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Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. My name's Roland Clark, and I'm here today talking to Alex O'Geeks about her new book, Welfare Work Without Welfare. Alexandra is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, where she's working on interwar anti-militarism and pacifism in Central and Eastern Europe. She's also an incoming Mary Scott-Ovsky-Cury postdoctoral fellow at Leignix Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe from Leipzig.
Her research interests include women's labor history, the history and sociology of social policy, the social history of state socialisms and post-socialisms, and the history of women's social movements. So welcome to the podcast, Alexandra. Thank you for inviting me, Roland. Alexandra, there's a lot going on in this book.
But by waiving introduction, could you tell us a bit about one of your main characters, a woman by the name of Mariwara? What was her life like, and why is she interesting to historians? Mariwara is a 33-year-old single mother of two young children, living in one of the 1920s in the most tourist, Bucharest poorer Mariwara neighborhoods. She earns a living working from a fairly furnished rented room, doing piece-rate work.
Essentially, she makes leather parts for shoes, using two sewing machines she has in her home. She had learned this craft from her partner, the man left her and the two children, and Mariwara makes shoes at home together with a 13-year-old niece that she hosts. Mariwara has migrated to Bucharest from a rural area, possibly from a smaller town, sometime in the early 1920s. Her parents had little land and could not support a family with many siblings entirely.
The niece has a similar story, many other people in Bucharest do at the time. In November 1929, Mariwara's situation comes to the attention of a social worker, and thus a case file is drawn up, and this is how we know more about her. From the case file we learned that although Mariwara overexerts herself to earn money and to care for her children, she's increasingly sick. The family is in debt, so by the autumn of 1929, they do not have money for medicine, for firewood, and more importantly, for the least payments for the two single sewing machines that are so crucial for the family's survival.
The social worker tries to help Mariwara to handle this complicated situation, and I should point out that the presence of a social worker is quite extraordinary and experimental, and the fact that we have a sort of detailed case study or case file even more so. I think that for historians, Mariwara's life story shows how women sought to juggle paid and unpaid care work in the 20th century in the capital city of an agrarian country such as Bucharest, or such as Romania. And at the same time, this case file allows us to question and perhaps revise what we think we know about state building in the interwar period in Romania and beyond. It allows us to see that very little of the burden of ensuring others' well-being was attenuated or affiliated, or affiliated, I meant, through the welfare programs or laws of a purportedly centralizing work-spanning state.
So the well-being of those who were vulnerable was somehow ensured through gendered forms of unpaid and underpaid work of various kinds. And in my book, I call these forms of work austerity welfare work. So Mariwara E is a kind of austerity welfare worker as is the social worker who visits her in a different way. So if someone like Mariwara needed help, who could you take turn to?
Like, who was providing welfare and social assistance in interwar Romania? That's a great question. So Mariwara could piece together various forms of support and small amounts of money from private and state-subsidized by private organizations. So she received some support from, for example, the Association of the Romanian clergy initially, the rafter from the Prince Mecia Society for the Protection of Children, from Bucharest City Hall, the other social worker who visits her home, from the craft corporation to which she belongs and where she's in search, which is quite unusual for a woman at the time, from a pharmacist in the neighborhood and from several doctors from her sister, from other poor women in the neighborhood.
Interwar Bucharest has a very special thriving landscape of associations dedicated to social reform and otherwise to welfare provision to social assistance. The role of the church, historically important, is decreasing. The role of the so-called private initiative associations is increasing. Whereas classical or well established conceptualization of welfare states and social assistance is that social assistance is a form of publicly funded support for those who cannot benefit from insurance.
The historical reality is that social assistance in Bucharest was a kind of state, subsidized, but privately run patchwork of programs supporting a vast population that simply does not have access to social insurance. So, and this Bucharest is not atypical at the time. What is unusual is that women welfare activists are quite influential, but the public money to be spent is quite limited. So, Maríara E.
and people, especially women in her situation, you could say, have many doors to knock on, but in fact, very few systematic avenues of support. Yeah, it's a tough situation for her to have been in. Can you tell us a bit more about women's work in general? Were women in Bucharest able to get the same sorts of jobs as men with similar wages?
