On the pages of Solidaritatea: Journal of the Workingmen and Workingwomen of the Tobacco Manufactories and Matches Factories, readers catch rare glimpses of the gendered dynamics of labour activism in Cluj, Romania. Although this bilingual Romanian-Hungarian newspaper was published only in 1928–1929, it offers a wealth of information about women’s grassroots labour activism.

Published quarterly by the employees of the Cluj Tobacco Manufactory, Solidaritatea began as a “trade publication” but soon revealed its allegiance to social democratic trade unionism. Cluj, at the time the largest city in the region of Transylvania, had a turbulent labour history, with unions suppressed by the Romanian state after a brief general strike in 1920. By 1928, workers were cautiously rebuilding their organizations. Though Solidaritatea may seem inconsequential, it captures the nuances of women’s activism better than better-known sources coming from centralized labour organizations that tended to not detail the actions of women activists.

The newspaper illuminates gendered dynamics shaping the interwar labour movement. Despite the majority of tobacco workers being women, they were generally not well represented in the leadership of unions. The term “men of trust” (translated from the German "Vertrauensmann") was used to describe workers’ representatives within factories, reinforcing a men-dominated model of activism. However, Solidaritatea shows clearly that women workers were strongly involved in shopfloor activism. For instance, women were named alongside men as workers’ representatives in negotiations. In 1928–1929, some women workers in Cluj played, in practice, the role of “men of trust”, while women workers in a different Transylvanian tobacco factory were specifically elected to “men of trust” positions. This underscores women’s participation in local-level union leadership even though these leading roles were linguistically and symbolically created for men.

Tobacco factory in Cluj (Source: Europeana

The paper also reveals how women’s activism extended beyond formal roles. Ana Oroszi’s farewell letter, published upon her retirement, reflects her deep commitment to the labour movement. Her words highlight the personal experience of long-running labour and political activism, an angle often missing from official trade union records:

As I leave the midst of workers from the tobacco factory, with the hope that they will hold me as a fond memory, I use this occasion to ask all my work comrades to work with all their might for the strengthening of the trade union, in the future as well, a trade union to whose strengthening I have also contributed through my modest knowledge and power. [. . .] Although I leave your company, my thoughts will always be with you. I, even in the future, will continue to walk the good road, the one which takes you also towards a better fate, and a road I will never abandon.

By focusing on day-to-day struggles, Solidaritatea underscores how women navigated and reshaped the labour movement’s gendered structures. This close-up look reveals transnational patterns too: Cluj’s women activists had experiences similar to those of their counterparts in Vienna and beyond, who also found creative ways to assert leadership in male-dominated systems.

In sum, the eight issues of Solidaritatea illustrate how small-scale, local, short-lived publications can illuminate hidden histories. Such sources, often less favoured in comparison to seemingly more serious types of records or simply not searched for, reveal the shopfloor tactics of women’s labour activism and the strategies women activists used to challenge systemic hurdles to women’s political involvement.