Heroines Under Control: Unexpected Portrayals of Women in the Organ of the Bulgarian Communist Party, 1944–1989

Abstract

This is a framing analysis of the news coverage of women's issues in the official newspaper of the Bulgarian Communist Party over three nonconsecutive years. At the start of the Communist regime, women were ideologically constructed as warriors and tearless mothers of lost sons, deserving of complete equality. In the 1960s, the emphasis unexpectedly shifted to fashion and beauty as part of the Party's pronatalist propaganda. The age of perestroika in the late 1980s deconstructed the “double burden” faced by women and suggested social policies to relieve it, while still maintaining that chores were women's work only. Throughout the decades, the ideal Bulgarian woman was seen as androgynous, combining masculine and feminine traits to both contribute to the country's industrialization and birth the next generation of male elites. The analysis shows how quasi-feminist policies offered women limited career fulfillment while maintaining oppressive expectations, such as having sons over daughters, being attractive, and shouldering all household chores.

Keywords:

• Bulgaria
• Communism
• Eastern Europe
• gender roles
• ideology
• news
• women

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this manuscript to the memory of my mother, Vesselina Dimova (1942–2011). I wish to express gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers and Valeria Fabj, the journal's editor, for the thoughtful feedback. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in St. Louis, Missouri in 2011.

Notes

By contrast, in the United States in 1950, the labor force participation of women was 34%. It increased to 60% in 2000 (Toossi, 2002).

Many households in Bulgaria, especially in smaller cities and villages, did not have central heating. During the cold season, men were responsible for procuring wood or coal and making fire in the household's stove.

Before the industrialization, Bulgarian women used to sew and embroider traditional clothing, as well as weave rugs, which featured different patterns unique to each region of the country.

A brand of Hungarian buses imported in Bulgaria and other countries within the Warsaw Pact.