'Time was Pressing': Women Activists, Memory and Regimes of Historicity in the Early 1990s in Romania and Moldova

• In Event: Political Thought, Memory, and Biographies from Women’s Intellectual History in East Central Europe

Abstract

In a 1999 book of “dialogues” with a journalist, anticommunist dissident Doina Cornea claimed that on 26 December 1989 she had allowed herself “to be defeated by the intellectual prestige” of several persons assembled to discuss a roadmap for Romania after Ceaușescu. At a gathering in the house of soon to be Minister of Culture Andrei Pleșu, Cornea did not insist on what she, in retrospect, believed to be her historically prescient vision for intellectuals’ political participation in the coming period, one focused on political parties rather than on civil society organizing. In Cornea’s reflection from 1999, this was a missed opportunity for anticommunist intellectuals to shape long-term developments in Romania, a country ruled by politicians who had been communist before 1989.
Cornea and a few other women intellectuals, of quite diverse political persuasions, played key practical and symbolic parts in the transformative events in Romania in late 1989 and the early 1990s. Similarly, in neighboring Moldova (part of the vanishing USSR until independence in 1991), women teachers, especially, took the lead in arguing for linguistic rights and “national identity”, particularly on behalf of Romanian-speakers there. Yet these women’s distinctive versions of what had happened before the fall of the USSR, what was happening in the immediate aftermath of the more or less bloody revolutions in East-Central Europe, and what ought to happen in longer term were not published in canonizable first-person accounts, even less in political essays. Instead, relatively quickly, women intellectuals (re)constructed their historical experience of postsocialist politics via dialogically produced memory narratives, such as interviews and oral history accounts. What are the causes for these women’s relatively greater ease in “speaking” rather than “writing” about postsocialist history? And what concepts of politics and transformation did these narratives bring to the surface? In my paper, I explore oral history narratives as sources for women’s political thought on postsocialist transformation in Romania and Moldova. I analyze how and why women intellectuals with very diverse preoccupations, from both countries, including philologist Doina Cornea, feminist sociologist Laura Grünberg and poet Irina Nechit, remembered or encouraged others to remember, this period of intense political transformation through dialogue-based memory genres. I show that mediated and co-produced forms of remembering were and, arguably, remain integral to women intellectuals’ political theorizing of postsocialism.

Author

• Alexandra Ghit, U of Vienna (Austria)