Welfare Work Without Welfare Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest

"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.

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"Drawing on archives of social reform, Alexandra Ghit provides a complex portrait of gender, work, and social welfare in interwar Romania. We learn how through 'austerity welfare work,' welfare activists (philanthropists, social workers, and policy experts), as well as women wage and domestic workers, negotiated a stingy political system that diminished the civic worth of socially vulnerable women and girls. The book is especially timely, compelling us to consider who is deemed deserving of social assistance and to think critically about the various actors, feminists included, involved in making such determinations." - Jill Massino, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.