Domesticating Viragos : the politics of womanhood in the Romanian Legionary movement

Building on the basic premise that the attempt to create a New Man was one of fascism's master-ideas, this article focuses on the feminine underside of this program of political anthropogenesis. The article centers on the image of the New Woman and the politics of womanhood within the Romanian Legionary movement. It argues that the Legion's trademark rhetoric of martial heroism and martyrdom led to an essential tension between a virile model of womanhood (patterned upon the masculine ideal type of the martyr-hero) and a more conservative domestic model. A third, reconciliatory hybrid model, which mixed features borrowed from the two antagonistic types of Legionary womanhood was eventually developed to defuse this tension. 1 online resource ([28] pages)