cooperation between communist women and women affiliated with women’s organizations with different »democratic« or »progressive« ideological stances.

Like the brochures that shaped it, the period 1944–1948 has its own rough edges –historically and historiographically. It is often described as a short transitional period which ushered in the bipolar world of the Cold War. However, like the brochures, it was more important than it may seem, bridging systems and shaping continuities. In my research project, focused on these early postwar years, I will investigate processes that recovered or discarded elements of older gendered social contracts in the making of a new one.