Constructing Females Identity: Women’s Emancipation, Press and Propaganda. (Case Study: Special Issues Dedicated to Women in Romanian Cultural Press in the 1950s).

The article deals with the issue of women’s emancipation as one of the most significant communist discursive elements and considered by some authors the “total myth” (Aivazova) of the communist ideology. The ideological complex associated with the Marxist and Leninist beliefs was used by political propaganda in the Soviet Union and later imposed to the rest of the Eastern European Communist countries. The study focuses on the actual praxis associated to this official discourse in Romania, resulting in the creation and imposing of specific identity patterns, reflected on the “new” women’s roles and visual representations. The analysis starts from the theoretical paradigm of women studies, discussing gender issues in the context of Eastern European totalitarian regimes and focusing on the elements of the communist identity construction policies applied in Romania in the late 1940s-1950s, when the Soviet influence was maximal. The study aims to reveal – by using Romanian cultural press (and propaganda articles and images on women’s emancipation and identity present there, particularly in festive special issues dedicated to them) – the aspects of the political intrusion in private and public life as related to important identity pattern changes. Female identity was reconfigured by this political intrusion, her roles multiplying (the “triple burden” of performing professional, political and domestic tasks) as her individuality and female features were almost annulled in favour of an imposed, stereotypical, non-sexual and uniform image. Relating the construction of identity policies to women studies, the analysis (using press representations of these Soviet – “second-hand” – patterns) concludes that different levels of female identity have been affected by the political intrusion, setting specific coordinates of the dramatically reconfigured female identity.