Mind the Gap: The Changing Face of Gender (In) equality in Bulgaria after 1989

Abstract

The Bulgarian gender regime has historically tended toward a more gender-equal form of familiarism, albeit with a strong patriarchal, pronatalist, and heteronormative tinge.¹ The country has a comparatively long-standing history of gender equality legislation, starting in the late nineteenth century with the equal entitlements of Bulgarian women to heritage and an equal duration of high school education. Beginning in the 1900s the scope of gender equality expanded to include a marriage regime of separate property, the unimpeded right of married women to go into business, and the symmetric regulation of divorce,² as well as access to university education and equalization of high school subjects of boys and girls. The first Bulgarian Constitution (1879) de jure granted voting rights to all citizens regardless of their gender, while de facto women were enfranchised de facto only in the late 1930s after several decades of women’s activism. From the mid-1940s gender equality became the state policy of the newly formed communist government with Bulgaria being the first socialist country to adopt egalitarian family legislation that secularized marriage.³ Women were granted equal rights in “all spheres of life” with the adoption of the Decree on Equality (1944) and the new communist Constitution (1947) and could be elected to parliament from 1947. Abortion on demand first became available in 1956 and has been accessible ever since, with some partial restrictions being put in place in the 1960s and 1970s; these restrictions were lifted in 1990.