Miglena Sternadori. Women’s Studies in Communication. Volume 36, Issue 2. 2013.
For much of the second half of the 20th century, women in countries under Soviet influence were encouraged to feel and act as though they were fully equal to men. They were expected to gain power and financial independence by participating in the labor force; simultaneously, they were to continue having children without excessive investment in child rearing, thanks to free or subsidized day care (Clark & Clark, 1987; Fodor, 2002; Harsch, 2007; Rudd, 2000). These Marxist notions of ideal womanhood were reflected in 19th-century European socialists’ desire for equality of results, expressed in full economic and social equality between the sexes (Rosenthal, 1979). By contrast, feminists of that era had been asking only for equality of opportunity, which was essentially legal equality within existing social structures. The Communist revolution in Russia (and later in the rest of Eastern Europe) aimed at equality of results and was thus “more audacious in its approach to gender than any revolution before or since” (Moghadam, 1995, p. 335). Lenin ranted against women’s status as “domestic slaves” engaged in “petty housework” and “stultifying and crushing drudgery” (p. 336). This unusual stance for a male political leader was later criticized as nothing more than hypocritical political propaganda aimed at recruiting women for the Communist cause during the prerevolutionary years (e.g., Chatterjee, 2002).
Yet Communism deserves some credit for eroding local patriarchies in rural parts of Eastern Europe. For example, before 1945, 95% of women in Albania were illiterate and could not initiate divorce; by contrast, Albanian men could legally beat their wives and divorce them on the grounds of failure to bear a male child, a law which was no longer sanctioned after the installment of a Communist regime in Albania in 1945 (Falkingham & Gionca, 2001). In Central Asia, Communism had some success in banning the head-to-toe veil worn by women in the presence of unrelated men (Northrop, 2004). Even in the more progressive and mostly Christian Russia, the Communist regime had visible effects on the status of women by transforming the churchgoing baba, a term for an uneducated and subservient peasant woman, into a relatively educated and working comrade (Wood, 1997). Literacy for Bulgarian women was reported to be 47% in 1926 (Nestorova, 1996), and overall literacy in Bulgaria was 69% at the start of Communist schooling in 1945 (Darden & Grzymala-Busse, 2006), with an average of 6.5 years of schooling, which was lower for women (Ganzeboom & Nieuwbeerta, 1999). Communism had clearly positive effects: by the 1950s, the gender gap in educational attainment had closed, and the average years of schooling for both Bulgarian men and women had reached 13 by the 1970s (Ganzeboom & Nieuwbeerta, 1999).
Despite the elimination of some elements of oppression, the Communist reality did not fully reflect the official commitment to women’s emancipation. Once the new regimes were established, the focus shifted from achieving universal equality to—in Orwell’s (2003) words from the 1946 novel Animal Farm—making some members of society “more equal than others” (p. 88). Stalin followed Lenin’s promotion of Soviet prowomen’s policies but ceased once he had gained control of the Party (Rosenthal, 1979). Traditional cultures also turned out to be more resilient than Communist apparatchiks had assumed. In rural areas of Central Asia in the 1980s, female Soviet citizens were still “bought for marriage in their early teens, forced to live with their husbands’ families and to work twelve-hour days in the cotton fields, submitting to the tyranny of often sadistic mothers-in-law” (Gray, 1990, p. 133).
Some scholars have argued that “gender equity under socialism was largely a myth” (Silova & Magno, 2004). Indeed, few women gained the promised social power through leadership positions in the workplace or in political bodies, and few were free from child care duties, housework, and various forms of emotional and physical abuse (Dobos, 1983). Women’s organizations existed under the auspices of the male-dominated Party, and while women were publicly celebrated they were privately oppressed. Chatterjee (2002) offers a vivid illustration of these hypocritical views, persisting after the fall of Communism:
In spring of 1992 I was invited to attend a private celebration of International Women’s Day in Moscow … As a self-proclaimed feministka, it was no doubt fitting that I sat at a table demurely consuming a meal prepared by women while the men raised their glasses in archaic toasts to “extraordinary women, beautiful women, and how impossible it is to live with them!” (p. 1)
This study attempts to explain some of the paradoxes in women’s emancipation under Communism through a rhetorical analysis of women-related news and images published in the official newspaper of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Rabotnichesko Delo (which translates as “Workers’ Act” or “Workers’ Cause”). The analysis included news articles from three nonconsecutive years, in the beginning, middle, and end of the Bulgarian Communist regime, which lasted from 1944 to 1989. The following broad research questions were explored: What stunted the proclaimed liberation of women in former Communist countries? How does the evolution of attitudes toward women under Communism compare to feminism in the United States? How did the Party messages evolve in framing the so-called women’s question?
Answering these questions requires a framework based on the existing literature on women’s issues in the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe, which included the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Although the focus here is on the status of Bulgarian women, the literature review extrapolates conclusions about the entire region based on studies concerning different countries. The reason for this is twofold. First, the available literature specifically on the status of women in Bulgaria is not sufficient to provide the needed historical context. Second, Rabotnichesko Delo and other countries’ official party newspapers followed the line of Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union; both the status of women in different Eastern European countries and the portrayals of women in these countries’ Communist publications reflected the heavy influence of the Soviet Union.
Historical Context: Bulgarian Women Under Communism
The following sections describe three aspects of Bulgarian women’s status under Communism: work and leadership, family life, and motherhood.
Work and Leadership
Just as World War II empowered many women in the United States to join the workforce (Massoni, 2010), the Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe ushered women into the workforce to help with the industrialization of formerly rural countries (Fodor, 2002; Panayotova & Brayfield, 1997). Female employment in the Bulgarian workforce was 25.8% in 1952, increasing to 39% in 1965 and 50% percent by the 1970s and 1980s (Brunnbauer & Kassabova, 2012; Smollett, 1989). By the end of the Communist regime, 87% of all Bulgarian women considered to be in the productive-age group were in the workforce, compared to 78% of Bulgarian men in the same group (Anachkova, 1995).
This initial increase in female participation in the workforce reflected the fact that, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was difficult to support a family in Bulgaria on one salary (Brunnbauer & Kassabova, 2012). Many Eastern European women quickly formed identities around their careers, even if their husbands’ incomes could support a family (Bystydzienski, 1989). Once again, Bulgaria was no exception: a 1969 survey reported that 85% of Bulgarian married women would not leave their jobs even if they could afford to do so (Brunnbauer & Kassabova, 2012).
Although no statistics on a gender pay gap were ever published in Communist Bulgaria, Anachkova (1995) has argued that men’s earnings were higher but attributed to “better performance” (p. 57). This is not difficult to deduce, considering the high proportion of Bulgarian women in lower-paying jobs that were routine or service related. In 1960, only 7% of working women were rated “specialists,” meaning they had the Bulgarian equivalent of associate’s or bachelor’s degrees (Smollett, 1989, p. 66). By 1975, only 26% of employed women were “specialists” (Smollett, 1989). Bulgarian women’s educational attainment did not reach parity with men’s until 1988, when 51% of all employed university graduates were female (Anachkova, 1995). Women were also rare in public-status-granting occupations throughout most of the Communist regime; for instance, only 15% of the members of the Union of Bulgarian Journalists were women in 1962 (Todorov, 1962). In academia in the early 1970s, Bulgarian women were only 29% of all assistant professors, 10% of associate professors, and 5% of full professors (Anachkova, 1995).
