Radio România Internațional

Tag: childhood

  • Femininity and Childhood in Modern Times

    Femininity and Childhood in Modern Times

    Romanians
    gave up the Oriental style and fashion and quickly adopted Western fashions
    radically changing their dressing style and the interior decorations of their
    homes.




    Women
    quickly embraced the Western trends and proved to be the main promoters of
    these changes in the Romanian society. Furthermore, the change in mentalities
    allowed women to get more involved in social activities destined for children
    and not only. So, in the first half of the 19th century children
    benefitted from improved education and standard of living in comparison to the
    previous generations. Well-off families in the aforementioned principalities started
    hiring German, English or French tutors for their children, which replaced the
    previous Greek private teachers they used to have. Bourgeois families in these
    two regions inhabited by Romanians had their own approach in the education of
    their offspring. Here is now at the microphone Nicoleta Roman, researcher with
    the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History:

    There was the emerging bourgeoisie, made up mainly of traders trying
    to imitate the aristocrats in these regions. And in this case, these children’s
    childhood was somehow protected by the involvement of their parents who
    invested in their education in order to improve their status and the status of
    their families. And it was that investment that made the difference between the
    children coming from the rich families and aristocracy and the rest.





    The issue of childhood
    in the rural areas in the first half of the 19th century is still
    under the scrutiny of the historians. However, what is known for certain is
    that the struggle for survival in that area didn’t prove beneficial to the
    process of transformations of Wallachia and Moldavia in early 19th
    century. Changes in people’s outlook on childhood and the status of women were
    quite sluggish in the rural world and the young boyars who were the engine of these
    changes had their own outlook on education, mainly supervised by their mothers,
    who thus become the promoters of new ideas in this area. Here is again at the
    microphone Nicoleta Roman:






    We should not forget to mention the
    young generation of revolutionaries of 1848 or their associates who had made it
    to major positions in state structures. They had different approaches in terms
    of education and a series of state-funded social policies regarding education
    or social assistance started to emerge. The growing interest in children
    education shed a new light on childhood as compared to the previous years,
    making children more visible in society. There was also that feeling of
    national identity and the C.A. Rosetti – Mary Grant couple was a case in point.
    That was a cosmopolitan couple who loved their children very much and tried to
    instill this feeling of national identity in them, including through the names
    they had given to them. Their first daughter was named Liberty and we’ve learnt
    that the aforementioned feeling was also shared by their friends, the Golescu
    and Bratianu families. So, the elite changed and so did its approach to children
    education. The spirit of the 18th century had been replaced by one
    focusing on how those children could represent the nation better and how they
    could assume the values of a certain nation.




    Journalist, writer, political leader
    and revolutionary Constantin Alexandru Rosetti aka C.A.Rosetti in 1847 married Mary
    Grant, a Scotswoman who was working as a governess. The couple was to become an
    example not only for their cosmopolitan style but also for the fact they tried
    to fairly share the household tasks and chores. They had a joint contribution
    to their children’s education and worked together over their publications. Mary
    Grant rapidly adopted the ideals of modernizing the Romanian space at that
    time. And as Nicoleta Roman pointed out she wasn’t the only woman changing her
    status in those years.


    There was in early 19th century a tendency of
    professionalizing some aspects in a woman’s life. The woman could become a
    midwife, a teacher or a babysitter. These were paid activities and started
    being integrated in the state system. So women started taking off from the
    private field and finding their own way in life without giving up families or
    households. They started gaining public recognition. At the same time, women
    from the upper classes got involved in the process of founding charity
    associations and charity actions. Some of them got involved in the process of
    editing various publications. The 19th century saw a significant
    improvement in terms of women’s involvement in society than the previous one.     (bill)

  • “The Ever Forward!” Generation

    “The Ever Forward!” Generation

    However, the philosophy of history tells us that history, memory and truth are nothing but fragments of what belonged to the individual and the community. And the nostalgia that sometimes seizes us sends us to a past which, more often than not, we try to trim into something more beautiful, unpleasant as it may have been.



