Alexandra Ghiț: Women’s Labor Activism and Gendered Tobacco Work in Rural Southern Romania, 1930s to 1950s

What forms of labor activism shaped the lives of rural women doing agricultural tobacco work in the first half of the twentieth century in Romania? And to what extent? I will show how, in the 1930s, women were key workers in state-subcontracted tobacco cultivation. Yet policymakers did not devise policies concerning tobacco cultivation and sorting with the needs of rural women workers in mind. By the end of the 1930s, women labor activists linked to transnational expert networks were increasingly vocal about the situation of peasant women in agrarian Romania but had little influence on governments. Between 1945 and 1950, women’s existing involvement in tobacco cultivation and processing became more visible to policymakers and local women labor activists. I investigate continuities in women’s labor activism and place the greater post-1945 attention to women tobacco workers in the context of the transformation of social relations in rural areas in the region after the Second World War.

Alexandra Ghiț is Postdoctoral Fellow in the project ZARAH : Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century (ERC Advanced Grant, Principal Investigator: Susan Zimmermann) at the Central European University.