ABSTRACT
Feminist theory and practice from the very beginning have stressed the importance of language as a basic means for structuring and representing the self and society. In Bulgaria, as in most Christian patriarchal societies, women have been reduced to the grand and grotesque symbol of "Woman". The latter is quite ambivalent and contradictory, expressing everything and anything that men have wanted to put into it simply on the grounds of being different from them. Unfortunately, many women have uncritically internalized that male model, taking it for granted, taking it for generic, the unified male language model included. Social psychology has shown that stereotypes are necessary; the peoples need them because they offer simplified and generalized evaluations of one group of people to another group of people. They serve as a group norm in helping orientation, as a defense mechanism against the foreign/the other, as a compensatory mechanism, as a mechanism for control over the other.
