Gender Roles and the Family under Romania’s Post-Socialist Constitution: Between Progress and Restraint

This article contributes to understanding the status of gender equality in Eastern European constitutions and societies. It focuses on Romania, revealing both progress and conservative setbacks. Specifically, the article provides a case study on the construction and evolution of gender roles within the family under the post-socialist Romanian Constitution. It shows that although state socialism aimed to promote gender equality, it left gender roles within the family mostly untouched. Gender roles within the family started being more fundamentally challenged – at least when it comes to legislation – only after the fall of the regime. The Constitutional Court of Romania played an important role in this process through its interpretation of the Constitution, acknowledging early on the socially constructed nature of gender roles and their impact on gender (in)equality in the family and beyond. An exception to this general trend comes from its recent case law on same-sex marriage. While the Court seems to be generally open to promoting equality between men and women, it shows restraint when questions of sexual orientation are at play. In this context, the article suggests that the recent conservative turn on constitutional questions of gender equality in Romania may be driven more by reticence to LGBT+ and intersectional equality than by concerns about equality between men and women per se.