Between Sofia and Berlin. Impulses and Background of the High Social School for Women at the Bulgarian Women’s Union (1929 - 1932)

Abstract

The article presents the preparation of the High Social School for Women which was opened in 1932 by the Bulgarian Women’s Union (BWU). It was the first Social Work School in the Balkans. The school was a result of long-time efforts to establish an education of women for social work, to open their cultural, political, and social hori-zon as well as to raise their consciousness about family, children, and women’s ques-tions. The steps of this preparation are presented: The journal ‘The Woman’ 1929 – 1931 which discussed the need for social education and its models abroad, the decisions of the Congress of the BWU in 1930 about the preparation of social courses for women, the International Summer School of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom in Sofia in 1930. The educational trip in 1930 of the BWU’s activists led by its president Dimitrana Ivanova to the women’s social institutions in the Weimar Republic and especially the visit of the Alice Salomon Social Woman’s Academy in Berlin was also of great importance for the curricula preparation of the School in Sofia. One of its future lecturers Rayna Petkova was trained in the Academia in Berlin. The establishment of the High Social School for Women in Sofia was one of the most important achievements of the Bulgarian Women’s Union. It was also one of the most important contributions of the BWU to the early welfare state in Bulgaria which structure was shaped in the 1930-es.