Defining Female Subjectivities in Italy: motherhood and abortion in the individual and collective memories of the 1970s women's movement in Bologna

In Italy, women have long been stereotypically marked as either objects of sexual desire or as producers of new life. This changed radically in the 1970s, when second-wave feminism redefined gender relations and experimented with new paths of life not determined by matrimony and maternity. The legalisation of abortion, during the second half of the decade, is now hailed as one of the primary achievements of the women's movement. A theme closely connected to abortion such as motherhood, on the other hand, seems to have been excluded from the public memory of 1970s feminism. Drawing on the outcomes of an oral history project, this article unearths the dominant discourses and individual and collective silences within the public memory of the 1970s women's movement in the Italian city of Bologna, and explores the processes of creating ‘composure’ among women as they remember their experiences of motherhood and abortion.     

女性非正规就业的影响因素研究 ——基于中国社会状况综合调查的实证分析

系统考察女性劳动者选择非正规就业的因素,不仅对揭示其非正规就业选择的机理具有重要意义,而且对其权益保护也具有深远影响。本研究基于中国社会状况综合调查(CSS)数据,分析女性非正规就业的影响因素,并考察影响非正规就业女性选择不同就业身份和职业类型的因素。研究结果表明:非正规就业已经成为女性非农就业的主要途径;户籍等个体特征、家庭中子女数量等家庭因素以及所在地区等对女性劳动者非正规就业选择有显著影响,而人力资本不但对女性非正规就业的选择有显著影响,对其就业身份和职业类型的选择也有显著影响。研究建议:应完善非正规就业政策,结合影响女性非正规就业的因素制定措施保障其合法权益,提升女性劳动者的人力资本水平,进而提高女性非正规就业劳动者的就业质量。     

ambiguities and ambivalences in making the nation: women and politics in 20th-century Mexico

By comparing two time periods, the early and late 20th century, this article examines the ambiguities and ambivalences in the state promotion of women in the nation-building projects of Mexico. I argue that in both cases, the state was keen to promote itself as modern and progressive and used women's status in society to these ends. Despite the explicit focus on women, there were many ambiguities and ambivalences resulting from the competing state projects in the political, socio-economic and cultural arenas offering women both privileged spaces and constraints in the development of gendered citizenship. The contradictions arise from simultaneously promoting women's rights, extolling traditional gender roles and fearing women's political activism – both conservative and more radical. Although these ambivalences and ambiguities remain a constant feature, there is a key difference in the two time periods: in one the regime is inward looking, economically protectionist and corporatist, while in the other a new vision of Mexico has attempted to dismantle the corporatist structures and state development project with private economic initiatives and political individualism. In both periods, women gained important rights but romanticized imagery of the self-sacrificing mother was mobilized to underpin change: women were expected both to change and remain the same.     

feminism,policy and women's safety during Australia's ‘war on terror’

The main argument in this article is that the Australian government in power from 1996 to November 2007 failed women's domestic security by denying the central policy role of women's organizations in the struggle against domestic violence and by successfully expunging public debate on gender issues in Australian governance, while participating in the ‘war on terror’ to guard national security. In bringing together a discussion about the war on terror and the importance of feminism for women's security, key issues about feminism, race and gender are considered. This article also explores the prevalence of violence against women and the social implications of the lack of leadership in public debate about the gendered nature of violence against women. Under the Australian government led by Prime Minister John Howard that gained power in 1996 and was defeated in 2007, women's organizations lost financial support and women's policy infrastructure was decimated. Violence against women, however, continued to increase, reaffirming women's place in Australian society as insecure and dangerous. After more than 30 years of struggle to maintain domestic violence and sexual assault as serious social policy problems, provide services, support and advocacy for women who are victims of violence and assault, women's organizations are coming to terms with a society where there is a blindness to the role of gender in violence against women.     

sexual regimes and migration controls: reproducing the Irish nation-state in transnational contexts

This article examines the ways that state sexual regimes intersect with migration controls to re-make exclusionary nation-states and geopolitical hierarchies among women. I focus on two important Irish Supreme Court rulings: the X case (1992) and the O case (2002), respectively. X was a raped, pregnant, 14-year-old who sought an abortion in Britain. While the Supreme Court ultimately permitted her to procure an abortion, women's right to travel across international borders without government inquiry into their reproductive status came into question. The O case concerned a Nigerian asylum seeker who invoked the fact that she was pregnant in an effort to avoid deportation. The Supreme Court, however, affirmed that she could be deported, despite the Irish Constitution's pledge to protect the ‘right to life of the unborn.’ Considered together, these cases reveal how overlapping sexual/migration control regimes both reinscribe hierarchies among women based on geopolitical location, and rebound the exclusionary nation-state despite growing transnationalism.     

