An abundance of scholarly works have announced the death of democracy, however, the book Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania by Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu shows how democracy can rise. The authors offer a compelling account of lessons learned when women are the protagonists of democratization. The main question of the book—how do women experience living under different political regimes and how do they interpret and practice rights and democratic citizenship—is explored through a re-imagining of the emblematic principle of second-wave western feminism: the personal is political.
The authors construct the political through a historical and sociological analysis of gender relations in Romania during three political regimes (a far-right dictatorship before the Second World War, communism after 1946, and a transition to democracy following 1989 that was feminist-indifferent at best and feminist-hostile at worst during the 1990s). They construct the personal as the accounts about the meaning of democratic citizenship of women interviewed for this book.
The normative perspective of Bucur and Miroiu's book, provided by Ruth Lister's assertion that democratic citizenship needs feminism to develop (Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, 1998, 35–36; Bucur and Miroiu, 2–3), is supplemented by an empirical approach. The authors base their book on 101 interviews with Romanian women of various ages, educational backgrounds, ethnicity, and religious affinity. Throughout the book the authors alternate between recollections of major events in Romania's past century, historical and sociological accounts of how the labor market, political participation, and education evolved from a gender perspective, and excerpts from the interviews given by the women about what it means to navigate the personal in different political regimes.
Bucur and Miroiu start to address the main question of their book by presenting how women view personal and family relations. While relationships with men, especially their husbands, are described as unequal in terms of resources and power, having and raising children seems to bring to the women interviewed the most sense of fulfilment. Motherhood as fulfilment, however, brings to the forefront how during communism Romanian women experienced a traumatic clash between the personal (having children as the most satisfying life experience) and the political (the decree of Nicolae Ceausescu banning and criminalizing abortions in 1966). In the section that addresses how work, both paid and unpaid, shapes identity for the women interviewed, Bucur and Miroiu show that employing a normative, western feminist approach can clash with women's experiences in central and eastern Europe. Paid work gives women a sense of belonging and pride, but so does domestic work.
Bucur and Miroiu also touch on the issues of social justice and political participation by placing the fundamentals of these important components of democratic citizenship with women's everyday practice: socializing, forming or participating in apolitical associations, going to church, and so forth. It is interesting to note that having a socially-participative life was noted mostly by the older women interviewed, while the accounts given by the Romanian women living their young adult or adult lives during the transition period echoed Ruth Lister's observation of the loneliness of women confided to family life (Citizenship, 2003; Bucur and Miroiu, 2018, 97).
In a very important contribution to the academic literature, the authors explore the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship of the women interviewed with communism, both as political regime and an ideal. As evidenced by the accounts related in this chapter, women viewed positively the rights gained during communism, especially related to access to housing, education, and the labor market. At the same time, the accounts of the women interviewed show that communism also meant for them losing reproductive rights and personal autonomy. The authors do not imply that the respondents see a type of trade-off, but come back to the theme of how the empirical can inform normative perspectives of women and gender relations.
In the closing part of the book, Bucur and Miroiu deal with the period of transition to democracy after 1989. The authors reformulate the starting question of their book, how women navigate the personal and the political, but this time during a transition to democracy that, as the women interviewed point out, was promissory of but never developed a complete democratic citizenship.
Bucur and Miroiu offer a new perspective on Romanian history, one seen through the eyes of women, thus supplementing the valuable but relatively scarce academic research in this area. The authors provide a necessary account of how women can forge their own interpretation and practice of rights and citizenship while, simultaneously, having to navigate political regimes that were in direct opposition to their empowerment.