    The memory of Communism is still something difficult to take responsibility for and its brunt is still hard to bear, although nostalgia has somehow rendered it more human. After decades of communist regime, and after other decades when research studies exposed Communisms fateful errors, it was nostalgia that had people come to terms with Communism and its blamable acts. “The Ever Forward generation is the generation of those who were children in the 1970s and the 1980s and who now make up Romanias mature generation.



    This generation is also the generation of the decree children, of the children who were born as a result of Decree no. 770 of 1966, which officially banned abortion. Named after the pioneers slogan, “Ever Forward, this generation has now reached the age of nostalgia. Let it be mentioned that people with this kind of nostalgia no longer pine for the communist regime, but for the age that defined them as nostalgic.



    In the 1990, “the Ever Forward generation viewed the nostalgia of the elderly with a mix of revolt and indifference. However, as years had gone by, “the Ever Forward generation was in turn seized by nostalgia, playfully at first, deeper and deeper afterwards. Historians Simona Preda and Valeriu Antonovici interviewed 22 personalities on their childhood in the communist regime, when, to a certain extent, parents did not have to worry about their children. A volume was the outcome of that, entitled “Ever Forward! Memories of Childhood, as well as a documentary film.



    Simona Preda spoke about the exercise she did jointly with the interviewees as about an act of common introspection, which is not deprived of the traps of distorted perception: What is the difficulty when you speak about childhood? It may seem something of the ordinary, but it is very hard to speak about your own childhood. It is all the more difficult when you find yourself in front of the camera. It is very hard for you to find your bearings, to update yourself, to yet again find yourself in a time which, after so long, you may run the risk of blemishing its memories with an ideological grid you identified as such, much later, after many, many years. The moment you had to deal with adults, when you were exposed to talks, research studies, ideological influences, youre likely to run the risk of placing yourself ‘a posteriori towards things that sometimes you used to experience in a particular manner, things you used to feel in a certain way or things you enjoyed in a specific manner, when you were a child. The main trap for us, when we deal with memoirs and memories, is that belated relation which is eventually contaminated by maturity. Accordingly, memoirs and oral history studies will always be affected by the passage of time. Generally, when we bring history into discussion, even when we bring our own individuality into discussion, we actually deal only with interpretations. We can no longer recapture reality or us, just as we were, with good or bad, with sensational things or which only seemed sensational to us, at the time, no matter how much we would have liked to do that.



    The nostalgia for childhood in Communism is easier to understand than other types of nostalgia, because its about the age of innocence, the age at which the world around is good, pure, beautiful, and you are surrounded by affection and attention. That is why the entire arsenal of objections, situations, life facts from that childhood, though ideologized at the maximum, is perceived with benevolence. The quasi-military structure of the pioneers organizations, the red flag, the slogans, the school uniforms, text-books, the entire universe of a 1970-1980 child, though representing a life style in a political regime that deeply humiliated its citizens, are treated with mercy and tolerance.



    Just like all those who have recollected their communist childhood, Simona Preda knows that those times must never come back again, but people cannot forget: “There is this possibility of recovering, to a certain extent, what we liked or what we would have liked to have. Or to recover ourselves as we would have liked to be. And its all about the passing of time. I believe that the protagonists were sincere, and there are moments when you can actually feel that honesty breaking through the screen. There are moments when we ask questions about certain aspects relating to our past. I dont believe that we can give diagnostics or perform sociological assessments after several dozens of interviews. We could not do that after three, thirty, three hundred, three million or 23 million, as the population was at one time. Each and every one of us lived their own childhood, lived their own moments of nostalgia, of greatness or humiliation, and I dont think we can draw up standard prescriptions. As somebody once said, I did not spend my childhood in Communism, I spent my childhood during my childhood.



    The “Ever Forward generation is the generation that had the historic chance to get rid of the most oppressive regime in history. Its the generation that turned Romania into what it is today, the generation that, despite third-age nostalgias, still has a say in what is happening.