Mihaela Miroiu

In 2010, the U.S.-based Association of Women in Slavic Studies awarded her its Outstanding Achievement Award for her accomplishments as a philosopher and her mentorship of a new generation of young Romanian feminists. The European Institute for Gender Equality also featured her in its “Women Inspiring Europe” 2011 calendar.

As a general critic to the book “Feminist Lexicon” that explains the fundamental concepts by the feminism movement, some Western observers consider that the Christian-Orthodox populations consider feminism to be irrelevant by the spirit Orthodox These observers discover that there is no popular mass movement to promote the ordination of women for the priesthood or the episcopate, and even the timid demands of women's right to become deacons, which would only revive a tradition Well-documented early Byzantine church avoided the shrill and direct tone of ordination movements in Western Christian churches. The majority of critics do not agree with Mihaela Miroiu's ideea of communism being incompatible with feminism due to the lack of free association, the lack of formulating their interests which were to be put on the cultural, civic and political agenda. The most significant dispute about these arguments took place on the pages of the Aspasia magazine. International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, Volume I, New York, 2007. In the context of the debate forum proposed by Mihaela Miroiu: "Communism was a state Patriarchate, not a state feminism". A series of author criticises his perspective: Krassimira Daskalova, Elena Gapova, Angelika Passara. Others revise their own perspective in the years 70 about the relationship between Marxism and feminism: Jane Slaughter and Marilyn Boxer. Critics of Mihaelei Miroiu's personal approach to liberal feminism (in relation to ethical liberalism of type welfare), namely the risks of a less close approach to the assisting role of the State and women's protection policies are formulated and by Anca Gheauș. However, this penchant is regarded as a reasonable context by Nanette Funk. Another criticism is the Romanian liberal feminism that has tended to be homogeneous and generally focused on the rights, freedoms and autonomy of women by its lack of connection with the ethnicity, class or sexual orientation of women. She directly answers to all this allegations in the same volume aimed to analyse the feminist and ecologist movements in Romania. In addition, she prefers to answer the international critics in a practical manner in the research entitled “On Women, Feminism and Democracy”. In the "(Re) construction of Romanian feminism (1999-2000)", Andreea Molocea speaks of Romanian feminism as an intellectual and academic invoice because the majority of early-year feminists came from the educational environment. Coming from this environment, activists tended to limit the diversity of action and were rather open to feminist theories in the west. Having the tendency to report and signal problems in accordance with their status and prospects, feminists have omitted "in those years the question of poor women, who are experiencing the difficulties of the transition, issues that they knew too little because they do not they had been investigated. This phase is reinforced by the lack of NGOs or activities involving and representing the interests of women in rural areas

She is the author of twelve books published in Romanian, including Road to Autonomy: Feminist Political Theories (Polirom, 2004), Priceless Women (Polirom 2006) and Convenio: On Women, Nature and Morals (Alternative Publishing House, 1996). She has also edited or co-edited nine volumes, most of them on feminism and feminist theory.

She had permanently got actively involved in the society through institutional, civic and mediatic journals regarding philosophy, political science and the process of democratization in Romania. In 2000, she instituted the first postdoctoral programme of Political Science in Romania at Faculty of Political Science, National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest. She added in the university curricula courses like feminist philosophy at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy. In 2001, she had coordinated and the first collection of Gender Studies, Polirom Publishing. Moreover, her involvement developed the Political Science Curricula in accordance to the Bologna Programme, being a member of the evaluation commission in 1997.

She founded the country's first gender studies Master's program in 1998, and helped to organize one of its earliest independent women's nongovernmental organizations: AnA –The Romanian Society for Feminist Analyses. She is an expert advisor to both UNESCO and the European Union, and has won international fellowships at Cornell University, Oxford University and the Central European University in Budapest. She was also a Fulbright recipient and was resident in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University in 2003–2004.

Between 1997 and 2001, Mihaela Miroiu was the dean of the Faculty of Political Science, National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest. Currently she is a professor at the same educational institution. She is teaching Actual Political Ideologies, Ethics in International Relations and Feminist Political Theories. Her research interest refer to domains such as political theories, feminist political theories, ethical politics and gender policies.