There was even a greater dearth of female leaders at the top, even though Marxism had promised women political and social power. Only one woman was a member of the Bulgarian Politburo (Staar, 1982), and only 20% of the members of the Bulgarian Parliament were women in the early 1960s, a figure that rose to 21% in the late 1980s (Anachkova, 1995). Women were held back from leadership positions because, as Smollett (1989) observed, “a man is under social pressure to earn more than his wife and to advance further” (p. 67). This was also reflected by limitations on Party membership, a prerequisite to elite status. Women never exceeded 30% of Party members in Bulgaria (Staar, 1982)—the same level as in Hungary, where Fodor (2002), based on an analysis of classified documents, has argued that the Party consciously monitored its membership to ensure women did not exceed one-third of all members. Women’s shorter work cycles, due to care for children or grandchildren and the persistent stereotype of a leader as a man or at least a “manly woman,” deterred many Bulgarian women from fulfilling their leadership potential (Smollett, 1989, p. 73). By the final year of the Communist regime, 1989, only 31% of managerial positions in Bulgaria were occupied by women (Anachkova, 1995).
Family Life
Bulgaria’s new Communist regime started with intentions to reform the traditional patriarchal family in the direction of making it more egalitarian. A Decree on Marriage, published by the new Bulgarian government in May 1945, declared that only civil marriage is legal; it also gave married women the freedom to choose their occupation, keep their maiden names if they chose to do so, and seek divorce under significantly liberalized conditions (Brunnbauer & Kassabova, 2012). The gendered social structures in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s, inherited by Communist regimes, required women to complete household chores following a regular workday (Clark & Clark, 1987), a phenomenon called the “double burden” of production and reproduction (Bystydzienski, 1989; Falkingham & Gionca, 2001). This hardly changed under Communism, despite promises to free women from chores by establishing child care centers, public laundries, and canteens; in 1966-1967, Bulgarian women spent 4 hours and 42 minutes a day on housework—mostly cooking, laundry, and cleaning—while Bulgarian men spent exactly half of that time, mostly on repairs, shopping, and taking care of heating, according to the findings of a Bulgarian survey quoted by Brunnbauer and Kassabova (2012). Harsch (2007) reports that a similar, gendered division of labor benefited East Germany’s exclusively male Party elites who “were personally invested in the status quo” (p. 4). Brunnbauer and Kassabova (2012) also argue that Bulgaria’s male elites made an effort to retain the patriarchal status quo through a “broad pro-family propaganda … presenting marriage as the only normal way of life” and limiting access to divorces through so-called Family Codes, adopted in 1968 and 1985 (p. 485). The goal was to preserve marriages crumbling under impossible, atavistic demands, such as housing shortages, which forced many couples of childbearing age to live with their parents. Brunnbauer and Kassabova (2012) report that “in 1970s’ Bulgaria the share of three-generation households was higher than in the 19th century” (p. 488). This was partly also because the shortage of child care facilities and the traditional view that nurseries are bad for children required many Bulgarian parents to leave their children with “co-resident grandparents” (Smollett, 1989, p. 65). As a result, family responsibilities became particularly heavy for middle-aged women, who had to “frequently do their own housework and some of the housework and errands for the households of their children as well” (Smollett, 1989, p. 67).
By the time Bulgarian women saw gender emancipation being eroded by family life in the 1960s, Soviet women had already grappled with this in the 1920s and 1930s, sadly concluding that career success required them to eliminate male presence (Chatterjee, 2002). While Soviet husbands were an “elective obligation” (Gray, 1990, p. 53), Soviet ideology argued that “the most important duty of a woman, along with her work, is to have children, far beyond the duty of being a wife” (p. 61). Bulgarian pronatalist propaganda was different in its insistence on marriage. While “Soviet acceptance of extramarital births was caused by the significant majority of women in the fertile cohorts due to war losses … [i]n Bulgaria, the gender balance was only slightly in favor of women,” leading to a “taboo on single motherhood and to extensive attempts to regulate sexual life” (Brunnbauer & Kassabova, 2012, p. 489).
Motherhood
Because single women were discouraged from having sexual relations and because motherhood under Communism was a duty, contraceptives were not easily available and abortion became increasingly difficult to procure despite its legalization in the early stages of Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes (Bystydzienski, 1989). Eastern European countries repressed abortion in the 1960s and promised lump sums at childbirth, following policies introduced in the Soviet Union in 1935-1936 (Brunnbauer & Taylor, 2004). Bulgaria was no exception: abortion on request was legalized in 1956 (just as it was in the Soviet Union in 1920), but restrictions were imposed in 1968 and 1973 (Brunnbauer & Taylor, 2004). Bulgarian women who wished to obtain an abortion had to provide a justification to a special commission, and the Bulgarian Politburo “officially declared fertility as the primary function of women” (Brunnbauer & Kassabova, 2012, p. 488). In spite of that, abortions remained frequent (whether legal or illegal) and were “one of the primary means of family planning” in Communist Bulgaria (Stoyanova & Richardus, 1999).
Motherhood under Communism was encouraged not for its perceived benefits to individual happiness and emotional growth but because a high birthrate meant more workers, more party members, and more potential future soldiers. In addition to childbearing, Bulgarian women had an obligation to educate their children to be good Communist citizens and workers (Brunnbauer & Taylor, 2004) and convey friendship with the Soviet Union “to their children with their mother’s milk” (Staar, 1982, p. 44). The Bulgarian birthrate plunged from 20 to 22 per 1,000 in the 1950s (Deacon, 1987) to 16.3 per 1,000 in 1970, and 13 per 1,000 in 1987, which mirrored trends in other industrialized European countries, both Communist and non-Communist (Smollett, 1989). According to Brunnbauer and Kassabova (2012), the Bulgarian government started worrying about the falling birthrate in the 1960s for two reasons: “it feared future shortages of workers, because economic growth depended on rising labour inputs”; and “it was worried about much higher population growth rates among the Muslim minorities, especially the Turks, who made up 10% of the total population of the country” (p. 486). However, in the 1970s, a survey of Bulgarian women still showed that most wanted to have a maximum of two children, likely due to the limited child care options. Although the maternity leave policy was generous, most Bulgarian women specialists (with higher education) usually returned to work within one year because they were afraid of falling behind in their careers (Smollett, 1989).
In sum, the literature on Bulgarian women under Communism depicts a coexistence of prowomen policies and deep-seated stereotypes about women’s roles at work and at home. The following section lays out a framework to contextualize these contradictions, likely to be evident in news portrayals.
Theoretical Framework
This analysis relies on two distinctly different traditions, morphed to construct a sufficiently broad framework for the interpretation of the analyzed texts. One of these traditions is Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) social construction of reality, which views news stories as examples of constructed reality where people are social actors creating mental images of one another’s actions over time. Although social construction of reality is a perspective applicable to most media texts, news stories published in a state-sanctioned newspaper are likely to be constructed by elites rather than representing loosely social narratives. Specifically, news stories in Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes, such as the one that existed in Bulgaria from 1944 to 1989, were not constructed by free agents unwittingly perpetuating cultural narratives unique to their point in space and time. Rather, the stories were constructed by a dominant Communist elite interested in perpetuating narratives to serve its own interests.
