Refugee women in Serbia – invisible victims of war in the former Yugoslavia

In this paper, I explore the experiences of women who found refuge in Serbia during the war in the former Yugoslavia. I look at the women's experiences of both leaving home and coping with everyday life in refuge. The exploration of refugee women's experiences is mainly based on analyses of their own stories, which I collected while researching women and war. In spite of all the hardship of their lives, refugee women who fled to Serbia have been treated by Western media, the public and aid organizations as ‘UNPEOPLE’ or as non-existent. Making their experiences visible as women, refugees and citizens is the main purpose of this article.     

New woman meets Shakespeare woman: the struggle over the figure of Portia in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

Approaching the material from the perspective of cultural history, this essay explores the ways in which England, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, witnessed considerable debate about the character of Portia from Shakespeare'sThe Merchant of Venice. Feminists seized upon her appearance as a lawyer to argue for Shakespeare's advocacy on behalf of women's emancipation. Anti-feminists stressed the character's acquiescence to male control of her affections and her estate. Thus for many readers and viewers of the play concern about the status of the New Woman, civic maternalism, married women's property rights, and women in the professions, overrode their interest in the play as a text about Christians and Jews.     

Rural women migrant returnees in contemporary China

This essay focuses on the experiences of female returnees in rural–urban migration in contemporary China. Based on in-depth interviews with women migrants, returnees, their family members, friends and fellow villagers in both sending and receiving areas, the research examines rural migrant women's return migration process. It investigates rural migrant women's decision-making in the process, the ways women returnees construct their lives in the countryside, their identity negotiation as returnees and the impact of patriarchy on women's experiences of the return and resettlement process. The author argues that despite women's active involvement in migration and the ‘empowerment and agency’ gained through migration, the patriarchal power relations within rural households remain intact and continue to shape rural female returnees' life in their villages.     

‘Girls who arouse dangerous passions’: women and bathing, 1900-39

Abstract

This article focuses on the struggle by women to achieve unsegregated access to beaches and swimming pools in Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century until the start of the Second World War against a background of bureaucratic regulation. Through a variety of sources that contrast official material with the mood within popular culture, it exposes the clash of patriarchal prudery against changing public opinions. It poses questions on the notions of female modesty and emancipation as women's swimwear reflected changing perceptions of the female body and explores conflicting discourses of glamour and sex versus health and efficiency.     

Manning the Fields: Remaking Women's Work in the Tobacco South in the Twentieth Century

Today, men make up the vast majority of the workforce in the tobacco fields of the American South. This was not always the case. For more than two centuries, enslaved women worked alongside men in the tobacco fields. In the late nineteenth century, the unpaid labor of female kin made possible the household's replacement of the plantation as the center of production, and it remained critical for farm families well into the twentieth century. Following World War II, agricultural engineers developed new technologies to eliminate tasks traditionally done by women. In the 1980s, the process of defeminization accelerated as growers began to hire male guestworkers from Mexico as more women moved into the non-farm labor market to supplement their families' farm incomes. The transition from family to wage labor in the tobacco South was far from a ‘natural’ process, but one nurtured by state agricultural, labor, and immigration policy.     

Love,literacy, and laments: themes of women writers in late imperial China

In late imperial China (roughly the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century), the expanding literacy of women helped to popularize ideals of romantic love, and to raise women's expectations regarding marriage and their active participation in creative cultural activities. As a result, literate women easily experienced hopes and aspirations that conflicted directly with the demands of the patriarchal family system. As seen through a sampling of courtesan and gentry women's writings, some women responded to these conflicts by questioning the value of literacy itself, some expressed despair over their fate, while others began to raise questions regarding their society's constraints on women.     

Book Review: Gendered mobility

In the decades after 1945, Danish governments approved a series of family policy reforms which came to constitute the core elements of what is considered the women-friendly welfare state. In order to understand these developments, this article explores the rise of women's political influence, looking specifically at women's agency outside the parliamentary sphere. This article analyses how a network of influential women combined critical resources such as knowledge of families' concerns and inside information from commissions and boards with agenda-setting strategies promoting family policy reforms, even though women constituted a minority in parliament and had no permanent women's state institution. Hence, modern Danish family policy was not a state project granted to women but to a great extent the result of a network of exceptional women setting a new agenda.     

Gaining a Public Voice: Ottoman women's struggle to survive in the print life of early twentieth-century Ottoman society,and the example of Halide Edib (1884–1964)

After delving into the emergence of women in Ottoman print culture and the challenges associated with this process, this paper focuses on women's periodicals which provided a platform for women writers, education for a female audience and a means of communication between both parties. Analysing the social and technical challenges of establishing independently run and long-lived women's journals under the restrictive circumstances of the early twentieth century's gender-segregated Ottoman society, this article not only documents women's struggle for survival in the publishing world but also explains why women's periodicals and their female authors had an ephemeral print life. After acknowledging the role of print culture in the women's emancipation movement, the focus is on Halide Edib as an exceptional example in terms of her survival and transformation from unknown to world-renowned author. Her struggle to enter and become established in the print life of the late Ottoman society illustrates the potential and available positions for women in the publishing sphere and explains the failure of her female contemporaries to achieve success in this area.     

