Lecture format: on site
Venue: Alte Kapelle
Street address: Spitalgasse 2, Hof 2, Eingang 2.8, 1090 Wien
This event will feature a presentation and discussion of Alexandra Ghiţ's newest book Welfare Work Without Welfare. Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter, 2025). The book will be presented by its author, commented on by Prof. Melissa Feinberg (Rutgers University). The event will be moderated by Prof. Zsófia Lóránd (RECET/University of Vienna).
Welfare Work Without Welfare argues that women activists, wage workers, and homemakers in the Romanian capital Bucharest ensured others’ well-being in the interwar period through their "austerity welfare work".
Revealing links and tensions between the performers of different types of underpaid or unpaid austerity welfare work, each empirical chapter focuses on a key domain:
- knowledge production about social problems by "women welfare activists" (professional social workers, lay experts, left wing militants);
- municipal-level social assistance policy, with emphasis on a pioneering generation of women local politicians in shaping welfare practices;
- paid household work by underpaid servants;
- unpaid household work by homemakers or precariously employed women in working class communities.
The book offers a novel interpretation of state-society relations after the First World War, showing that unpaid labor and gender relations were crucial in responding to economic crisis in an Eastern European urban setting and beyond. At once a local and transnational history of women’s work, Welfare Work Without Welfare contributes to the historicization of social reproduction work and to the rethinking of the history of welfare states.
Alexandra Ghiț is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at GWZO Leipzig. Between 2024-2025 Alexandra Ghiţ was a researcher with RECET and the HERESSEE project.
Melissa Feinberg is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick with particular interests in gender history, Eastern Europe, the history of human rights, political culture, emotions in politics, and the history of feminism.
Zsófia Lóránd is Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary History and RECET at the University of Vienna. Earlier, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of History and Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, and had held positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Göttingen. Her book, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia focusing on the intellectual history of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s was published in 2018 and got translated into Croatian in 2020. Currently, she is working as PI on her ERC-funded project HERESSEE “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929 – 2001”.
