“The Unwomanly Face of War”: The Great War Thorough the Eyes of Romanian Women
“The Unwomanly Face of War”: The Great War Thorough the Eyes of Romanian Women

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the Great War from a gender perspective. It is part of an extended research focused on analyzing and understanding the impact the Great War had on women from Transylvania. Thus the present paper focuses only on revealing a glimpse of the attitudes, reactions and feelings of Romanian women during the war years. Our intention is to bring into discussion a less researched subject as far as Romanian historiography is concerned that is the War seen through women’s eyes. The work premises are that wars, in generally but also in Romanian society, tended, so far, to be treated as being exclusively masculine and so were the stories written about it. Through the masculine lens, the war is only about heroism; victories, military strategies and political treaties leaving in the shadow women’s war efforts as well as their actual understanding of what war was. These are the main reasons justifying the present scientific research: to deepen the present understanding and knowledge of the Great War by taking into consideration also the feminine side of the story. The research is conducted on press articles, memoires, letters as well as on literature (mostly poems) written by women who experienced the war.

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