Romanian women's lives under socialism, Jill Massino writes, are “often interpreted through the prism of pronatalist policies and are overshadowed by the heroic narratives of (mainly men's) struggles against a brutal regime” (3). Her book offers, instead, a nuanced, three-dimensional history that paints a richly-textured portrait of women's lives as experienced from below and structured from above. The evocative title “Ambiguous Transitions” captures her central argument about the complexities of both state policy and women's everyday lives. It refers to contradictions in gendered policies that characterized two historical transformations: the socialist revolution of 1944–45 and the anti-socialist revolution of 1989–90. It evokes the mix of state oppression and personal agency, deprivation and plenty, alienation and affiliation that marked the life histories of countless female Romanians. It denotes inconsistencies that arose in the transition from political goals to social consequences as local customs and individual behaviors defied, evaded, or simply gummed up central plans.

Between a first chapter on the transition to socialism and a final chapter on the transition to capitalism stand six thematic chapters that each features a phase or arena of women's life-cycle under socialism: childhood and schooling, employment, marriage, family and reproduction, leisure and consumption. The book's sources are wide-ranging, including print literature, especially magazines and the press, material from government and party archives, and most striking, more than a hundred oral histories conducted since 2003. In her excellent Introduction, Massino points out that her interview pool and other sources are skewed toward urban women, on the one hand, and women of ethnic Romanian descent, on the other. Be that as it may, readers will be impressed by Massino's intelligent and sensitive deployment of the interviews. They present a broad diversity of experiences and perspectives that confirm her thesis that daily lives and attitudes were highly varied across women and across each woman's life-phases.

Within variation, some general tendencies come to the fore. Equal education for girls and women emerges as a point on which women's hopes and communist policy converged. Massino's interlocutors express unadulterated support for both the goal and the results. Yet Massino also shows that in the 1950s parents, especially rural parents, were not always enthusiastic about girls’ education—and they held on even longer to patriarchal ideas about sexual education and maternal employment. Rural and older people's resistance to communist gender policies is an example of similarities, Massino notes, between the Romanian story and those in other east European socialist states, the Soviet Union, and the west during the 1950s and 60s. Other similarities that she highlights include the failure of the domestic division of labor to adapt to women's high rate of employment, hostility of male workers to women workers’ skilling and promotion, and the dismal representation of women in even middle-level political positions.

The most infamous difference between Romanian Socialism and socialism in the rest of the eastern bloc was, of course, its crackdown on abortion and, indeed, all forms of birth control from the early 1970s through the end of communism. While other eastern bloc and many western countries continued or introduced legalized abortion, Ceauşescu's regime outlawed it and enforced criminalization with ever more draconian interventions. The reversal from a relatively positive to a heavily negative and repressive pronatalism, Massino suggests, was the greatest single contradiction in the project of “socialist modernization” that, she argues, drove communist policy. Her interlocutors speak with anger and sorrow about reproductive violence and its tragic effects, including increased maternal and infant mortality and the crisis of abandoned children that afflicted Romania from the 1970s into the 1990s.

Largely missing from the story is discussion of the intermediaries who represented party policies, while also interacting with ordinary women. Certainly, with material from the press, especially women's publications, Massino demonstrates that journalists, educators, and physicians explicated and sometimes mildly criticized party policy and/or popular opinion. She also provides interesting evidence on how and why individual doctors helped women obtain illegal abortions. Absent, though, are the activities of mid- and low-level state officials, party functionaries, and trade union bureaucrats who must have mediated, for example, between female workers and male workers or managers, working mothers and day-care or consumer services, or pregnant women and health clinics. Given that Massino combed through state and party archives, these actors are missing, presumably, because she could not find traces of their actions in the records. I wish only that she had explicitly addressed these lacuna in her otherwise thorough discussion of her sources.