Învăţământ preşcolar şi cultură naţională în România interbelică. Contribuţii feminine
Pre-school Education and National Culture in Interwar Romania. Women’s Contributions

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the professional trajectory of Elisa Angela Nicolaide as a key figure of the national school policy regarding kindergarten teaching. It explores the contributions by her and her fellow teachers working in Normal Schools for kindergarten teachers to create an autonomous entity, which represented their professional objectives and interests. The article also analyses how the Ministry of Public Instruction deliberately excluded all women from overseeing kindergarten teaching during 1920s, even though, prior to the First World War, women had been appointed inspectors. Only in the second half of the 1930s, female teachers were once again employed for such tasks, being in charge of evaluating the everyday activity of their colleagues. At the same time, the public perception on the role of kindergartens started to change. Initially, it had been perceived as having mainly national and social purposes, with rural minority communities and peripheral urban spaces as their target. Gradually, the focus expanded to social and cultural objectives, once such institutions were assigned the task of facilitating the civilizational uplift in the Romanian countryside.

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