So, women's work patterns in inter Bucharest resemble those of women in other cities across the globe at the same time, especially industrializing cities, not quite different from the patterns or the work patterns for men, whether in Bucharest or well elsewhere. So, a growing number of women become wage workers as part of a post-World War I trend across Europe. However, a significant number of women continue their income-generating activities by working from home, as they had done before, so doing laundry, taking in borders, doing piece-rate work at home like Maríara, or especially working in other people's homes as servants. So, the 1930 census shows that there were around 400,000 adults working in industry.
Some 13% of these adults were women in an overwhelmingly agrarian country of around, I believe, 17 million at the time. So, 90% of the population around is in rural areas, and some 400,000 adults work in industry. 13% of these are women. However, there are 250,000 adults, according to the census, who work as servants, and here it is 89% who are women in this, what is at the time, a very large occupational sector.
So, it's a very different type of work that women do. When they do work in factories or in small workshops, child care, needs, and pregnancies are a systematic, significant dimension structuring women's employment. So, when they do work in factories and do full-time work, women's wages are 50% lower, usually than those of men, but they do different kind of work, so it's very hard to compare. So, comparing men's and women's wages is only part of the story.
Women did different kinds of paid work because they were expected, especially, to do a lot more care work. So, this care work is usually unpaid, or as in the case of many servants, nannies, but even some white women, so white collar women, white collar professions or in the caring professions, social work, this is badly paid work. So, let's say women earn a lot less than men, but importantly, they do different kinds of paid work, which they mix with significant amounts of unpaid care work. Even if they're doing different kinds of work, 50% still ridiculous.
Were there laws protecting women in the workplace? It depends how you define a workplace, again, and I should say that 50% of the wage differential is sort of typically, in Europe at the time. There's a slight improvement in wages in Europe, but it's very much the norm, right? So, but again, it depends how you define a workplace, and if you worked as a servant, for example, a servant woman, your employment was not governed by a typical labor contract, what we might think of as a typical labor contract now, but by an rather archaic at the time servant code, or servant master code, meaning you were largely the servant of your master and master and your employer into the 1930s.
So, this meant you could work under widely variable conditions in someone's home. If you worked in a large factory, but few women did comparatively, from 1928 on, women workers in Romania were covered by laws that were in principle, allowing with international labor organization conventions on maternity leave, meaning that there was a maximum of six weeks of leave before birth and the mandatory six weeks after birth, and you were covered by a prohibition on women's night work, but there were many possible exceptions to this. I should also say that technically, employers weren't allowed to dismiss a woman who was on maternity leave, but in practice, this happened frequently. Beyond exceptions, there was actually little enforcement.
Labor inspection was so notoriously weak and toothless in the interwar period, so women labor activists in Romania had called for better labor protection, and especially for equal pay for equal work since the 1910s, but equal pay for equal work, in fact, becomes a legal principle, only 1948, essentially. But there are people around who are doing philanthropy and advocating on behalf of women, and one of the most prominent philanthropists in Interwar Romania is the Princess Alexanderina Canteccusino, who's a leading figure in the Orthodox National Society of Romanian Women. How does she approach welfare? That's a great question.
So Alexander Canteccusino is a princess in the sense that she has an old aristocratic title, which is not exactly bestowed to her by the existing royal family at the time in Interwar Romania, but she's part of her so-called old boyar family, and she is independently wealthy, and by the 1930s, I believe, already with her. She travels extensively, she's educated in France, she has many international contacts, and is very influential politically as far as I could be. Canteccusino believes social assistance should modernize, but that women philanthropists just such as herself and her Orthodox National Society and many others chalerties she presides upon, believes that these societies in general should continue to have a strong say in creating welfare policies at least at municipal level. She's religious, but also someone who is very active in the international women's movement at one point, president of the extremely influential International Council of Women.
She is what a French historian or historian of France has termed a feminine expert. She does not have a degree in any of the new caring professions, she's not a social worker per se, but she has contacts across the world, is knowledgeable on social issues. She's certainly perceived to be an expert and a person of influence by many others involved in politics at various levels, so in Romania and internationally. She believes women and especially girls should be better protected through social programs and services, but is not particularly interested in the emancipation of lower-class girls per se.