This requires the introduction of a second theoretical tradition, the Marxist theory of ideology. Althusser (2006) defines ideology as a representation of “the imaginary conditions of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (p. 100). Within Althusser’s framework of state ideology, media are the building blocks of the communications part of the ideological state apparatuses; thus, media contribute to relations of exploitation by “cramming every ‘citizen’ with daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc.” (p. 97). This Marxism-based theory of ideology as a tool of perpetuating labor oppression is useful in understanding the social forces in states built with the intention of achieving social progress by applying the ideas of Marx himself. As several examples from the previous section suggest, women under Communism were ideologically constructed to be exploited as sources of cheap labor. In the industrial sphere, women were needed to facilitate harried progress. At home, women had the task of birthing and raising future soldiers, workers, and mothers while silently upholding patriarchal divisions of household labor. Marxism is particularly appropriate as a framework for uncovering and explaining the links between elite control and simplified cultural narratives in media content (e.g., Horkheimer & Adorno, 1969); applying it to representations of an underprivileged group within a Communist regime has the added benefit of accounting for some of the theory’s limitations:
[Marxism] has neglected other modes of domination not reducible to class, such as race and gender, and has undertheorised the role of the state. It was noticeable that in European state-administered, socialist societies the flow of information and civil society generally was centrally controlled. (Williams & Hall, 2002, p. 9)
In sum, two theoretical assumptions apply here. First, news representations reflect a reality subjectively constructed by individuals or groups. Second, such subjective constructions reflect forms of oppression reinforcing the status quo and favoring certain elites. This oppression can range from class domination, as in traditional Marxism, to race and gender domination. This combination of social construction and Marxist theory of ideology can be tentatively labeled ideological construction of reality. The following section outlines how the interpretation of selected content from the Bulgarian Communist Party’s newspaper will be carried out within this framework and how the analysis may account for the contradictory attitudes toward women.
Method
The analysis included women-related news stories and images published in the official newspaper of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Rabotnichesko Delo. I had access to its issues on microfilm from 1944 to 1990 at the British Library in London and, being a native Bulgarian speaker, faced no language obstacles. The publication was chosen because it represented official Party policy and thus offered texts containing clues to the ideological construction of women under Communism. I read the headline and the first paragraph of the thousands of news articles published in Rabotnichesko Delo during the three years of the analysis, but did not record them unless they were related to women’s issues or offered a novel aspect. For example, I did not record every obituary mentioning the death of female partisans in 1944 because some only mentioned a female name without providing commentary or details. The newspaper’s history, the choice of years for analysis, and the interpretive approaches are outlined as follows.
Newspaper Background
Rabotnichesko Delo can be translated as “Workers’ Act,” “Workers’ Deed,” or “Workers’ Cause” (Bakardjieva, 1995; Dimitrova, 1998; Todorov, 1962). As the “propagandistic extension of Politburo” (Dimitrova, p. 169), it delivered the Party’s policy through a mix of editorials and blatantly biased news stories. The latter rarely contained any attributions to people or documents and thus did not conform to the objectivity standards of Western newspapers. The first issue was published on March 5, 1927, in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, by the Bulgarian Workers’ Party, created two weeks earlier as a “legal form of the Communist Party” (Kovachev, 1980, p. 13). Rabotnichesko Delo continued the tradition of Rabotnicheski Vestnik (“Workers’ Newspaper”), the Communist Party’s official newspaper, whose publication began in 1897. Rabotnichesko Delo was published illegally from 1934 to 1944 and coexisted with its predecessor until merging with it in 1938 (Kovachev, 1980). Starting as a weekly publication, it tried to become a daily in 1929 and then again in 1931, but its issues were frequently confiscated, leading to a switch to monthly publication in 1942. Only in 1949 did the newspaper become a daily, which was published on workdays as well as holidays (Kovachev, 1980).
A review of an index of Rabotnichesko Delo‘s content from 1927 to 1944 suggests the newspaper promoted sex equality to attract women to the Communist cause. Some of the articles that appeared during this time were about the loveless and mercantile nature of marriage under capitalism, International Women’s Day, and the positive examples of Soviet women. These stories either lacked bylines or were signed with pseudonyms, a practice that continued in later issues.
Later, during the Communist regime starting in 1944, Rabotnichesko Delo had the highest circulation in Bulgaria—550,000 in 1962 (Todorov, 1962) and 800,000 in 1980 (Kovachev, 1980). (The numbers represent information disseminated by the Party’s central committee.) After the fall of the Communist regime, Rabotnichesko Delo was renamed to Duma (“Word”) in 1990, and became the official newspaper of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, which represented most of the factions within the former Bulgarian Communist Party.
Years of Analysis
Three periods were selected for analysis: The first year of the new regime, immediately following September 9, 1944, when the Red Army seized control of Bulgaria, forcing the then-monarch to flee; the final year of the Communist regime, immediately preceding the stepping-down of the secretary general of the Bulgarian Communist Party on November 10, 1989; and one year in the middle of the four and a half decades of Communism, 1968, selected because of its reputation as a year of change as well as backlash to change across the world. It is remembered for the anti-Communist revolution in Czechoslovakia, known as the Prague Spring, which was crushed by a Soviet invasion; the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States; massive protests in France; and the banning of the birth control pill by the Vatican. In Bulgaria, 1968 was also the year when abortion restrictions were introduced as part of the state’s pronatalist propaganda. The selection of these three years aimed to provide a look at the evolution of the ideological construction of women’s place in Bulgarian society over time. All stories about women or women’s roles during these three years were read, although not all of them are individually mentioned in this study.
My notes included approximately 110 stories or pictures from the first year of the regime; about 100 stories or pictures portraying women from 1968; and about 120 stories from the final year of the regime. There was some overlap between the recorded stories and photos, as photos often accompanied stories, which is why the numbers are approximate.
Interpretive Approaches
This is, in essence, a news framing analysis, which focuses on the selection and salience of information presented in news stories (Entman, 1993), and is related to Goffman’s (1974) idea that people filter their perceptions of the world. For the purposes of this article, frames were defined as inclusion or exclusion of certain details, resulting in the molding of news according to a mainstream cultural discourse. One of the goals of the analysis was to depict the ideological construction of the interaction between policies founded on Marxist egalitarianism and preexisting cultural gender scripts in Bulgarian society (highly similar to the gender scripts in other Communist countries in the region). Portrayals of women as tough, steadfast, and caring, which were considered ideal feminine traits during Communism, were anticipated, but so were more subtle narratives that reinforced male dominance.
The starting point was to identify themes and roles in which women were presented. Given the point-of-view style of writing in most of the texts, it was not difficult to discern the messages encoded by the authors, who (especially in the first year of publication) often remained anonymous or used only initials in bylines. In analyzing more subtle scripts, especially ones that contradicted the official Party line by suggesting a second-class status for women, I also took into account narratives, juxtapositions, metaphors, and visual imagery conveyed through literary techniques, when such were present. Linguistic choices were taken into account as well, especially when they suggested unexpected or extreme attributes, and so were sourcing choices, especially when news stories contained quotes reflecting highly emotional or polarized opinions. What emerged from this analysis is outlined in the following section.
