Subscribers // by Benoît Bréville (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, July 2026)

Gender inequality remains the most durable form of inequality. Oxford historian Martin Conway has a radical claim: democracy helped reinforce it. In this interview, Johanna Taufner, doctoral researche...

This blog accompanies the MSCA research project »Women’s Politics and Postwar Reconstruction in Romania« by Alexandra Ghiț. How did women politicians and grassroots activists shape the postwar remaking of key political fields? RECKON will investigate the gendered transformation of public health, labour, foreign affairs and culture after World War II, with a focus on Romania 1944–1948.It regularly features reflection pieces that provide insights into ongoing research, prefiguring interpretative lines and offering a glimpse of the findings to be unpacked in longer-format publications. The blog and the research project are funded by the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA).

Alexandra Ghiț studied political science, liberal arts, history and gender studies in Cluj Napoca, Budapest, Durham (USA), Nottingham and Leipzig. She obtained a Doctorate (2020) from Central European University Budapest with a dissertation on women’s activism, gendered expertise and social policy in interwar Bucharest placed in transnational perspective. From February 2020 to July 2023, she was Postdoctoral Fellow in the project ZARAH (ERC Advanced Grant), on women’s labour activism, at CEU Budapest. In 2024 and 2025, she was a postdoctoral researcher in HERESSEE (ERC Starting Grant), on women’s political thought, at Vienna University.

Welfare Work Without Welfare argues that women activists, wage workers, and homemakers in the Romanian capital Bucharest ensured others’ well-being in the interwar period through their "austerity welf...