Abstract
The aim of this article is to trace how popular publications aimed at female audiences, the women’s press, contributed to the emancipation and cultural modernisation of Bulgarian women from the end of nineteenth century until 1914. The subject of research are the so-called ‘household periodicals’ - the newspapers and magazines addressing women, that deliberately avoided politicisation and tried to modernise and emancipate their readers within the private space of the ‘women's world’ (understood as home and family). Incorporating relational feminist arguments in their rhetoric, such periodicals did not confine themselves to the attempt of building an exemplary reconstruction of the private sphere in the variety of the aesthetic and moral dimensions of that field. They became a key element of the country’s popular culture and had a long-lasting political and social effect. An example of the household periodicals’ modernising efforts and sensitivity to modern emancipatory ideas was one of the pioneering women’s projects in this category, the magazine Moda i domakinstvo (‘Fashion and Household’), 1897-1906, edited and published by Elena Usheva.
Highlights
The aim of this article is to trace how the women’s press contributed to the emancipation and cultural modernisation of Bulgarian women from the end of nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I
Becoming an important part of the country’s popular culture, household periodicals had an unexpected subversive effect, both socially and politically: traditionally located in the domestic arena, they contributed to intensifying the processes of personal and social awareness of the ‘second sex’ (De Beauvoir, 2010) in Bulgaria, making women publicly visible and helping them to imagine themselves as active participants in building the modern (European) profile of the country
In this article, using the case of Moda i domakinstvo, I argued that the role of Bulgarian household periodicals was not limited to an attempt at building an exemplary reconstruction of the women’s world in the variety of its aesthetic and moral dimensions
Summary
The aim of this article is to trace how the women’s press contributed to the emancipation and cultural modernisation of Bulgarian women from the end of nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I. Becoming an important part of the country’s popular culture, household periodicals had an unexpected subversive effect, both socially and politically: traditionally located in the domestic arena, they contributed to intensifying the processes of personal and social awareness of the ‘second sex’ (De Beauvoir, 2010) in Bulgaria, making women publicly visible and helping them to imagine themselves as active participants in building the modern (European) profile of the country. They contributed to the political mobilisation of women, supporting the cause of the explicitly feminist journals for changing public attitudes to the so-called ‘woman question’
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