Women and politics in the Romanian Legionary Movement

Abstract

This thesis examines women’s participation in the Legionary Movement or Iron Guard, a far-right, anti-Semitic movement active in interwar Romania. Over four chapters, I analyze how the participation of women changed over time, the different forms this participation took, and how these different forms shaped and redefined political relations within the movement. The first chapter focuses on women’s participation in the student activism that characterized Romanian universities throughout the interwar period. University politics played a major role in the origins, development, and self-image of the Legionary Movement. The chapter follows the evolution of the movement’s use of university politics through the lens of increasing female participation. The second chapter is entirely devoted to the exploration of family relations in the Legionary Movement’s ideology and experience. In the third chapter, I analyze the open support or sympathy for the Legionary Movement held among the intellectual elites of Bucharest, the aristocracy, and, finally, among some feminist circles. Gender and class dynamics are inseparable in the analysis of the political beliefs and activity of the women protagonists of this chapter, whose support of or sympathy for the Legion complicates the notion of membership and opens different perspectives on the intersection of gender and class within the movement. Finally, the fourth chapter explores the adoption and adaptation by some legionary women and, especially, by the more formal feminine section, of violence as a form of political action. What emerges from this study is the experimental nature of women’s participation, the constant redefinition of its forms and limits. Moving in an ideological framework designed for them by men, women found their space(s) of agency at the interplay of discourse and practice, through the opportunities for political action offered by the complexity of lived experience.