Book Review: Work,children and gender equality

The motivating concern behind this article is that women, in the diversity of their ages, life situations, cultural traditions of gender and actual sexual connections to men, are still marginalized by prevailing approaches to HIV and AIDS. Safe sexual practices for women, within social contexts and actual sexual relations with men, are not being approached in ways that engage women's (or their male partners') active involvement. Conventional heterosexual distinctions between women's and men's sexuality disables prevention processes. Categories and perspectives which prevail in ''interpreting'' the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, inhibitions and assumptions framing sexual safety information, and cultural narratives of gendered love/desire/sex, converge into two highly problematic outcomes: a dissociation of heterosexually-defined men who have sex with women from central responsibility for HIV prevention, and marginalization of women who have sex with men from concern about women's sexual safety.     

Constructing women's citizenship in the interwar period: the Edinburgh women citizens’ association

As a new stage in women's political participation, enfranchisement brought new efforts to advance gender equality and women's social position and new organisations were formed of women voters, including the women citizens' associations. Concerns with women's and children's welfare and social reform that had been important to sections of the pre-war women's movement were repositioned alongside the pursuit of an equal franchise, equal pay and opportunities and women's representation, in relation to women's new political status. Study of the women citizens' associations in Scotland supports an account of the period 1918-30 as one of considerable political activity, particularly in developing women's role and influence in relation to established political institutions and civil society. It suggests that the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ feminisms after 1918, mapped onto the binary of equality and difference, was not necessarily a tension for women's organisations. It gives insight into the meaning of ‘citizenship’ for women activists and how the status, rights and responsibilities of citizenship articulated and shaped a distinctive women's politics, bridging political, civil and social rights.     

Problematizing multiculturalism: Respect,tolerance and the limits to tolerance

The complexities of multiculturalism are discussed and it is argued that multiculturalism has to be critically defined and scrutinized in terms of respect, tolerance and the limits to tolerance. While avoiding the pitfalls of “Eurocentrism”, it is nonetheless important to recognize that there exist culturally or religiously defined beliefs, customs and practices that run counter to the basic values of society, to gender equality, and which violate women's human rights. The discussion focuses on possible conflict areas pertaining to marriage and family life, tradition‐based unequal authority systems between women and men and violence against women. The aim is to identify areas where conflicts may arise between, on the one hand, respect for women's human rights and, on the other, respect for the cultural identity of immigrant groups. The paper also suggests ways of addressing and handling this type of conflict.     

The economic role of middle-class women in Victorian Glasgow

Abstract

It has long been recognised that working-class women in the nineteenth century participated in waged labour, albeit dependent on marital status, stage in family life cycle, and locality. Middle-class women's economic role has been less fully explored, although it has been acknowledged that they played an informal, ‘hidden’ role in the economy. This article examines the extent of middle-class women's economic activity and independence by looking in detail at a residential area of Glasgow in the period 1850-1914. The authors demonstrate that women could negotiate the parameters of a gendered and limited labour market, the legal constraints on their property rights, and social constraints on their economic freedom, in order to achieve considerable economic autonomy and influence     

Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stopes's Married Love and E.M. Hull's The Sheik

This article examines popular discourses of women's sexuality in 1920s England and argues that sex manuals like Marie Stopes's Married Life and sex novels like E.M. Hull's The Sheik, despite their adherence to status quo values, were liberating for women through their affirmation of women's sexual subjectivity. Stopes's enormously popular book contributed strongly to a new understanding of women's sexual drives as natural and autonomous. The changing attitudes were reflected in the numbers of postwar women who actively participated in the creation and consumption of popular sex-novels and films, exercising both economic and sexual freedoms at once. This article focusses on the film version of The Sheik, which experienced great success as part of this growing leisure market catering specifically to women's desire, and in particular on the figure of Rudolph Valentino as a “woman-made” man. The film's “crossed” representations of sexuality (the emancipated “flapper” and the effeminate yet virile “sheik”) challenged traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, and in doing so, were liberating for women consumers at the same time that they threatened the sexual identities of men.     

Pills,potions, and purgatives: women and abortion methods in Ireland, 1900–1950

This article examines women's efforts to induce miscarriage in Ireland (the Irish Free State, Éire, and the Republic) from 1900 to 1950. It demonstrates that, when possible, Irish women avoided surgical procedures, preferring instead to consume pills, potions, and purgatives to cause abortion. Irish women viewed emmenagogues and abortifacients as more natural than surgery and in keeping with women's traditions; these substances, they understood, had been used for centuries to restore menstruation and return the female body to normalcy and health. Overall, it was control—control over the methods of abortion and control over what they put into their own bodies, as well as autonomy when it came to managing their own reproductive health—that mattered most to Irish women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Irish women's abortion efforts expose their resolve to manage their reproductive lives and thus remind us how they sometimes rejected the dictates of the conservative twentieth-century state-Church consensus, bypassing legislation and negotiating religious cultural norms.     

Informing Red Power and Transforming the Second Wave: Native American women and the struggle against coerced sterilization in the 1970s

It is argued that despite formidable foes—including powerful feminist organizations and Native American rights groups—Indigenous women's activism had an important influence on the larger movement for the termination of sterilization abuse in 1970s USA. Their work highlighted coerced sterilization as a most agonizing example of compromised tribal sovereignty—and demanded that political leaders address it. The article describes the tangible achievements of these women in effecting federal regulations as well as their influence on mainstream American feminist ideology and Indian Country's interpretation of women's rights as sovereign ones.     