She believes those who benefit from any sort of public welfare should be respectable and show a clear willingness to work and to be reformed. By the 1920s this is a socially conservative approach already, albeit by no means very old-fashioned, so she's at once a modernizer and someone who believes the noblest or bleash type of charity work that she had been doing for decades should be allowed to continue and even encouraged perhaps in partnership with the state. But she's not the only person out there and another key institutional player you talk about in the book was the Superior School of Social Assistance, which works really closely with the Section for Feminine Studies at the University of Bucharest and involves people like Calypso Botez, Venturia Manilla and Zenia Costa Furo. How did these women approach welfare?
So you are right, Roland, that's Cantacusino is not the only major player and realizing this was one of the more interesting aspects of researching this dissertation. Calypso Botez, Venturia Manilla and Zenia Costa Furo are involved in the Section for Feminine Studies of the Romanian Social Institute of the University of Bucharest, but a different kind of think tank type of organization. They are different from Cantacusino and also different among each other. So Calypso Botez is a feminist suffragist, she's interested in improving women's civil and political rights, but also in securing better working conditions for white-collar working women, for example secretaries.
Jiman Nulon, on the other hand, is a trained social worker having graduated from courses in social work at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the mid to late 1920s. Like Cantacusino, she and Botez are quite suspicious of women who apply for social assistance in general, thinking that women and men who wish to benefit from any kind of assistance should demonstrate a willingness to work and to become autonomous to no longer be so-called dependent on welfare. The Superior School for Social Assistance, that Manilla fans and the younger Costa Furo later runs is basically very fond of detailed home investigations, but also of neighborhood surveys in order to establish who is deserving, but also what are the economic circumstances that creates poverty and these situations of dependence. Until World War II, at least these three somewhat strange allies, Botez, Manilla and Costa Furo see poverty and need as linked both to individual failures and failures of character, a bit like how Cantacusino saw it.
And to broader economic trends, and this allowed to a greater extent than Cantacusino. You mentioned a minute ago that Manilla and others were trained at American universities and they had connections with the Rockefeller organization as well. To what extent do you think that their foreign ties shaped their approach to welfare? To a great extent, although I will say the Rockefeller Foundation provides fellowships but does not necessarily directly influence the direction of their studies or their approach.
In fact, Manilla pays for her studies herself while her husband, famous statistician Sabine Manilla is a Rockefeller fellow in the US, but she herself is not a direct fellow. In any case, in Baltimore, Manilla is influenced by Mary Richmond and the charity organization Society, the COS, and the COS seeks to systematize charity and practice so-called constructive social assistance. Costa Furo, on the other hand, from a quite old progressive family in Bucharest, is a Rockefeller fellow at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s. She eventually develops a monographic method for researching families, so again, these preoccupation with families and the household.
These methods are partly rooted in social work methods linked to the United States. Bottez is affiliated to the International Women's Suffrage Alliance, but by the mid-1930s is also important. The main correspondence committee on women's work of the International Labor Office, this is a Geneva connection. In 1935, the correspondence committee sends to Romania and other places, questionnaires on women's working conditions and experiences seeking to compile a large transnational report.
Bottez's Manilla, the Superior School of Social Assistance, team up to gather the statistical data they are asked to provide. This is how the Tain neighborhood, which is a popular neighborhood in sector one at the time called Sector Yellow of Bucharest, becomes the epicenter of data collection on women's work in urban settings in Romania. These interactions facilitated by exchanges in the section for feminine study at the Romanian Social Institute deeply shape how these welfare activists, Manilla, Costa Furo, Bottez, and many others, do social work. They realize that welfare and care work are interlinked in the background, I should say, a fear of communism, international communism, and to an extent also international social democracy shapes the views of the social reformer who are rather center left, center right, increasingly right wing on social issues.
In my book, I tried to make quite clear the fact that left wing practices and ideas about welfare and women's work are kind of shadowy pull in a debate that is largely carried out by sort of pragmatists and moderates in Bucharest. The communists themselves also have quite a lot to say about women's welfare and women's work, which is not a whole topic. But you're right that it was primarily women and female council members who were most involved in welfare. Why do you think that was?
Did men just not care about other people? No, certainly not. It was not because men did not care. Rather, it had something to do with the long history of women's social authority that is rooted in their charity work and quite a lot to do with electoral politics and electoral laws.
So certain categories of women can vote in local elections in Romania from 1929, which is a relatively late development in central European perspective. Even before women could elect and be elected for municipal office, they can be co-opted into local councils, especially if they have somehow distinguished themselves through charity work. So in 1929, 1930, first cohort of women is elected in various borders and sectors, but previously there had already been quite a few women who had been co-opted or nominated to local councils. By 1930, some of the women who are elected to the local council, so-called cohort of council women, some of the members of the National Pessentist Party, some of the others are loosely affiliated with the rival national liberal party.