Analysis
The portrayals of women during the three periods of analysis are presented here in chronological order, starting with the first year of the Communist regime and ending with the final year. General historical information is offered for each of the analyzed years to provide context for the ideological construction of women’s issues during these periods.
1944: Help out the New Regime
The Fatherland Front, a coalition of antifascist forces that included the Communist Party and ultimately became its underling rather than its umbrella, seized power after the Red Army entered Bulgaria on September 9, 1944. After initially supporting Germany in World War II, the country switched to support the Allies. During this first year, Rabotnichesko Delo read like ill-conceived propaganda (except for Reuters news). Most articles demanded accountability from elites for involving Bulgaria in the losing side of the war, urged “workmen” and “workwomen” to increase productivity, and somberly reminded readers of the deaths of Bulgarian partisans. These were underground fighters (including some women) associated with the Communist Party, who upon the start of World War II left their homes to live in the woods, engaging in armed fights with police and in frequent sabotage of major infrastructure points to weaken Bulgaria’s contribution to Germany’s war effort.
Most articles from this period conveyed a message of complete gender equality in all aspects of life. For example, in a New Year’s greeting to women, the chairwoman of a national women’s committee rallied women to support the new regime because it was in their best interest; the Fatherland Front “tore apart the chains of powerlessness, which for decades kept the woman bound and treated her as an inferior being, ‘scientifically’ argued and proved the inferiority of women, her smaller brain, her drive to obedience, and other similar nonsense” (Todorova, 1944b). But the message was weak. Although women were taking on traditionally masculine roles, nothing suggested that men were to take on traditionally feminine roles, such as helping at home.
Three portrayals of women were constructed by Rabotnichesko Delo during this period—warriors, caretakers, and activists—with some overlap. Killed female partisans were lost as potential caretakers, while surviving female partisans often turned activists; activists, on the other hand, were the best mothers because they educated their children well. All three of these ideal roles reflected ideological construction of reality because they glossed over the daily obstacles faced by women and portrayed them in roles that served the Party’s male elites.
Warriors
Stories that focused on the bravery of women in the resistance movement underscored their suffering in a somewhat voyeuristic fashion, referring to their torture by “fascist monsters” (“Loved Ones,” 1944). The articles also focused on the fact that these women had husbands, children, and relatives, implicitly constructing the dead heroines through either their relationships or their bodies:
Women took the gun, along with their husbands, fathers, and brothers and went to the Balkan. Their bodies were tortured and shown in the squares of villages and towns, their heads were put on stakes to show the horrors of the fascists. Prisons were filled with women—mothers, sisters, wives. (“The War and the Woman,” 1945, p. 6)
Another element of gendered ideological construction was evident in articles portraying women’s extraordinary willpower and resilience, as though such qualities could not usually be expected from women and had to be emphasized. For example, a story about a female partisan with the underground name Katya described how she died while holding an automatic weapon during a fight in the Balkan, after escaping from a women’s labor camp (“The Heroic Death of Comrade Yordanka Chankova—Katya,” 1944). “The slim Yordanka showed a remarkable firmness and resilience,” read one sentence, juxtaposing her evident lack of physical power with an abundance of psychological strength. Another female partisan, bedridden for eight years, was said to have overcome her disease and heroically spit in the face of a traitor during a police interrogation (“Kill Us, But Others Will Get Revenge for Us,” 1944).
Other warrior stories focused on the example of resilient Soviet women who defied traditional femininity by participating actively in Stalin’s war effort. Clearly, this was another element of ideological construction benefiting the Party elites under the flimsy pretense that women did their heroic deeds because they did not want to go back to the “old and hateful system under which the woman was a slave, treated like a work animal” (Todorova, 1944a, p. 2). One Soviet woman learned to melt metals; another dug up 56 tons of ore in a year; a good shot took the lives of 300 Nazis; an aviator dropped 50 tons of bombs; a nurse defied traditional femininity by killing 28 Nazis; and many other women became carpenters, masons, and tractor drivers. During the Leningrad siege, women worked at temperatures reaching -40°F (-40°C) to build a railroad for carrying wood: “They fell from hunger and cold, but they continued their voluntarily undertaken task” (Todorova, 1944a, p. 2).
“Good” women were also portrayed as bloodthirsty for revenge. Articles in Rabotnichesko Delo encouraged women to display stereotypically masculine traits of aggression and anger against the country’s previous leaders. What emerges in this idealized construction of a bloodthirsty woman is the fear of Party elites at the time that the country’s female population may not fully support their plans for cleansing and revenge. To appease traditional gender norms, the bloodthirstiness had to be combined with a feminine characteristic, such as motherly love. A December 21 article encouraged women to judge the killers ruthlessly because only severe punishments for former elites could help “the much suffered Bulgarian mother think of a free and joyful life for the future generations” (Karalieva, 1944). A picture of crying women on the front page of the February 2, 1945, issue bore the following caption: “Only the death of the criminals can redeem motherly tears.”
Caretakers
News articles cast women in a traditional feminine role when they praised their efforts at child rearing or other caretaking, such as sewing of undergarments, socks, and gloves for soldiers, and baking and selling cookies to raise money for the war. It served the Party in such cases to construct women not as comrades but as “brides,” “maidens,” or “grandmothers”—words used mostly by rural populations to define women by their relationships. Some stories were blunt in outlining how the Party’s male elite saw women’s roles: “Women are huge armies of labor; they are called to raise and educate the future generation” (“March 8: International Women’s Day,” 1945, p. 2). Giving birth was “a woman’s supreme duty” because children were needed for economic and military growth; to make sure women did not fail in this important duty, the new government was planning to put birthing under its control by providing maternity wards in every town and village, according to an article by the male director of the Institute for Hygiene and Social Policy (Sharov, 1945, p. 2). Indirectly supporting women’s ideological construction as caretakers (but not main actors) were idealized portrayals of women who had mothered brave sons or helped men succeed, similar to textbook portrayals of Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, and the flag-sewing Betsy Ross (Pottker, 1977). For example, one article reprinted from the Soviet press told of 14 women who had received “mother heroine” medals for having and raising 10 children each. The three heroines featured in depth had mostly sons and were quoted only on the topic of their sons’ achievements, underscoring women’s role as breeders of the Party’s future male elites. In another article mothers were called on to “find the strength to tear their sons from themselves and send them to fight” (“The War and the Woman,” 1945, p. 6). These stories suggest the ideological construction of mothers under Communism placed a much higher value on the mothers of sons than of daughters, providing indirect evidence for the Party’s male elite’s desire to maintain its own version of an “old boys’ club.”
