Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

From Visiting Ladies Towards Municipality Female Social Advisors:
Women in Home Visiting Practice in Bulgaria (1915 – 1939)
Kristina Popova
Abstract
The aim of the article is to analyse the importance of home visit practices
as a key method of biopolitics in Bulgaria as well as their development by
various female charity and professional activities over a period of twenty-five
years. In 1910 the first female preparation course for voluntary social work
(Samaritan women) was organized in Bulgaria. They introduced home visit
practice during World War I. The home visit practice was also developed by
various female professional and charity activities: visiting nurses (after 1926),
female teachers – advisors in the villages (after 1927), students in the Women’s
Social High School (founded in 1932, based on the model of the Female Social
Academy in Berlin) and municipality female professional social workers (after
1934). Women of diverse social and educational backgrounds took part in
these activities, crossing class and spatial borders. All these women made
the home visit in Bulgaria a common practice where power and trust were
negotiated. The development of a new profession of home advisors will be used
as a case study in the teaching process. A set of questions that can be used as
didactic material is offered to reflect on the ways women were constructed in
the early stage of social work activities in Bulgaria.
The aim of the article is to use the historical case study to emphasis
how the new profession of social advisors involved women as carers and
nurses, thereby strengthening the public perception of women, and how the
new profession assisted in emancipating women from domestic isolation. It is
important for social work education to acknowledge the multidimensionality
of historical developments and their various impacts on the position of women.
Historical case studies are therefore an effective tool in social work teaching.
The article can itself be a case study for social work teaching, and an additional
set of questions facilitating students’ participation in the class will be offered.
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