So, Kan'takuisinou, but also Botte, for example, became council women in 1930. So there is a link between social reform and various more or less formal fora and then becoming local politicians. Because of the historical precedent of nominations to local councils on account of merits for charity work, but also because most council women had been effectively involved in various large private initiative organizations, they are delegated, they are appointed to deal with social assistance and social issues by the general mayor, by their fellow council members and so on. Council women themselves see this as a domain they are good at and in which they can be effective, yet they are also pushed into this kind of responsibility because men politicians are not exactly willing to concede authority over many other domains.
This one, it's hard to argue that when women say, well, we've been doing this for a while, we do it quite well. And of course, what is interesting is that municipal welfare is a dynamic and transforming field, and by 1930, Bucharest is beginning to see relatively high unemployment because of the Great Depression. There's plenty to do in this field. So there's both a sort of a choice involved in why council women do this and the kind of sort of being assigned partly based on gendered notions about what women do in public being assigned this domain of care and public assistance.
What's the difference between the types of social assistance provided by the city council and the sort you get from private charities, like the sort of thing that cantigazino runs? So there is less of a kind of a difference than a continuum. So there is a continuum between what the city council could provide and what charities could provide. There was a long history of what we would now call private public cooperation in assistance, especially for the poorest or for children.
And also at the time, some women were council women, so they were serving in an office. The city council could be a direct or an indirect provider of social assistance and services, social services. As a direct provider, it could sell or distribute fire with cheaply and winter. It could provide small cash aids for those considered needy, according to various changing criteria.
It could step into open up to open soup kitchens for the unemployed. It could fund orphanages and shelters for the homeless. And it could consider all of this the duty of the municipality. Significantly, with the exception of firewood and the night asylum, there's actually a lot of change and discontinuity in methods and principles.
And the methods and principles through which the city councils of various districts and the city council of Bucharest provide direct welfare. Indirectly at the same time, the city council can provide subsidies for so-called indoor assistance that is for residential institutions, such as orphanages or boarding school for girls that are then run by private charities, most of those run by women. Intern, private charities, such as the ones that are no cantacuzzi no runs or many of these other women support, can run clinics or orphanages schools. And they can draw on funding from the central government, from private donations, but also very often from the local government in order to do especially municipal urban setting work.
In 1930, for example, there are 105 charitable societies active in the so-called Old Kingdom of Romania, so the part of Romania that had been the Kingdom of Romania before 1992. There are 105 charitable societies, 88 of these are in Bucharest, so there's a very large field of social assistance and charity work in the city. And most of these organizations are run by women or rely on the voluntary work of women, and several of the largest ones have as their specific mission the protection of women and girls. So there is a kind of, you could say, difference between what the private and public assistance could be, but in practice, in fact, there is a lot of continuum and a lot of cooperation with shifting attributions and duties and the kind of think-pong about whether this is to be a system.
Or whether this is to be taken up by the city hall or by the charities or by a mix of the two. And say you're a poor woman and you want assistance, what would you have to do in return? You would have to work, especially or promise to work, and before receiving aid, you would usually have to demonstrate that you were poor and deserving, that is, you were respectable enough. And I think in the background, of course, there were many other criteria related to ethnicity and religion, but these are more difficult to detect at the moment, or at least they were for me, but I'm quite sure that if you were Orthodox, for example, or you were ethnically Romanian and identified as such, you would be probably a little bit more favored in receiving welfare.
In any case, this general focus on a willingness to labor and on respectability across the board is not unusual or particular to Bucharest. In most liberal capital aesthetics from the 19th century, welfare provision becomes linked to wage work. In interwar Bucharest, however, there is little money for expansive welfare provisions of this idea that the poor should work for what they receive is even stronger, in a sense. And beyond economic constraint, this notion of dispense towards austerity and low social spending is embedded in the local political culture or ideology or mentality, if you wish.