The ideological construction of women as mothers rather than comrades also served the homeland’s diplomatic interests abroad. As the Bulgarian government emphasized “eternal friendship” with neighboring Yugoslavia under the rule of Marshal Josip Tito (before Tito’s rift with the Soviet Union), Rabotnichesko Delo called on Bulgarian women to adopt or foster Yugoslavian orphans. In a clumsy attempt to hide the ideological motive, the appeals were framed in emotional rather than political terms. For example, one article described the orphans as “the dearest and the most innocent victims of the war” who are “dying of hunger and starvation” (“Appeal of the Bulgarian People’s Women’s Union to Help Children in Yugoslavia,” 1944, p. 1). Finally, the ideological construction of women as caretakers expected them to help the homeland by buying government bonds under the implicit assumption that women controlled household finances or had influence upon financial decisions. Using a typical propaganda tactic, such stories acknowledged that women had already suffered much but framed the need to buy bonds in a patriotic light: “By setting aside their limited resources, they [women] will make another dear sacrifice in the name of freedom” (Karalieva, 1945, p. 2).
Activists
This ideological construction of women was the one that most explicitly served the Party in the first year of the new regime. A Fatherland Front order required that at least one woman be in charge of recruiting other women in each town or village (Dragoicheva, 1944). A push to create a national women’s organization was justified by a statement that Bulgarian women were socially, culturally, and politically “behind” men (Kiranova, 1945, p. 2). This was especially the case for peasant women, whose “culture” needed to be raised through state-owned bakeries, laundry facilities, and day cares, according to an article by a male doctor (Kiranov, 1945, p. 3). Articles promoting activism and community work paid only lip service to women’s agency, often referring to individuals only by their first names or by their relationships with men. For example, a January 17, 1945, story about a women’s regional conference described two of the delegates as “grandmother Pena” (baba Pena) and “bride/wife Petrovitsa” (bulia Petrovitsa), in the latter case referring to the woman as her husband’s possession by constructing her name from the husband’s name and the suffix –itsa. Condescending remarks about women were not unusual in articles meant to praise their achievements; for example, one story about female workers in a printing press stressed that they had no difficulty speaking or remembering facts, as if cognitive fluency were a significant achievement for them (Boyadzhieva, 1945, p. 4).
This ideological construction of women as activists was also meant to facilitate their exploitation by the Party’s male elites rather than offer them actual opportunities for leadership. Indeed, even though the new government recognized “women as equally valuable and with completely equal rights with men in all areas of life” (Dragoicheva, 1944, p. 2), sex segregation was encouraged through the establishment of separate Fatherland Front men’s and women’s committees. Soviet women were still cast by Rabotnichesko Delo as examples of political activism, but their leadership roles appeared sadly limited. For example, one article reported that only 226 out of 1,338 representatives (17%) to the Soviet Supreme Commission were female (Grizodubova, 1945, p. 2). This devaluation of women’s work and leadership potential becomes even more evident in the next period of analysis.
1968: Make Babies
Surprisingly, major world events in 1968 had little or no effect on Rabotnichesko Delo‘s coverage of women. The coverage of the Prague Spring reflected confusion, starting with a short front-page story about Czechoslovakia’s new government, followed by a revised friendship agreement between the two countries and a trip by the Bulgarian secretary general to meet revolutionary leader Alexander Dubchek. Bulgaria later changed course under directions from the Soviet Union, a shift reflected in a reprinted Pravda article criticizing the Prague Spring as a counterrevolution. The 1968 protests in Paris received friendly and positive coverage, and a short article about Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination painted him in somewhat Marxist language as a progressive leader fighting for the oppressed.
Stories about women in 1968 were often written in a first-person, magazine style and had complete or semicomplete bylines (last name, first-name initial) more frequently than the 1944-1945 articles. The bylines were predominantly female, with last names ending in –a. Considering the collectivist ideology of Communism, there was a surprising focus on individuals in both news and images. Rabotnichesko Delo frequently featured pictures of women in the process of exceeding production quotas or succeeding in traditionally masculine fields. Yet in 1968 the main emphasis was on motherhood, beauty, and fashion. Three portrayals of women emerged during this period: celebrated and shamed mothers, pursuers of beauty, and tomboys. The first two of these ideologically constructed images of ideal femininity reflected the Party’s attempt to boost the birthrate. This was also one of the reasons behind the country’s switch from a six-day to a five-day workweek, even though the change was cast as a way to ease work-life balance (Lyubenova, 1968; Sivriev, 1968).
Celebrated and Shamed Mothers
The ideological construction of mothers as heroines emerged as early as the New Year’s Day issue of Rabotnichesko Delo, which profiled a mother of five sons (Mancheva, 1968, p. 2). The woman, who had a high school degree and worked at a pharmacy, had just been recognized with a medal as a “mother heroine.” The article painted the protagonist as a role model to other women: when she sensed disapproval from friends and acquaintances for having five children, she always provided the cliché answer that children are a joy, not a barrier. About a dozen more articles painstakingly described the alleged ease with which Bulgarian women of the 1960s could have both children and jobs, but the statistics provided in some of the articles did not support that. One story argued that mothers could participate fully in the “economic, cultural, and sociopolitical life of the country” thanks to the existence of more than 5,300 spaces for children between the ages of two months and three years at daily and weekly day cares in Sofia (“Caring for Children,” 1968, p. 2). In reality, this was not an achievement because the demand for day care was many times greater, considering that in Sofia, a city of almost a million people, more than 10,000 couples married each year (“Weddings,” 1968, p. 2) and that private day cares were not allowed. This shortage was implicitly acknowledged in another article, which predicted that by 1970 about 70% of three- to seven-year-olds would be in child care facilities (“International Women’s Day,” 1968, p. 2). Yet another news story acknowledged the almost complete lack of mass-produced baby foods, clothes, and cosmetics in spite of the countrywide rate of 120,000 births per year (“Lack of Baby Goods,” 1968, p. 4). As a result, mothers and grandmothers of infants had to spend much time on child care and home production of baby foods and clothes. Rabotnichesko Delo did not shy away from admitting that most women worked 80 to 90 hours a week, acknowledging that they had both “production and family duties” (“Do Services Facilitate Housework for Women?,” 1968, p. 3). It is not surprising, then, that women resisted motherhood—a resistance Rabotnichesko Delo either criticized as selfish or tried to assuage with promises of better life, such as the establishment of dry cleaning, community laundries, and a house-cleaning service with 56 employees, intended to serve a city of a million people (“Do Services Facilitate Housework for Women?” 1968, p. 3). To raise the birthrate, the Party even offered cash for babies. In February, the Bulgarian Parliament passed a 400% increase in state payments for second children and a 525% increase for third children, along with extending paid maternity leave to 120 days for a first child, 150 days for a second one, and 180 days for a third one.
As part of its ideological construction of the motherhood duty, the Party also aimed to denigrate women who sought abortions or used birth control. Rabotnichesko Delo reported on the passing of criminal penalties for having an illegal abortion, for inciting pregnant women to abort, or for engaging actions that “hurt and humiliate the dignity of the woman-mother” (Bulgarian Telegraph Agency, 1968, p. 4). Legal abortions already exceeded live births in areas where inferior living conditions and lack of child care had led to a negative population growth, leading Rabotnichesko Delo to criticize the “criminal decision of many families to have no children or have only one child,” thus engaging in a “petty bourgeois” practice of taking what they could from society and giving back very little (“Birth Rate Is Not Just a Personal Issue,” 1968, p. 3). Clearly, not only were women’s rights over their bodies restricted by the law but, as part of the motherhood ideology, women were also shamed for exercising whatever legal options they had to avoid having children.
