Historical Tradition and Transformation in Bulgaria: Women's Issues or Feminist Issues?

Abstract

The changes of 1989 in Bulgaria, which elsewhere were more grandilo- quently caUed revolutions, rdeased many suppressed voices and many ghosts from beneath the tight and uniform cover of communism. The most notorious among them is undoubtedly nationalism, but there is an abundance of other isms, too: monarchism, conservatism, Uberalism, sodaUsm, fasdsm, pacifism, environmentalism, and postmodernism, among others. However, feminism does not seem to be one of them. Indeed, there has been no feminist discourse in Bulgaria dther before or after 1989.1 Moreover, the potential leaders of women's movements have not adopted the ideology and discourse of feminism. Feminism is one of those notions which, at best, evokes a sneer, and is being avoided even by individual women who are otherwise weU-versed in feminist language and theory and who would describe themselves as feminists only off the record. This artide examines some of the specific charaderistics of the Bulgar- ian case, primarily to what extent the historical context has influenced both women's positions and women's attitudes. In a model of a multi-stage evolution of equaUty, which is independent of the poUtical regimes (communism, capitalism, etc.) but a function of the industrialization of society, Barbara Janear proposes four consecutive phases shaping women's status.2 In traditional society the roles of women and men are complementary but women have inferior status. In industrializing sod- eties women attain male roles by being integrated into the industrial paradigm but stall retain their traditional female roles. In industrialized societies women are primarily concerned with consumer satisfaction and their attention is focused on the nuclear farrdly. This increases the sex-role differentiation but still women make some advances toward equaUty during this phase. FinaUy, in postindustrial sodeties, exemplified today by the United States and some countries in Western Europe, women have leisure time to consider personal fulfillment, and demand androgyny, i.e., the disappearance of sex-role differentiation. Using Jancar's model as a framework, this artide also attempts to put the Bulgarian case in a comparative context. It has been widely asserted that sodaUsm imposed a double burden on women by throwing them, on one hand, into the labor market which was supposed to have an emandpatory impad and, on the other hand, by not reUeving them of the traditional work load of housewives. The problem