Between the Mother of the Wounded and the Virgin of Jiu: Romanian Women and the Gender of Heroism during the Great War

This article adds new depth to understanding the gendered dimension of the Great War experience on the eastern front by focusing on one of the smaller participants in the conflict and a latecomer to the experience of total war: Romania. The author examines how the image of two famous women, Queen Marie and Ecaterina Teodoroiu, functioned to construct normative gender roles and definitions of heroism, at the expense of making invisible the actions of most other women. In this process, notions of patriotism, heroism, and virtue came to reinforce and encode gender divisions in a more well-defined public debate than ever before, as both policy makers and publicists sought to construct agency as a male prerogative. By making this aspect of the war visible, the author's analysis also engages the wider question of how Romanian politicians, publicists, and civilians understood the meaning of this total war and sought to mobilize for it.