To encourage motherhood, the Party encouraged marriage, which ended being hardly different from the bourgeois marriage Marx and Engels had once criticized. Although 1.8 million women were in the workforce and many others were pursuing higher education, the marrying age was between 21 and 25. To better celebrate weddings (valid only if performed by the state), Party officials were considering building special halls (“Weddings,” 1968). Divorce was discouraged as part of the promarriage, pronatalist propaganda. For instance, one article in Rabotnichesko Delo highlighted the heartbreaking story of two siblings who, hand in hand, went to a government agency to seek help with stopping their parents’ divorce (“The Fate of Children,” 1968). These examples of family-related discourse outline Rabotnichesko Delo‘s ideological reconstruction of what Marx and Lenin would have criticized as bourgeois morality into a positive and wholesome duty, simply because it benefitted the state.
Pursuers of Beauty
To attract men and have babies, good Communist women were advised to improve their appearance through state-driven scientific development rather than a healthy lifestyle: “It is high time to put cosmetics on a scientific basis and to acquire the skills to maintain the good looks of the face and the body” (“Bulgarian Woman’s Beauty,” 1968, p. 3). In 1968, Rabotnichesko Delo also featured a surprising number of articles about designer clothing, cosmetics, and furniture. These stories appeared on the same page as other women-related articles, suggesting they were all intended for a female audience. Sometimes even hard-news stories about women, such as an article stating that 20% of local government officials, 17% of legislators, 40% of doctors, 67% of teachers, and 25% of scientists were female (Atanasova, 1968, p. 3), were relegated to the rubric called “esthetics.” Under the same rubric were some true fashion articles, describing new trends in clothing and accessories, such as straight and trapezoid dress silhouettes (Slavomirova, 1968), big purses (“Prognoses, News, Announcements,” 1968), and “romantic” elements, such as lace and pleats (“Bulgarian Woman’s Beauty,” 1968, p. 3). A female deputy minister promised through the pages of Rabotnichesko Delo that beautiful mass-produced goods were about to solve the problem of bad taste (Lozanova, 1968, p. 3). To boost Bulgaria’s limited economy, or perhaps as an indirect way to encourage more marriages and births, Rabotnichesko Delo constructed its own version of female-driven consumerism as a Communist value. For example, women were advised to consider attractive new radios and telephones when decorating their homes (“Beautiful Things,” 1968). If they did not buy into this bizarre ideological construction of consumerism, they were once again shamed:
How did it happen that, despite the centuries-old ability of the Bulgarian woman to select and combine colors and shapes, to create unique in their beauty and exotic, daring folk clothes and rugs, she now often suffers from incredible lack of taste in her dress and home appearance? (“Good Taste,” 1968, p. 3)
Births, marriages, and women’s submission to men were also implicitly encouraged in articles portraying women as excessively interested in the creation of beautiful things. Such stereotypical femininity was constructed through photos and stories showing female workers sewing or processing textiles, along with a long historical piece about Raina Kniaginia, the Bulgarian equivalent of Betsy Ross (Stoilov, 1968). Women were also often constructed not as comrades but as erratic and irrational creatures interested in men’s love. For example, a story about a poetess, who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, argued: “Above all, in her dominates the desire of a woman to realize herself through love, through free creative activity, which makes her close to the contemporary woman” (“Elisaveta Bagriana,” 1968, p. 2). It is nothing less than surprising that Rabotnichesko Delo‘s ideological construction of a “contemporary woman” was as one wanting to realize herself through love, even though only a couple of decades earlier that might have been viewed as a bourgeois notion. But in 1968, the Party had more important problems to solve than worrying about the ideological purity of its news articles.
Tomboys at Work
Even though women were first and foremost needed by the Communist regime for breeding purposes, their participation in the workforce was still an important element of their idealized images. For instance, regional unemployment was to be solved by training homemakers in construction, painting, and crane driving (“Appropriate Work for Women,” 1968). If some women managed to get married in the process, that was even better, as in the case of a female Soviet firefighter who flew planes over the Siberian forests and married another firefighter after saving his life (“Happy Holiday, Dear Mothers, Comrades, and Sisters,” 1968, p. 3). Several stories constructed portrayals of feminine women in traditionally masculine pursuits. One profile focused on a young woman who had begged to join the team that built heavy crane equipment at the country’s largest steel factory, soon becoming a standout worker in the all-male brigade (Nikolov, 1968). Another story described the work of a female police detective “whose love for people and devotion to Communist ideals make her treat with firmness and lack of tolerance those who destroy our moral and social norms” (Simeonova, 1968, p. 2).
Yet this ideological construction of women did not encourage leadership. Power was still men’s prerogative, and, ironically, all but one of the Party leaders who spoke at a women’s conference in September were men (“National Conference of Bulgarian Women Ended,” 1968). On the rare occasion when a woman achieved a leadership position, her success was minimized by references to her appearance and personal life. For example, a village teacher who emphasized critical thinking and loved the scientific method was described as having beautiful eyes (Stanev, 1968), and a news article about a history museum’s female director mentioned that she worked alongside her husband (“Always Searching,” 1968). The intertwining of the professional and personal spheres in Rabotnichesko Delo once again suggests that its ideological construction of the ideal woman contained internal contradictions, reflective of the Party’s varying and endless expectations of Bulgarian women.
1989: Let Go—The End Is Near
The final year analyzed was characterized by a sense of disjointedness and confusion, reflecting the so-called perestroika, or reforms, started by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, and their trickle-down effect in other Eastern Bloc countries. A new law allowed the existence of private firms as of January 1, 1989, months before the secretary general of the Party stepped down on November 10. Coverage of women’s issues during that period reflected a mix of the old ideological construction and attempts at real journalism. Instead of offering solutions or promising better life, news articles in this period engaged in honest discussions of the so-called double burden and even acknowledged female delinquency.
Bulgaria was struggling throughout the 1980s to reach a population of 9 million, so a focus on beauty and fashion was still present even during the final year of the regime. For example, one article stated that “there are no truly ugly women, only women who truly are not taking care of their gifts from nature” (Simeonova, 1968, p. 4). Remarkably, a few months before the collapse of the regime, Rabotnichesko Delo also at least occasionally replaced the title “Comrade” with the title “Mrs.,” as in an article about the female manager of two foreign-trade firms (Borisov, 1989, p. 5). This reflects a resurfacing of traditional values similar to the stage Gray (1990) observed in the Soviet Union. The ideological construction of women for the first time also focused on political loyalty, as in the coverage of those who chose to stay during the state-sanctioned emigration of Bulgarian Muslims or who returned to Bulgaria later, complaining about the mistreatment of women in Turkey (Tosheva, 1989). Overall, three idealized images of women were distinguishable in the final year of the regime: resilient mothers, superwomen, and antiheroines. There was some overlap between the first two categories, but superwomen required a separate category because they were not always mothers.
