Women’s status in the community has changed little over the time. For the Romanians, until recently the situation of gypsy women was similar to that of slaves. Upon adopting the Pentecostal religion, there have been improvements, a clear example being the participation of women to the vote to elect the preachers. They don’t have this… even when they weren’t married legally, gypsy women would never leave regardless of what the men did. Even if they beat them up, the women would stay… During that time, women were little more than slaves. It’s rough. To me it’s rough. But this is how we saw them from an outsider’s perspective. (representative of Romanians) We would get married as children. You couldn’t tell your dad… Dad I want to marry that woman, that girl, no way. He’d say… mind your own business, that’s my decision not yours. Children weren’t asked what they wanted. If the girl liked me or not didn’t matter, she’d marry me anyway because that was her parents’ decision. We obeyed our parents. All our community, we obey our parents. So once you get married, you stay married. So if women get beaten up or not, it doesn’t matter. Even if a woman goes back to her father, she spends a day, and then she returns to her husband. We’re not like you. It’s not like a man slaps his wife and she divorces him! No! Once you’re married in front of God, you stay married! It’s all good for us. Because that’s the way to be. Even if you’re not married in church, even if you don’t go to the Mayor’s Office, the women would never leave their husbands. So, we have our problems… I mean, any family has its problems… some families are filthy rich and still they have problems. But problems can be solved! Once you make peace, life goes on, the family goes on. (Roma leader) Well, women’s situation in the community is the same as it was 200 years ago. They have no rights, their husbands can do anything. Women can’t leave their husbands, regardless of what they do. Unless there is a conflict between the families, and the woman’s father takes her back. But once something like that happens, the woman in question has no future. She cannot set up house with another man… or if she’s allowed to, it will be with another gypsy, a widower, or someone who’s too poor to have been able to marry, or someone with a mental disability or some other reason for which he couldn’t marry. But there’s no way for her to start life all over again… if her husband dies, it’s over. And there’s no way that a woman can get separated from her husband to start over again… this just doesn’t exist! (representative of the Romanians) She had to walk behind us, I had to walk three meters in front of her. That was the tradition, women can’t walk alongside men on the road. If that happened, I’d be the laughing stock of the village. It’s just not allowed. Or if a woman passed in front of a man… it just was not allowed. Even if a man was just
Integrated Community Development Program
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