Monarchism with a Human Face: Balkan Queens and the Social Politics of Nursing in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens’ interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the “naturalization” of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such “soft power” they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the “curing” and “caring” dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens’ honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring “by nature,” and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women’s effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands.

Gender and Anticommunism in Children’s Social Protection in Postwar Greece

“…Comparing the queens of Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania in that same period, Evguenia Davidova has highlighted how their interventions in nursing during times of war contributed to the "naturalisation" of ruling foreign dynasties, the militarisation of charity and the connection between the monarchy and the philanthropic sector. 8 In Greece, networks of voluntary associations dedicated to the social protection of children and other vulnerable groups, in close relation to state authorities and under the auspices of the monarchs, were active and took different forms in the course of twentieth century. As a result of the social and political upheavals between 1912 (outbreak of the Balkan Wars) and 1974 (the end of the 1967-1974 dictatorship), the close interaction of public and private agents covered important needs in social provision.…”