The Bulgarian case: Women’s issues or feminist issues?

Elena Bonner, an outstanding leader of the radical democratic movement, spelled out without a trace of irony the beliefs and illusions characteristic of the vast majority of women and men in the USSR and other countries of Eastern Europe. When asked, after delivering an address to the University of California, Berkeley, in March 1990, what role women and women’s organizations have played in the struggle in the Soviet Union, she replied, “You know, our country is on such a low socioeconomic level, that at the moment we cannot afford to divide ourselves into ‘us women’ and ‘us men.' We share a common struggle for democracy, a struggle to feed the country.”.