Home Page | About the IFRWH | National Committees| Board Members| Conferences| Newsletter |Publications|
NEWS
Since 1995, when the Bulgarian Women's History Group (BWHG) became member of
the International Federation for Research in Women's History (IFRWH), it has
published two books, many translations (by authors as Gisela Bock, June Purvis,
Karen Offen, Nancy Fraser, Karen Hausen, Joan Scott) and done several interviews
(with Ida Blom, Karen Offen, Catharine Stimpson, among the others) in order
to popularize the field within the Bulgarian society at large. In 1999 the group
organized an international conference entitled "Limits of Citizenship:
European Women between Tradition and Modernity". The texts from the conference
were published in a book, edited by Krassimira Daskalova and Raina Gavrilova.
[Granitsi na Grazhdanstvoto: Evropeiskite Zheni Mezhdu Traditsiata I Modernostta
(Limits of Citizenship: European Women between Tradition and Modernity). Sofia:
LIK, 2001. With the support of British Council and Goethe-Institut in Sofia,
the group invited June Purvis (1999), Gisela Bock (2000) and Karen Hausen (2001),
who gave talks at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia on topics related
to European, British and German women's/gender history. The group organized
also several other public lectures with scholars from England, the Netherlands,
Serbia, etc.
Let me say now a few words about the profile of the research done by the members
of the BWHG and by some other historians, who's work gravitate towards women's/gender
history (please, follow the attached bibliography):
Sashka Georgieva works on various aspects of women's position in the Medieval
Bulgarian history. Her Ph.D. thesis was the first one in the field of Bulgarian
women's history. Her publications in Bulgarian and English appeared during the
1990s in "Bulgarian Historical Review" and "Ricerche Slavistiche".
Some male historians - Tsvetelin Stepanov, Georgi Kazakov - are also interested
in women's representations in the medieval texts and wrote on the representations
of women-saints and women-sinners found in several eschatological texts from
the Balkans.
The marital status of Christian (Bulgarian) and Muslim women and the family
life during the period of Ottoman domination (15th-19th) C attracted the interest
of several women-historians, Olga Todorova and Svetlana Ivanova among them.
They studied the economic and social position of women and the role of Christian
common law and Islamic law (Sheri'ah) in the marriage and divorce practices
in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire. A Ph.D. thesis on peasant marriage
in the Bulgarian villages during the Ottoman rule (though not from the perspective
of women's/gender history) was defended by Margarita Karamihova in 1991.
Women-historians from the BWHG conducted research on the status and activities
of Bulgarian women during the so-called period of the National Revival (19th
C until 1878). Margarita Cholakova, for example, studied the history of the
women's organizations during the 1850s-1870s. Coming from the field of the history
of everyday life, Raina Gavrilova argued that the "public"-"private"
dichotomy has little to say about the gender relations in the Bulgarian peasant
society of the 19th Century. [Though not a formal member of the BWHG, Barbara
Reeves-Elington, who works on the role of the American women-missionaries in
the Balkans during the 19th C published also texts about limitations, imposed
on Bulgarian women by the patriarchal culture, about the relationship between
gender and nation during the period of the National Revival in Bulgaria, etc.]
Krassimira Daskalova collected and published sources on women's past in Bulgaria.
In various publications she studied the position of educated women from the
intelligentsia (teachers, writers, etc.) in the Bulgarian society during the
National Revival and in the modern Bulgarian State, established after 1878.
She also published on identity politics, nationalism, and citizenship of Bulgarian
women, stressing the discriminatory treatment of women-citizens in spite of
the presumably universal liberal rhetoric, used by the Bulgarian nation state.
She also worked on women's movements, problems and discourses in the post-communist
"transition". Recently, her review article about the development of
the Bulgarian women's history was published in "L'Homme. Zeitschrift fuer
Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft" (2001, Heft 2).
Dobrinka Parusheva studied the history of the bourgeois and socialist women's
movements between 1900-1944.
Within the framework of the collaborative project "Regional Reflections
of the Modernist Movement in Bulgaria between the Two World Wars. The Contribution
of Women", Irina Genova and Liubinka Stoilova did research on women-artists
and architects. The authors discussed the social profile of those women and
analyzed the discriminations and difficulties, encountered by them.
An international conference "She on the Balkans", organized by colleagues
from the Southwestern University in Blagoevgrad was held in Bansko in February
2000 with the participation of Bulgarian, Serbian, American, Austrian, English
scholars. The papers were published (in Bulgarian) by the International University
Seminar for Balkan Studies of the same University (see the attached bibliography).
Something needs be said about the institutionalization of the field of women's/gender
history in the Bulgarian academic life. As in many other cases, the first women's
history courses were established at institutions outside the old (and rather
conservative) History Departments. Center for Theory and History of Culture
at Sofia University developed in the 1980s and 1990s as a more innovative institution,
where scholars promoted new trends in historical writing (as history of everyday
life, of books and reading, etc). Gender history course of modern Bulgaria was
introduced (by the BWHG) at this Center in 1998-1999 and 1999/2000 academic
years. It covered the period from the 1840s to the 1940s, i.e. from the founding
of the first modern Bulgarian school for girls in 1841 up until World War II,
and made comparisons with other Balkan countries, Russia and Western Europe,
especially Germany, England and France.
The first academic M. A. Gender Studies Program in Bulgaria was launched in
1999/2000 academic year at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences of
St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia. Included in the program are several
history courses, directed by members of BWHG, dealing with topics such as: women
and gender in traditional societies; women, gender, nationalism, and citizenship
in Modern Bulgarian society and culture; women and art, etc. Several theoretical
texts have been translated by members of the BWHG from English and French into
Bulgarian to facilitate the introduction of the students to the problematic
of women's/gender history. But still no women's history courses are offered
to the students from the Department of History at Sofia University or the History
Departments of other older academic institutions.
Lectures on various topics of the modern Bulgarian women's/gender history form part of the course on History of the modern Bulgarian culture (19th-20th Century) at the Department of Library and Information Sciences and Cultural Politics (at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia), taught by one member of the group. Several M. A. theses were written and defended there on women's/gender history.
And to mention the last initiative of the Bulgarian Women's/Gender History
Group: several months ago we started a new project ("Voices of their own"),
sponsored by the Open Society Foundation in Sofia. The aim of the project is
to collect 50 (oral history) interviews, conducted with women (mothers and daughters)
from different professional, educational, ethnic and religious groups. The results
of the research (the interviews and comments on them) will be published first
in Bulgarian and subsequently in English.
-compiled by Krassimira Daskalova, Sofia