Mihaela Miroiu introduced the political Ethics course in 1997 and wrote, in collaboration with Gabriela Bacud, the first work of professional ethics in 2001-Introduction to Professional ethics. Significant for its constant interest in the ethical perspective in political theories and gender policies is that it has used a grid of political ethics in the construction of analyses contained in the volume of current political ideologies. Significance, developments and impact (2012). It allowed him to classify ideology according to the degree to which they accept and encourage personal autonomy, universal human rights, women and minorities, social justice, environmental justice, operating with three categories of ideologies: pluralistic, hybrid and coins. She was interested in analysing the political manipulative in which conflicts derived from illustration strategies were used in Romania. She also coordinated a first national research on ethics in Romanian universities and a draft code of ethics adopted by the Ministry of Education and Research in 2005. She held an ethics course at the Babes-Bolyai University, between 2000 and 2011. She is currently teaching the Ethics course in international relations at SNSPA.

She wrote a book of consenting feminist ethics, about nature, women and morals in 1996 and developed a theoretical insight into ethics through the theory of convenience. This philosophical perspective on morality encompasses "as a particular approach in the context of feminist ethics, but through the type of argument, it approaches many other theoretical perspectives on morality: Kantianism, utilitarianism, ethics of Rights, Rawls' theory of justice and its feminist criticism, the ethics of concern ". The Convention comes from Latin (agree,-come,-ventum,-coming) and means to come together, to come from all sides, to meet, to agree, to fit, to be understood; But the concept rests on the component of identifying the moral subject – "we" – "which must be well defined – because in the traditional, hidden, and deeply dissimulated approaches" we "was a cultural construct, which concealed the hegemony itself – particularly the domination of male rule models of normativity ". In the first part of the book, Miroiu departs from feminist theological approaches, strongly with interpretations leading to the inferiority of women and physical opposition to the spirit and the letter of the Evangelistic sacred lessons, deprived of the most misogynistic messages, on the contrary, loaded with egalitarian messages and a significant strongly on the attitude of women around Christ and Christ towards women. Leaving this place, she resumes the discussion in the context of secular ethics, remembered at first, partially criticises the rational perspectives and the ethics of concern and offers a "convenience" interpretation, advantageous to the others because it can be applied not only between people, but also between people and non-human beings, by virtue of the fact that rational choice and empathy allow us to be morally both as members of the human community and as members of the biotic community.

Mihaela Miroiu is the author of the first Romanian work of feminist philosophy and criticism of the philosophical postmodernism from the feminist perspective in 1995 The thought of the shadow. Feminist approaches in contemporary philosophy. In this paper, Mihaela Miroiu analyzes the "Alliance and Mesalliance" between feminism and philosophy, including Romanian philosophy, arguing in favour of the philosophical revaluation of the feminine and feminity (including through the experience epistemic A privileged birth, a perspective which she calls "local essentialism"), in the context of a culture still dominated by dichotomies and the idea that women are rather treated as "shadows of the Philosophical thought". Miroiu examines the boundaries of gender-gender, natural-cultural distinction and humanism as andromorphic. In the last part of the book:"Dominion, mediation, sacrifice" complements the painting of causes leading to the preservation of women as shadows of the philosophical thought and not as "thoughts of the Shadow", by analysing the canonical relationship between "thinkers/creators" and women as means for the purposes Creators.

Mihaela Miroiu initiated the research and gender Studies in Romania and introduced the first university courses of feminist theory in Romania, at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest in 1994. The first Masters of Gender Studies, in 1998 at SNSPA. She coordinated, together with Laura Grunberg, volumes of initiation in gender studies and education and Gender and Society (1997). She also introduced and coordinated the first collection of gender studies at the Polirom publishing house, starting with the year 2001 and promoted Romanian research in Europe and the US. In 2002, together with Otilia Dragomir edited the volume of feminist Lexicon, a dictionary with an initiation role in the study of feminist terms and authors, feminist publications and movements. She wrote the first policy guide to promote gender fairness in higher education in Eastern Europe, UNESCO-Guidelines for promoting gender Equity in higher education in Central and Eastern Europe in 2003. She contributed to the affiliation of gender Studies to the European Network of ATHENA European Network for Gender Studies in 2002. She also implemented gender policy projects in education for the Ministry of Education. She coordinated the gender barometer, together with Renate Weber (2000), the first national research on the perceptions of gender relations and roles in Romanian society. She edited patriarchal and emancipation in Romanian political thinking with Maria Bucur (2002), childbirth. History, with Otilia Dragomir (2010) and the volume of feminist and ecological movements in Romania (2015). She coordinated research on the topic: Gender and education, gender and politics, gender and citizenship, women and poverty, gender issues in the Roma community.