Women's Citizenship and the First World War: general remarks and a case study of women's enfranchisement in Austria and Germany

Historians' views about the impact of World War I on women's citizenship have diverged. Some scholars have emphasized that the war changed cultural understandings of suffrage due to women's patriotism and dedication to the war effort. Others have underlined that the politics of electoral reform determined whether or not women attained voting rights. Based on the cases of Austria and Germany where women were enfranchised in the context of revolutionary unrest triggered by the war, this article argues that the political process was in fact crucial. However, the claim of women's suffrage during the war is to be contextualized within a general understanding of republican citizenship and the concept of the ‘citizen soldier’. This discourse was essential to keeping the issue alive during the war. Nonetheless, further studies are still required to assess the war's impact on women and citizenship in the subjective sense of participation.     

Women in Television in the Multi-Channel Age

This article explores the impact of structural and technological change on women's employment in the UK television industry. It looks at the challenges faced by women in working in what has become since the mid-1980s a largely freelance industry where short-term contracts, informal recruitment procedures and long, unpredictable work schedules mean that women find it increasingly difficult to combine a career and family. Through case studies of individual careers, of a women's magazine programme for S4C Digital and a survey of women's credits on a selection of the newer channels (Sky One, UK Living and Channel 5), it argues that technological advances in digital transmission and production will not improve working conditions and opportunities for women's participation in all areas of the industry if they continue to replicate existing practice.     

The Conflicting Interests of Women's Organizations and the League of Nations on the Question of Married Women's Nationality in the 1930s

This article investigates the question of legal equality in citizenship and nationality in the inter-war years. The first conference for the codification of international law was hosted by the League of Nations in The Hague in 1930. One of the topics of the conference was married women's nationality, and international women's organizations did everything in their power to persuade the conference that married women deserved to be treated equally to non-married women and to men. Women lobbied the League, but they were ultimately unsuccessful. The study highlights the conflicting aims of a movement struggling for social and political change and the official aims of an international organization. Whereas previous research has focused on the actions of the women's organizations, this article directs its interest towards the interaction between the League of Nations and the women's organizations. In questions regarding women's rights and claims for equality the League of Nations adapted an overly cautious, even conservative, position. However, the article shows that the international discourse provided arguments and documents useful in national struggles. This will be illustrated by the debate on independent nationality in the Swedish feminist press.     

the reinvention of feminism in Pakistan

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.     

An Exceptional Choice?

Building on Penelope Deutscher's analysis of the biopolitical implications of abortion being regulated by a framework of exceptionalism, this article explores discursive constructions of abortion as an exceptional choice that is only justifiable in ‘worthy’ cases. In so doing, it extends our understanding of exceptionalism and neo-liberalism as ways for thinking about abortion. Through an analysis of interviews with New Zealand women about their views on abortion, I contend that exceptionalism operates not only as a dominant framework for talking about abortion but that it structures a hierarchy of worthiness in abortion discourse. I argue that the exceptionalism framework both obscures the ways that abortion is an ordinary and common part of many women's reproductive experiences and raises questions for how challenges to prevailing legislative regimes might be organised.     

Fighting for the ‘Privileges of Citizenship’: the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), feminism and the women's movement, 1928–1945

In 1928 the YWCA welcomed the introduction of the universal suffrage by declaring that women in Britain were now entitled to the full political privileges of citizenship. This article will explore the way in which the YWCA, previously omitted from histories of the British women's movement, sought to educate and inform its members about the rights and duties of democratic citizenship. The involvement of the YWCA in citizenship education and its role in campaigning for the citizenship rights of women will be assessed, with a particular focus on workers’ rights and the appointment of women police. Despite its reluctance to be identified as overtly feminist, the YWCA was determined to ensure that women had access to social and economic rights within a democratic society. The article therefore argues that a new definition of the women's movement is required in order to uncover the full extent of female engagement in politics and public debate in the aftermath of the suffrage.     

Women as Active Citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh c.1918–1939

This article examines evidence of active political engagement by women in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the inter-war years of the twentieth century. While discussing the wider context of women's political activities in this period, in terms of party politics and the range of women's organisations in existence, it focuses in particular on Women Citizens’ Associations, Societies for Equal Citizenship and Co-operative Women's Guild branches. Comparing interventions by such women's organisations in the two cities around the selected themes of political representation, housing, ‘moral and social hygiene’, and contraception, the article demonstrates that women's organisations participated in public debates and campaigns to advance what they perceived as women's interests. Temporary alliances around issues such as the regulation of prostitution and provision of contraceptive advice brought together a range of women's organisations, but class differences in perspectives became increasingly apparent in this period, particularly in Glasgow. The issues addressed by women's organisations covered the spectrum of ‘equal rights’ and ‘welfare feminism’, although they did not necessarily identify as feminist. Common to all organisations, however, was a commitment to active citizenship, with women becoming a recognised part of local political networks in this period, although they remained poorly represented in parliament.