So by the interwar internationally, you could say, or within the ILO, for example, there's a growing sense that sickness, parenthood, or old age are parts of the human condition, and insurance and social assistance should be of help during those periods of life. Similarly, there are older notions in Orthodox Romania that charities are Christian duty, that you shouldn't expect anything in return. Despite this, the fact that there are alternatives at the time and there are historical alternatives of thinking about charity and welfare among politically influential social reformers in Bucharest, including many of the women I talk about, the prevailing idea is that there should not be so-called indiscriminate giving, quote-unquote. So even after the worst of the Great Depression has passed, and municipal assistance budgets are no longer extremely low and overburdened, the mayor of sector one of sector yellow asks that the women who receive small amounts of cash from the city that they knit socks at home.
There's no very clear economic sense to asking them to do this, yet somehow the mayor decides that this is what should be done if you receive welfare, you should be knitting socks at home. So essentially the idea is that there is no such thing as social assistance without it being immediately paid back in a way by the individual or the specific family who has helped. And this is quite different from the outlook that we hopefully tend to have today, that welfare provision functions at scale, that it distributes risk across all those in short. And this notion that the poor should be respectable and work in return from what they receive is rather an older form of so-called poverty politics that was quite spread across Europe, but also everywhere the British Empire especially reached.
Yes, even if we can't find evidence in the files that people discriminated against or in favour of ethnic Romanians and ethnically and religiously orthodox people, you see in the petitions that they do that the people appealing for aid clearly thought that that was something that they would, the authorities would want to hear, because they say in their own petitions, give me this because I'm an orthodox and I'm a good person. Precisely, and in the very few petitions I could find in the archives, it really seems that neighbours vouching for people petitioning for a bit of aid from the municipality or the petitioners themselves, they will mention old age, they will mention gender, they will mention need, but also would tend to mention ethnicity or religion as well, or perhaps silence it. I should point out that there's archival material that shows that social workers, for example in Bucharest, at least in sort of to the mid 1930s, some of them were very preoccupied by Jewish inhabitants of Bucharest as well, maybe not as much as they should have. One of the main professions that welfare workers encouraged poor uneducated women to join was domestic service, which you mentioned before.
The Association of Women, Friends of Young Girls in particular, tells girls that working with servants was an honourable occupation, but when you look at the police files and the newspapers, they see servants as potentially dangerous groups of people. How did journalists talk about female servants? So by the 1930s, especially there is great concern in Romania but truly across Europe that servants are internal enemies, so they live in their employers' houses, they are privy, talk kinds of secrets, they can poison or rob those living in the house, yet here they are indispensable. I believe on the background of the Russian Revolution, but especially of Greater Labour, Militancy across Europe, many middle-class employers, including in Romania, but also as far away as from Bucharest as in England and London, for example, they have to grapple with the fact that peasant girl or lower-class young woman they know not much about will be living under the same roof and possibly harbouring great resentment towards them, because of that treatment but also sort of class resentment.
And in Bucharest, this perception is as you point out hyped by rumours and the press who tend to over-report on crimes of servants on a murder that happens at some point and so on. This, unfortunately, hides a sort of troubling labour and welfare reality, because rather than modernising servants' employment conditions away from the servant code framework, Romania with greater virulence than other countries in the region doubles down by using modern means, and this notion that servants might be criminals or murderers is really serving this kind of harsher treatment of servants, and so on. The fact that servants are not a domestic person, so servants are controlled and surveilled through an office for the control of servants, which fingerprints and photographs them in the 1930s, and I should point out fingerprinting for example is a very new technology at the time. Women, but not men, are required to undergo medical examinations, and it seems in the very building of the office for the control of servants.
And this is based on a suspicion that women are sort of carriers or frequent carriers of venereal diseases or infectious diseases, just tuberculosis. Domestic service is a deregulated occupation, where the employer has a clear legal advantage that is enshrined in the servant code, and the employer has a clear legal advantage that is enshrined in the servant code. And Consecunque is an increasingly unappealing occupation as well, so many young women would rather do 10, 12 hours of factory work and night shifts than work for a master because of this deregulated character. And during the Great Depression, the Association of Women, women friends of young women, Amicie L'Echinel-Olfeta in Romanian, they run a hostile and job placement office, and this is when they try to persuade educated but jobless women to take up domestic work, arguing that it is an honourable profession, but they have little success because public opinion really tends to associate domestic service with something quite unsavory and dubious.