As far as educational policies are concerned, Miroiu contributed significantly to reform of teaching of philosophy in high school after the fall of communism. She coordinated the first Reform Manual in 1993, re-edited for seven years. She coordinated the first civic culture manual for high schools - Civic Culture. Democracy, Human Rights. Tolerance in 1995. Other important publications in this field are related to the analysis of education policies: Romanian Education Today, 1998 (in collaboration with Gabriel Ivan, Vladimir Pasti, Adrian Miroiu) and the analysis of gender policies in education through the international research grants The Gender Dimension of Education in Romania, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna (2001) and Case Study on Gender-sensitive Educational Policy and Practice, SNSPA (2003) and the Guidelines for the Promotion of Gender Equity in Higher Education in Central and Eastern Europe (2003) field.

Alongside with her husband, Adrian Miroiu, has edited the first guiding textbook of political terms specific to the democracy in 1990. In 1999 publishes Retro Society, a work in which the author analyses the ideological and political tendencies of the post-Communist period as a "conservatorism cocktail", namely a dominant combination between the conservatism of the left, represented by Socialists, well supported by most of the electorate under deindustrialisation conditions, loss of status and job and right, politically represented by PNȚ (Partidul Național Țărănesc - National Party of Peasants) and PNL (Partidul Național Liberal - National Liberal Party), the historic political parties in Romania), and also dominant in the mainstream offer of public intellectuals. She argues that the post-communist Romanian policy has oscillated between two conservatorisms: the left and the right, both atypical and different from the Western Conservative tradition. The conservatism of the left, seeks the organic growth of the market economy in the centralised, state, the birth of decentralisation from centralism and democracy in totalitarianism. The right conservatism has several faces: Liberal, traditionalist, paternalistic or new straight-crypto-conservatism. These types of conservatorism have as main elements maintaining the status quo and feeding "tendencies of exclusion or social marginalization of some categories of people". In the year 2000 she initiated the theorizing and analysis of the left and international conservatism in the context of the 18th International Congress of the Science Association policy (IPSA), held in Quebec: "Poverty, Authority and leftist Conservatism". In 2004, she publishes "the road to autonomy". It's the first book of feminist political theories of a Romanian author. In this context, Mihaela Miroiu analyses the evolution and orientation of feminist political theories and movements, including Romania in context. Considering that the common purpose of feminism, regardless of orientation, is that women can become autonomous towards thinking, culture, patriarchal policies and practices, Mihaela Miroiu rejects the idea that it is possible to talk about communist feminism. Feminism, such as ideology and political movement, is only possible in open, pluralistic societies. Communism is a state patriarch who confiscates the autonomy of all citizens.Indeed, it claims that communism was a contribution to the economic independence of women, access to education and professions, but did not allow them to organise themselves autonomously to represent their interests. Communism, supports the writer, has consecrated and legitimized the double day of work for women and, in addition, in the case of Romania, confiscated their reproductive faculties through the pro birth policy. Post-Communism also meant a return to the conservative tradition of women, via the massive revival of religious spirit, the political underrepresentation of women and the left and right conservatism in Romanian politics. Deindustrialization transformed men into favourite victims of transition and privatization turned some of them into favoured customers of the state. Mihaela Miroiu uses the phrase: "The men of the State and women of the market", to express both the withdrawal of the State from the defence of women's interests and the contribution of women to the creation and development of the market economy. In other words, she argues that, contrary to the western feminist tradition, the communist policies showed that women had to gain from liberal policies, as they were left without protection in the market competition, while Men were protected in bankrupt state enterprises through masked social protection.In the same volume she introduces the concept of "political feminism room-service" developed as a result of the imposition of a gender sensitive legislation in central and Eastern Europe through the perspective of the authority of international political actors, especially European ones (IMF, World Bank, NATO), before local political actors recognise this need. It develops comparative analysis of the theoretical frameworks of political feminism, the analysis of gender relations in Communism and post-communism, unliberal democracy through scientific publications and international conferences.

Mihaela Miroiu (born 1955 in Hunedoara, Romania) is a Romanian political theorist and feminist philosopher.