Echoes of the Eugenic Movement from Interwar Romania in Communist Pronatalist Practices

The present article dwells on the idea of the empowerment of women as it was used by the Communist regime. Eugenics, a field much discussed in inter-war Romania, was the main tool in controlling women. The principles of this science, related to the idea of biology as destiny, were adopted and applied so that the private sphere became public. My thesis is that even if these principles were used in the communist strategy in order to strengthen the nation, in fact, their core aspect – reproduction – became only a means for increasing work force and in the end weakened the family and implicitly the nation.