Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

In the 1930s female teachers and advisers managed to build a broad
network for observing child health in the home, to spread modern standards of
child rearing among mothers in the villages, and to enforce social control over
the rural population. In their reports they told how they gained access to family
homes, how they managed to communicate with mothers and how fathers
were sceptical at the beginning but then tended to accept advice. Using the
standards they had received instruction about, the female teachers and advisors
presented in their reports images of rural homes in poverty, the lack of modern
order and hygiene and their efforts to instruct mothers.
Through the work in the villages of female teachers and advisors, undertaken
in tandem with the work of the visiting nurses and “Samarjanka”
volunteers in urban areas, home visit practice had been generally established
in Bulgaria by the late 1920s as a female activity of professional visiting nurses
and trained volunteers. They elaborated and established rules and practices of
communication to the poor population in town peripheries and distant villages
and traced the way for visiting practices as a key method of professional social
work in the 1930s.
Questions for students:
1. Why did the Bulgarian Child Protection Union need to prepare
women separately for home visits in the villages?
2. Why were female teachers chosen?
3. What were their main duties as female teachers and advisors?
What personal qualities did they have to develop?
4. What were the most important social problems in rural areas in
the Balkans at that time?
5. What did female teachers and advisors manage to do for the
situation of children and mothers in the villages?
The Social High School for Women of the Bulgarian Women’s Union
In 1932, the Bulgarian Women’s Union opened a female preparatory course
for social work, which became in the following year a Social High School
for women. It was based on the model of Alice Salomon’s Women’s Social
Academy in Berlin. Bulgarian jurist Rayna Petkova was sent by the Women’s
Union in 1929 to Berlin in order to study at the academy and then implant
137