According to the Encyclopedia of Romania, published in 1938 after years of data collection, domestic servants made up 24.9 percent of the active population of Bucharest in the 1930s. They were the second largest category of employment, after industrial workers (28 percent), but ahead of civil servants and clerks (19.3 percent). This was a significant departure from the beginning of the century when domestic servants made up only 7 percent of the city’s employees.[i] One important reason for this was the post-1918 creation of Greater Romania and the subsequent expansion of Bucharest into the capital of a much larger and more diverse country. Another, however, was the postwar economic turmoil, particularly the Depression years, which hit rural areas hard, forcing many people to seek jobs as servants in the capital or in provincial towns.
Interestingly, this particular development in interwar Romania seemed to favour the national minorities, especially the ethnic Germans and Hungarians. In the 1980s, sociologist Zoltán Rostás interviewed Bucharest inhabitants of various ethnicities who lived through the interwar and socialist decades. Finally published in 2002, his collection includes interviews with both individuals who worked as servants and whose families had servants. Educated German women fared best as affluent Bucharest families competed for the services of German-speaking governesses. Anna Fohreiter from Bukovina described the high salaries offered by employers in the 1920s and early 30s.[ii] Testimonies show that Hungarian women servants were also in high demand, given their reputation for diligence and integrity. Vilma Kovács, who worked hard and lived frugally in Bucharest in order to earn enough money to buy land back in Transylvania, was more reluctant to talk about her experience.[iii] Simultaneously proud of her achievements and embarrassed for having worked as a servant, her attitude mirrors that of peasants interviewed back in the 1930s, who were ambivalent about working “for a master” but were nonetheless increasingly pressured to consider it.
The interviews conducted by the sociologists at the Banat-Crişana Social Institute in 1934 in the village of Sâmbateni, near Arad, in western Transylvania, reveal the difficulty of coming to terms with domestic service. Several individuals agreed that working as a servant in town was something “rather shameful,” made acceptable by abject poverty and debt.[iv] Peasants, especially women, had higher chances to find work as servants in town than as day laborers in the village.[v] While the work itself was considered easier than in the fields, the wages, working conditions and the way servants were treated by their employers were all up to chance. Here too an ethnic dimension is visible as employment by ethnic Germans was preferable since pay was better and more reliable.[vi] Even as some still rebelled against working for a “host” (master),[vii] worsening economic conditions transformed the village mentality as well.
[i] Enciclopedia României, vol. 2 (Bucharest, 1938), 557.
[ii] Zoltán Rostás, Chipurile oraşului. Istorii de viaţă în Bucureşti. Secolul XX (Iaşi: Polirom, 2002), 208-210.
[iii] Ibid., 186.
[iv] DJAN Arad, Fond Institutul Social Banat-Crişana, Monografia comunei Sâmbateni, vol. Clase sociale. 71
[v] Ibid., 73, 79.
[vi] Ibid., 73, 77.
[vii] Ibid., 94.