New Books In Eastern European Studies

Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) argues that women activists, wage workers, and homemakers in the Romanian capital Bucharest became de facto social workers 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 activist" (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