ABSTRACT

WOMEN’S TRADITIONAL ROLES IN THE ROMANIAN ETHNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE

This paper is a hermeneutic approach of ethnographic texts on the family roles of women. The main objective is the sociological interpretation of the types of family roles reflected in this literature. The aim is also to diversify the ways of relating to femininity and to open fruitful dialogues between the Romanian cultural, anthropological and ethnographic perspectives. The paper was elaborated following the specialized literature (ethnographic, anthropological, sociological), based on a secondary analysis of ethnographic texts. By outlining a monograph on the family role of women in the traditional community, based on the Weberian methodology of the ideal type, this article proposes not a model for what the woman is or should be in the family, but a model of what she could be if her family roles were entirely traditional. Family roles and qualities are often a structuring factor in articulating individual identity, both in the traditional family and in the modern society. In the family and in the household, femininity as a socio-cultural type as well as an identity formula is built on the statuses of mother, wife and housewife. The roles associated with these positions involve not mere sets of behaviors, but the exercise of exceptional abilities: the power to give birth, to raise, care for, feed, educate – assimilated to the maternal role; the ability to respect, listen and serve, associated with the role of wife; the power to produce, the science of managing and increasing resources, the allocation of expenses, the authority to distribute tasks assumed by the role of housewife. Keywords: femininity, family, tradition, role and status.

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