Welfare Work Without Welfare : Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest

Welfare Work Without Welfare argues that women activists, wage workers, and homemakers in the Romanian capital Bucharest ensured others’ well-being in the interwar period through their "austerity welfare work".

Revealing links and tensions between the performers of different types of underpaid or unpaid austerity welfare work, each empirical chapter focuses on a key domain:
• knowledge production about social problems by "women welfare activists" (professional social workers, lay experts, left wing militants);
• municipal-level social assistance policy, with emphasis on a pioneering generation of women local politicians in shaping welfare practices;
• paid household work by underpaid servants;
• unpaid household work by homemakers or precariously employed women in working class communities.

The book offers a novel interpretation of state-society relations after the First World War, showing that unpaid labor and gender relations were crucial in responding to economic crisis in an Eastern European urban setting and beyond. At once a local and transnational history of women’s work, Welfare Work Without Welfare contributes to the historicization of social reproduction work and to the rethinking of the history of welfare states.

“This is the first book on the birth of the woman question and the beginnings of welfare work in Greater Romania. For scholars working on interwar Romania, it will be a milestone. For scholars working on feminism and welfare work, the book brings a country from the Eastern periphery of Europe into the picture, which allows the author to show both the spread and the local adoption of ideologies and practices in local contexts.” – Alina-Sandra Cucu, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin.

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“The author proposes an innovative, intersectional interpretation of welfare combining a gender perspective with analysis of class, ideology, ethnicity, and to lesser extent race. The volume convincingly analyzes the status, conditions and activities of women in a society dominated by austerity politics as well as entrenched, state-engineered practices of exclusion.” – Cristian Iacob Bogdan, Austrian Academy of Sciences.