The Unsung Voices of Romanian Women
The Blouse Roumaine, Selected & Edited by Constantin RomanThis is a collection of biographical essays of 160 Romanian women, from antiquity, through the middle ages to the present-day, with the greater emphasis on modern and contemporary women.
Biography, Quotations & Selected References
Each entry is accompanied by a series of quotations and by a selected bibliography, or as the it may be in the case of musicians by discography discography and artist painters by exhibitions credits. This is very much an overview intended to incite the reader to look deeper into the cultural, social and historic background of Romania and by no means it intends to be exhaustive. The slant of the biographical notes focuses especially on the relationship between each individual woman and the Romanian society, but more so the relationship with the officialdom of the day; what achievements were made and how they were received, or acknowledged, what made these Romanian women turn into revolutionaries, political activists, underground resistance fighters, or political prisoners of concentration camps or take to the road of exile.
From All Walks of Life
The social range from which these women come is very broad, from aristocrats to peasant farmers, from philosophers to scientists, from artists to lawyers, poets or academics. The different political or religious persuasions and ethnic extractions are also represented, offering a panoply of famous and infamous alike, some of a world repute, but more often than not names limited to a national circulation, which would deserve a wider audience, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Unique & Original Book
This dictionary-cum-anthology assembles for the first time the large Romanian Diaspora (France, Germany, Italy, US, Canada, Argentina) side by side with the home-grown names, which stayed native, to brave the ire of the Communist regime over the past 50 years, or indeed to collaborate with it.
The Anthology has 1,100 pages containing 160 biographical essays, 600 quotations and some 4,000 references (in English, French, German, Romanian). In addition there is an introductory Overview and various indexes. A number of portraits illustrate the text. The Preface of ‘Blouse Roumaine’ is written by a distinguished French historian, novelist, expert in Romanian studies and Professor at INALCO, Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales, in Paris.