Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface ECHOES OFF THE IRON CURTAIN -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction THE ROAD TO BULGARIA, 1983–1990 -- Chapter 1. CONTRABAND, 1990 -- Chapter 2. KALOYAN AND HRISTO, 1998 -- Chapter 3. HER LOVER IN CUBA, 1999 -- Chapter 4. HAIR Ethnographic Fiction -- Chapter 5. SHOPAHOLIC IN EASTERN EUROPE, 1998–2006 -- Chapter 6. NEW CARPETS FOR OLD KILIMS, 1999 -- Chapter 7. COMRADES, 2000 -- Chapter 8. PETAR HAILS A CAB Ethnographic Fiction -- Chapter 9. BASSET HOUNDS IN THE BALKANS, 2005 -- Chapter 10. THE MASTER OF CONSPIRACIES, 2005 -- Chapter 11. AN EXPLOSION IN SOFIA, 2008 -- Chapter 12. COFFEE Ethnographic Fiction -- Chapter 13. KALOYAN IN MAINE, 2009 -- Chapter 14. TITO TRIVIA Ethnographic Fiction -- Chapter 15. PILGRIMS FROM SOFIA TO ZAGREB, 2009 -- Afterword LOST IN TRANSITION, 2010 -- Appendix TIMELINE OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY COMMUNISM -- Further reading

I wrote this talk specifically for this conference and so my ideas are still raw. I am also not an historian, although my ethnographic research is deeply inflected with the oral historical narratives of my subjects. This is an exploratory text, still very much in progress, and I hope you will forgive the tentative nature of my reflections. This full text was first delivered as a keynote address on October 1, 2021, to the "Gender and materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century conference" at Sciences Po in Paris. A shorter version of the text was published in a Festschrift for the Bulgarian historian, Maria Todorova (see Ghodsee 2023, 235-246), with the support of the Leibniz Institute of Eastern and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany.

National women's organizations were a ubiquitous feature of all of the eastern European communist nations. Although the specificities of these organizations varied from country to country, they were all state-run mass organizations variously charged with mobilizing domestic women and representing their nations at international forums concerning women's rights. In the west, these state women's organizations were treated with suspicion; they were often viewed as tools of authoritarian control, mobilizing women to fulfill party goals. It is rarely considered that eastern bloc women may have used their privileged relationship with the Communist Party to promote policies that actually helped women, or that they could push back at male patriarchal elites by appealing to higher communist principles regarding the woman question. This article is a case study of the Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement. It demonstrates that this organization, despite its entanglement with the state bureaucracy, was relatively successful in pressuring the Bulgarian Politburo into expanding rights and entitlements to women between 1968 and 1990.

During the UN Decade for Women, representatives of the world's governments came together for the first time to discuss the issues of equality, development, and peace in official intergovernmental forums, opening up an unexpected new front in the ongoing Cold War. While western women were concerned with legal and economic equality, socialist women in the Eastern Bloc argued that women's equality with men was useless in a world full of racism, violence, underdevelopment, colonialism, and war. Over the course of the decade, women from the developing world came to embrace the idea that feminist struggles could not be separated from the underlying political and economic conditions in which women lived, aligning themselves more closely with the socialist world. Through a case study of the Bulgarian Women's Movement, this article presents the UN Decade from the socialist women's point of view, and argues that their contributions to the early international women's movement should no longer be ignored.

In January 2010, I met a Bulgarian friend for dinner in a Georgetown pizza parlor. This friend, whom I will call Svetozara, had recently immigrated to the United States and was looking for a job in D.C. Recently divorced after twenty-six years of marriage, she had been a lawyer in Bulgaria, and one of a core of pro-democracy activists who had been politically influential during Bulgaria's transition from communism. With her liberal colleagues, Svetozara had fought hard to banish communist influences from the Bulgarian government and economy. She believed that democracy and the institution of free markets would improve the lives of her compatriots after more than four decades of totalitarian rule and had worked to make sure that post-1989 elections were free and fair. She had helped reorganize local governments to make them more responsive to citizens' needs and had supported legislation to make the Bulgarian government less bureaucratic and more open and transparent. She had been a darling of liberal reformers come from the West to dismantle the centralized state and the command econ-omy.

In January 2010, I met a Bulgarian friend for dinner in a Georgetown pizza parlor. This friend, whom I will call Svetozara, had recently immigrated to the United States and was looking for a job in D.C. Recently divorced after twenty-six-years of marriage, she had been a lawyer in Bulgaria, and one of a core of pro-democracy activists who had been politically influential during Bulgaria's transition from communism. Adapted from the source document.