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If nowadays gender equality constitutes an important objective in any democratic society, which seeks to establish equal rights for citizens, the situation was not always so. Analysing the subject from an historical point of view, we can easily ascertain that equality before the law between men and women represents a relatively recent concept. At the beginning of the 19th century, the social status of women was influenced solely by the social stratum from which they originated. Despite the high degree of illiteracy in the female population and ignorance of the rural women, the feminist movements supported by gender associations had sprung up in urban space before WWI and came forward until the end of the 1920s, a period characterized by a unit of thought, by social and national solidarity in the face of a feminist program. Then, during the Communist period, one of the great promises was equality. However, when Marx wrote about social equality and class struggle, he had little to say in regard to gender equality and women's empowerment. On the other hand, Friedrich Engels, in 1884, in his "The woman, family and origin of private property" put more emphasis on the subject, saying that the emancipation of women becomes possible only when they will be able to take part in the social scale production and when domestic duties will occupy only a small part of their time.... Based on these premises, I did a retrospective of women's position in the labour relations legislated in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]