I should point out that the paradoxically, perhaps, the main mission of the Association of Friends of Young Women is to protect young girls and women from being trafficked into coerced sex work, because domestic service is such a frequent occupation for young women who migrate from the countryside to the city, and it is so likely that the women friends of young women are going to have to help these young migrants. They have to deal with a lot of women who have actually experienced sexual abuse and harassment within the houses of their employers where they worked as domestic servants. So the anti-trafficking model of this Friends of Young Women's organization is never fully suited to grapple with the fact that in a sense the call is coming from inside the house, that the deregulated character of domestic service is what enables forms of sexual abuse and what makes domestic service not only a kind of dishonorable occupation but truly a quite dangerous occupation for many women who are left unprotected by labour codes and by many women. And by employers, of course.
You mentioned before that, while these organizations are helping women, they're also researching them and the Superior School of Social Assistance in particular does a lot of research in the time that is engaging with some of these poor women. What did they conclude about how women entering the work for workforce was impacting men's authority within the family because that's something that men always worried about once women start getting jobs? Right, and I think the research shows that men need not have been. To kind of explain the bigger story on the background of cooperation between the Superior School of Social Assistance and the International Labour Office's Correspondence Committee for Women's Work, the school conducts surveys in the neighborhood.
And they find out that there's a growing number of women who do paid work and they realize that it's mostly informalised work and in bad conditions and it's some of it is fact-rewered but a lot of it is sort of working by the days and so on. The interesting twist of what they discover and what they conclude is that women overwork because their partners are unemployed or unsupportive. So paid work for many of these proletarianised women is not a form of liberation or self-actualization meant to counter or undermine patriarchal authority. Rather it seems it was perceived as a kind of what these women say was a painful necessity.
So men's authority declines because men cannot provide but also because men leave and the surveys know the kind of disorganization of the family. But unlike social hygienists, doctors, so eugenicists in bookwares to tend to fault feminism and women's work and desire for work for this disorganization, these social workers from the Superior School of Social Assistance cautiously conclude that it's about men and the economy rather than women and their paid work ambitions. And I think the surveys that I also discussed quite a bit in the book should lead us to more carefully examine any wiggish narratives about women's entry into the paid workforce and instead lead us to immediately ask under what conditions that entry to the paid workforce occurred for different categories of women. And I mean, of course, for many working class, paid work was a source of pride and eventually of household authority.
But in the mid to late 1930s in bookwares, these surveys shows that this paid work was part of a much more complex process economically and effectively that was much more about survival and making do and safeguarding what there was left of some sort of patriarchal organization of families under economic conditions that didn't allow for that anymore. Finally, you've told us a story about these women who were doing both welfare work and sociological research and who were working overtime, both through city councils and through private charities to help book arrests working poor, who themselves were working overtime to support their husbands. What impacted all of their work have on state building and the creation of a welfare state in Romania? So foremost, the various kinds of austerity welfare workers I discuss in the book within their ideological and practical limits were as you pointed out essential for social reproduction, for keeping things going for surviving during the Great Depression, especially.
And this contribution is, of course, easier to theorize than to quantify, but what limited evidence we do have, such as a survey from the late 1930s that shows, for example, that working women bookwares supported a very high number of so-called dependence through their paid and unto paid work. So what data we do have corroborates this notion that women who worked carried a lot of the load of sort of subsistence during tough economic times. For the long term, the contribution to what we might understand is the history of the development of so-called welfare states in Romania is less visible. And other associated with the superior school were key policy actors in the Antonis regime during World War II.
So in 1945, it was important for the post-war transitional governments to devise a new system of social assistance to replace the old working principles in social assistance and especially to move away from the reprehensible goals that such social systems, settings and principles, had served during World War II, especially complicity in the Holocaust. We know from research on Argentina, for example, that the disjointed system of welfare provision that was built in Buenos Aires, for example, by women's organization in the interwar, was incorporated into an expansive welfare state. So we could imagine that had there not been World War II and its wars and massive regime change in Romania afterwards, that we could have had a similar genealogy where these women's organizations and private public disjointed corporations would have been institutionalized in a similar way, perhaps. But there was simply different historical conjuncture in post-war Romania with fewer continuities and that was for the better, I would say, but that is perhaps something to be argued with.
So that's about what we have time for today, but thank you so much for talking this really interesting topic, and I would recommend grabbing an order book and finding out more of the details, all of which are in there. Thank you, Zorond. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
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