Resilient Mothers
By1989 Rabotnichesko Delo had acknowledged that motherhood involved serious sacrifices, even though it was seen as a duty to society. Some articles reported on state policies that forced mothers to be the exclusive caretakers because fathers, grandmothers, and mothers-in-law were not allowed to use unpaid leave to help care for children or grandchildren. Once again, because it served the Party’s purposes, ideal mothers were cast as resilient, as seen in an article about a young family with four children, whose mother worked full time and believed that “a mother has no right to complain about caring for her children” (Zherev, 1989, p. 3). The idealization of resilience included an expectation for emotional strength as well, as represented in the cases of a woman raising her daughter in a tiny apartment shared with her ex-husband and his new wife (Petrova, 1989) and a folk singer who sang every day despite her evident poverty and laborious life (Filipova, 1989, p. 4). A similar story about resilience focused on a female doctor with three children and a long commute who enjoyed her job and had never taken a sick day (Ogoiska, 1989, p. 4). The article emphasized how she had risen above the humiliation of job hunting while pregnant, when she used to meet people’s looks of misunderstanding and disapproval at having too many children. This theme appeared in each of the analyzed periods, suggesting that the newspaper’s construction of motherhood as a duty had faced consistent resistance.
In line with encouraging births, Rabotnichesko Delo also condemned discrimination against mothers taking time off to care for sick children (Ilieva, 1989, p. 3) and requiring pregnant women to work in environments with high noise, vibrations, or chemical pollution. In fact, special treatment was advised for female workers: “The female body is more vulnerable compared to the male body due to its anatomic and physiological idiosyncrasies, hormonal cycles, and its biologically determined reproductive function” (Boshnyakov, 1988, p. 1).
When women failed to measure up to the ideological construction of an ideal Communist mother, they were once again shamed. For instance, the newspaper’s issue commemorating International Women’s Day featured an interview with a kindergarten director who criticized mothers for being irritable, harried, and quick to anger when their children failed to get dressed quickly enough (Nikolaeva & Borisov, 1989). Mothers were also criticized for leaving their children in group homes without relinquishing parental rights, which prevented adoption (Nikolaeva, 1989).
Superwomen
Motherhood was especially valuable to the state when women managed to continue being productive workers while raising children. Thus it is no surprise that work ethic and high productivity were aspects of the ideological construction of the ideal woman. Rabotnichesko Delo reported on women who had turned motherhood into a paid activity. Such was the story of a woman who had started the first private kindergarten in Sofia because she did not want to leave her own two children (Stoikova, 1989). A similar lesson emerged in the story of a foster mother (with a grown-up daughter) raising three school-age boys and a baby girl, thanks to payments from the state (Todorova, 1989).
The ideal Communist woman was a multitasker, as could be gleaned from the many profiles of women who were valuable employees in addition to fulfilling their motherhood and homemaking duties. Examples included a female chief engineer at a factory, who said a woman’s work was hard because, in addition to being prominent in her job, she had to be a good mother and a good homemaker (Nikolaeva & Borisov, 1989); a smiling nurse giving much love to young patients, although her own two children were always waiting to see her come home (Panamski & Todorov, 1989); and a high school principal who had succeeded in sending more than 70% of the school’s graduates to college, in addition to raising three young children (“Outside the Box,” 1988). The ideological construction of women included compliance with traditional gender norms by shouldering the burdens of child care and house chores without expecting significant help from men. It was a woman’s willingness to sacrifice her independence and leisure that especially contributed to her depiction as an ideal woman. Such was the case of a woman who dropped out of college to follow her husband, a border patrol agent, into a mountainous region far from any civilized area with their 18-day-old baby. Glossing over the hardships she no doubt had faced and continued to face, Rabotnichesko Delo described her as “not one of the women who are easily bent” (“Border—But Not to Love,” 1989, p. 3).
Another aspect of the ideologically constructed, ideal Bulgarian woman was the possession of an androgynous personality, combining both masculine and feminine qualities. This was evident, for example, in the profile of a female bus driver: “Like a man, she spins the wheel and steers the large Ikarus, but after work she is a wife, mother, and homemaker. A woman!” (Andreeva, 1989, p. 1). Women were also routinely depicted writing software, fixing clocks and watches, and holding jobs in astronomical observatories and computer hardware factories. Other successful women had feminine occupations but displayed masculine qualities, such as ambition and toughness: a fashion designer who had created her own clothing line, supplied a boutique in downtown Sofia, and had sold samples of her work throughout Europe (Kunchev, 1989); two female owners of a private hair salon, who renovated several rooms by themselves (Simeonova, 1989); and a female Party secretary at a textile factory, a mother and a wife, who frequently offered her employees confidence boosts and a shoulder to cry on while working harder than everyone else: “Other women are allowed to be late—since they are mothers, they can stay up late to finish work. She is never late. Her day ends with the beginning of the second shift. But does it end?” (“Working with People, 1988,” p. 1). The last story promoted the stereotype that most women whine and make excuses, while they really should try to be more like the ideal women profiled on the pages of Rabotnichesko Delo.
While androgyny was encouraged when it served the interests of the state, according to Rabotnichesko Delo‘s ideological construction the ideal Bulgarian woman was expected to calmly accept many profoundly patriarchal social practices. Some pockets of patriarchy were extreme and hidden from public view, as suggested by an article about an American ethnographer studying elements of preindustrialized life in a mountain village, where young women’s life consisted of preparing dowries and blessing one another with the saying “May you get on a horse soon,” in reference to being taken away on a horse upon getting married (Asiova, 1989, p. 3). In urban environments, women were encouraged to give their best at work without expecting high-profile leadership positions. One could read about a female chief technologist (e.g., Gozes, 1989), a female champion, or a factory team leader, but Rabotnichesko Delo never profiled women who were factory directors or leaders of large professional associations.
Antiheroines
Rabotnichesko Delo had become remarkably sophisticated in its ideological construction of women by its final year as the Party’s official newspaper. Instead of profiling only ideal women, who could serve as role models for female readers, the newspaper chose to also profile “bad” women, who had failed to live up to Bulgarian society’s expectations. Some had failed by finding success in criminal activity, such as the cold and calculating female ringleader of a group engaged in illegal currency exchange. She had been in prison twice and disregarded traditional femininity: “She is not joking. She works wholesale, and is not interested in small watches and things like that. She is interested in gold and its shine in her pocket” (“Woman in Gold,” 1988, p. 3). Other women had failed by experiencing mental health difficulties in response to various crises. Such was the example of a high school girl who had attempted suicide and was surrounded by sad and toxic women, including socially aggressive female friends engaged in prostitution and stealing; a chaotic, stressed-out mother who worked weekends; and a mean grandmother/mother-in-law who routinely ruined her mother’s cooking (Apostolov, 1989, p. 5). Another such “bad” woman was a mother who had pressured her daughter to leave the cherished Communist homeland and move to Turkey during the 1989 emigration of Muslims (“Mother’s Hate Instead of Love,” 1989). Clearly, such examples were needed to provide moral lessons to other women about how to avoid deviating from the ideal image of the good Communist woman.
