Women: Wife and Mother, Fighting with Familial and Public Demands in Modern Romania
Women: Wife and Mother, Fighting with Familial and Public Demands in Modern Romania

Summary/Abstract: Woman status as mother and wife did not change significantly, at least at a first glance, even if the modern state developed different elements of social solidarity in the frame of a complex construction combining the principles of liberalism with the ones related to the nation’s ideology. These circumstances were due to the fact that one of the most important innovations established by the modern state, citizenship, would not be reflected but partially upon women’ situation and therefore women would have various duties but not political rights. As a result, woman was confined in the private sphere of her existence, separated from public life and predestined almost exclusively to household, marriage and motherhood. The situation was not that simple as it might appear. The achievement of the modern state was one of standardization and homogenization which had as an objective the elimination of all discrepancies. The bureaucratic means used in order to encode to the smallest details the relations between individuals and newly-created institutions determined the constant limitation of the private sphere to the advance of the public one. Woman‘s emancipation was conditioned by the process of modernization of the whole society and by the practical, pragmatic means in which this modernization occurred. The modern state did not establish as an objective women ‘emancipation from the private sphere but some of the adopted measures had effects in this respect, and women knew how to use to their own advantage the new favorable conjectures.

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