Between 1914 and 1941, Bucharest’s population tripled, approaching one million inhabitants.This rapid growth created new neighborhoods and new opportunities, but also brought new forms of poverty. While some historians portrayed the interwar Bucharest as ”the little Paris”, Alexandra Ghiţ’s book Welfare Work without Welfare: Women and Austerity in interwar Bucharest provides a much more nuanced perspective about this city by focusing on the women’s role in welfare work.
As she states in our podcast:
”the city had a larger modern area with beautiful governmental buildings and bloc houses (…) . Beyond the city center, there were large popular neighborhoods made up of small houses, many of them with a small yard (..). Increasingly, there were very precarious improvised neighborhoods. Such small housing might coexist with very clumsy barrack-like organized dwellings, which were covered with corrugated cardboard, without running water, where the tram and public transform does not really reach well, extremely dusty in the summer and very muddy in the autumn and winter”.
While some celebrated the quick modernization, the labor market was fragile and the welfare system struggled to respond. Bucharest was ”a city without welfare but with plenty of welfare work”. In this context, the real engine of welfare was not the state at all. As the book argues, women created and sustained a welfare system through volunteer work, political advocacy, and sheer endurance. To explain this situation, Alexandra Ghiţ advances the concept of ”austerity welfare work”, which means ”intensified labor for the well-being of others under circumstances of great economic instability”.
In our podcast, she introduces the international actors, religious groups and foundations that brought their contribution. Among them, we discuss the case of Veturia Manuilă, who is extremely illustrative about the ideological and social nuances of interwar Romania.
Alexandra Ghiț’s book challenges the familiar image of Bucharest as simply a modernizing “little Paris”. Behind the city’s new architecture stood a much less glamorous reality, which included precarious work, but also a welfare system sustained to a remarkable extent by women’s largely invisible labor.
Alexandra Ghiț is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe.
The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Lilit Hakobyan edited the audio file.