Discussion
The goal of this analysis was to unravel the strategies used by Rabotnichesko Delo to ideologically construct acceptable behaviors for women that would best serve the interests of the state, such as enthusiastic motherhood and a stellar work ethic. It is remarkable to see how aspects of this ideological construction shifted over time depending on the needs and interests of the Party’s male elite. The first year of the regime had to promise women complete equality to recruit them for the Communist cause; the main purpose of the newspaper was to encourage women to accept their emotional and property losses from the war and move on by offering further sacrifices to the new regime. In 1944-1945, the ideal Bulgarian woman was a fighter, a caretaker, and a tearless but vengeful mother of lost sons.
Fast-forward about a quarter of a century, and the construction of this ideal woman had changed to meet the needs of the time. By 1968, almost all women had entered the workforce, but the birthrate had fallen. Thus, the emphasis shifted to encouraging women to remember their reproductive function, including a surprisingly heavy focus on their appearance. Further, the ideological construction suggested that women’s bodies were not their own; if they had only one child, for example, they were not properly or sufficiently giving back to the state. This is a remarkably hypocritical twist in the Party’s ideology, which only a few decades earlier had made the radical promise to free women from domesticity and give them full equality with men in all spheres of life. Althusser’s (2006) definition of ideology as a representation of “the imaginary conditions of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (p. 100) is easily applicable to Rabotnichesko Delo‘s 1968 claims about how much easier it was for Bulgarian women under Communism to have both children and careers. The “imaginary conditions” referred to the supposedly available, subsidized child care and accessible cleaning and laundry services for all; the “real conditions of existence” were drastically different because of shortage of the promised services, resulting in backbreaking labor that mothers and grandmothers had to put into raising a child or two.
Rabotnichesko Delo‘s construction of the ideal Communist woman had not changed much by 1989, during the age of perestroika, although articles published during that year included a relatively more honest discussion of women’s “second shift” and the social policies needed to alleviate it. A significant and interesting addition to the newspaper’s ideological construction of the Communist woman in 1989 was the depiction of “bad” women, who served as antitheses to the ideal women. The coverage continued to construct “good” women as androgynous, combining both masculine and feminine characteristics, which was also evident in Rabotnichesko Delo‘s content from 1944-1945 and 1968. Of course, this was not because the Party cared about women’s personal growth as multifaceted, psychologically complex individuals, but because the regime needed women to be both breeders and resilient workers, contributing to the country’s industrialization in its imagined competition with the Western world.
Entman (1993) has argued that a news framing analysis should take into account not only elements included in news stories but also the ones that are excluded. Considering that only 300 of the 2,000 members of the Union of Bulgarian Journalists were female (Todorov, 1962), the ideological construction of the ideal Communist woman was likely the deed of male editors and Party leaders. Thus, it is not surprising that they kept themselves out of women’s issues. The most significant element missing from Rabotnichesko Delo‘s discourse on women’s issues was the mention of men’s role in child care and household chores. None of the coverage during any of the analyzed periods implicitly or explicitly encouraged men to share housework duties. There were no profiles of standout male employees who had managed to be ultra productive in spite of having children at home, which was an element often mentioned in the profiles of women. Rabotnichesko Delo‘s clearly embraced and perpetuated the gendered division of labor at home, which was convenient to the Party’s male elite but not exactly in line with Lenin’s call to free women from “petty housework” (Moghadam, 1995, p. 336). Also missing from Rabotnichesko Delo‘s coverage of women were any depictions of women as victims of sexual assaults or domestic violence, even though the most common portrayal of women in news across the world is as victims (Byerly, 2008). Such coverage could have not only jeopardized readers’ belief in an absolute socialist morality but also exposed male members of the Party elite as the perpetrators of some ghastly assaults. Clearly, neither of these possibilities was convenient or welcome.
The analysis illustrates how the Bulgarian Communist state’s quasi-feminist policies ushered women into the workplace and offered them limited career fulfillment while still emphasizing traditional concepts, such as the importance of having sons over daughters, attracting men through beauty, and shouldering the burden of household chores. Indeed, as Anachkova (1995) has argued, “the achieved emancipation of women was political mimicry; it was not integrated into the social and political structures” (p. 63). Allegedly Communist ideals (very different from the ones actually espoused in the writings of Marx and Lenin) were used to force women to act against their own best interests. In that sense, the Communist regime was not much different from the patriarchal structures it had claimed to replace. The strength of these hidden structures was evident in the speed with which they resurfaced throughout the post-Communist world. This was illustrated by the quick engagement of women in a highly gendered, traditional “fantasy feminism” from the pages of glossy Western magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Elle (Stephenson, 2007, p. 615), and the emphasis on men’s roles as exclusive breadwinners who reject any household identity (Ashwin & Lytkina, 2004). Similar resilience of traditional structures was evident in the post-1989 return of women’s veiling and oppressive gender relations in Kyrgyzstan (Heyat, 2004) as well as the secret maintenance and the post-Communist resurfacing of women’s life-cycle and religious rituals in Uzbekistan, where the practice of arranged marriages and paying a bride-price persists (Kandiyoti & Azimova, 2004).
The ideological construction of women in Rabotnichesko Delo surprisingly mirrored some of the issues facing women in the United States. The enthusiastic support for women’s rights in the early years of the Communist regime later silenced independent and career-oriented women by encouraging a family focus in the 1960s. This transformation is strikingly similar to postwar societal changes in the United States, when working women were encouraged to return to homemaker duties and have children, as described in Friedan’s (1963) book The Feminine Mystique. But unlike in the United States, where the second wave of feminism brought women’s rights to the table in the 1960s and 1970s, in the Soviet Union and its satellites women’s issues started to be seen through an increasingly misogynistic and antifeminist lens. This is evident in stories about a female Soviet psychologist suggesting that a women’s movement should make women “more capable of reassuring their men” (Gray, 1990, p. 48) and a male sexologist blaming male impotence on “the excesses in women’s liberation” (p. 76). To further the analogy, the 1989 issues of Rabotnichesko Delo portrayed criminal and depressed women who had failed to achieve the power and independence promised by Marxist ideology—coverage that is reminiscent of elements of the U.S. antifeminist backlash of the 1980s and 1990s. These similarities suggest that cyclical attempts to erode the improved conditions of an oppressed group may represent a cross-cultural phenomenon, aided by the effects of new technologies on spreading values and beliefs across cultures. It is also possible that worldwide crises, such as World War II, may create analogous long-term social processes across the world.
The analysis was limited by the selection of only three years of news content. Expanding it to more years, possibly one from each decade, would offer more depth and a better understanding of the evolution of women’s issues in Rabotnichesko Delo‘s coverage. Future research could also include in-depth interviews with former journalists responsible for covering women’s issues before 1989. This may help determine the degree to which the coverage reflected Party-dictated ideology and the degree to which it reflected cultural narratives and social scripts espoused by individual journalists. In spite of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Eastern European Communist regimes in 1989, it is clear that analyses of news content and news routines from former Communist countries are still needed because of their theoretical and practical implications. Future studies can be helpful in extending Marxist theories to account not only for class domination but also for race and gender domination. Such analyses can also offer a blueprint for how news constructs reality in state-controlled environments, including non-Communist dictatorships, which continue to exist in many parts of the world.