The establishing of women's studies in Bulgaria: or how far can you go?

This article examines the problem of establishing women's studies as a legitimate area of study in Bulgarian universities. With the change from a communist to a post-communist society, Bulgaria is finding itself open to outside cultural influences. However, reactions to feminism and to women's studies are largely hostile. This is partly a legacy of the now discredited communist times when words like ‘emancipation’ and ‘equality for women’ were common, words that now have negative connotations in a society where it is assumed that men and women are equal. In addition, the specific social difficulties that Bulgaria is now facing make any new divisions between men and women, which women's studies can imply, yet another dividing line. Various strategies that have been adopted for introducing women's studies into Bulgarian universities are described.     

Colonial counterparts: the first academic women in Anglo-Canada,New Aealand and Australia

During the early years of the twentieth century, women first gained permanent academic positions in most universities across the Western world. This article considers the first academic women in Anglo-Canada, New Zealand and Australia as colonial counterparts. It argues that these women's experiences were shaped by a colonial setting that was infused with powerful gender-, race- and class-specific codes concerning knowledge and the institution of the university. The first academic women were simultaneously situated as ‘insiders’, as supporters of the institutions in which they worked, and as ‘outsiders’ because of their sex and the patriarchal attitudes of the time. In recovering some of their lives and experiences, it is shown how such a positioning shaped the careers of academic women, as well as how these women attempted to subvert and change their place within the university. As a group, the first academic women in Anglo-Canada, New Zealand and Australia were much more concerned with advancing the place of women in higher education than they were with critiquing the colonial knowledges that were a part of their various institutions.     

Challenge,Conformity and Casework in Interwar England: the first women councillors in Devon

Edith Splatt and Juanita Phillips, both former suffragettes, were the first women councillors on, respectively, Exeter City Council and Devon County Council. This article explores how these two very different women approached their task, the issues they tackled, both on welfare generally and specifically on some topics high on women's post-suffrage agendas. It considers the local support on which they drew and contrasts the different reception they were accorded, their representation of their constituents' interests, and their progress on committees and in the full council. The article contributes to an understanding of the diversity of women's contributions to public service after the achievement of women's suffrage.     

The Beauties of Kashmir: Nila Gupta's Representations of War from a Distance

Abstract: This essay examines Nila Gupta's literary representation of the conflict in Kashmir in her short story cycle The Sherpa and Other Fictions (2008). Born and raised in Canada, Gupta has a diasporic perspective and a feminist political stance that values women's solidarity and political involvement across borders. Her short stories explore the feminist thesis that the sexual crimes committed against girls and women at times of conflict are a direct consequence of the appropriation of women's bodies for symbolic uses within the dialectics of patriarchal nationalisms. However, her stories' restrained style and their publication in a small activist press preclude easy commodification in a global market avid for narratives of ethnic violence. By reading Gupta's creative texts in relation to academic studies of communal sexual violence and nationalism, humanitarian reports on refugees and gendered violence and journalistic accounts of the conflict, this essay attempts to assess the power of literature to offer nuanced and complex representations of violent conflict and its consequences. Special attention is paid to the representation of life in the officially designated ‘migrant camps’, to the difficult issue of the social stigmatization of rape victims and to the many ways in which women are implicated.     

人口再生产价值视角的女性生育和劳动权益保障

近年来,我国生育政策进行了几次调整,体现了国家对人口再生产在社会发展中重要性的认同,但是生育率未能得到有效提升,而女性在劳动力市场遭受歧视的现象依然广泛存在.研究认为,生育与工作家庭的冲突是我国生育现状的主要影响因素,而"全面三孩"政策可能加剧这种冲突.研究建议:应以人口再生产与物质生产理论为基础,重新审视人口再生产在...     

‘Call Us Ms.’: Viva and arguments for Kenyan women's respectable citizenship 1975–80

Drawing on Viva, the first women's magazine published in East Africa, this article articulates the ways educated Kenyan women actively inserted themselves into public debates and constructions of the new nation. It argues that Viva authors and editors employed rhetorics of nationalism and development to advocate for Kenyan women's right to equal citizenship. They wanted participation in the possibilities, power, and self-reliance that postcolonial nationalism promised its citizens and mobilized images of a productive, modern woman to make their case. Viva's producers appropriated the momentum of 1970s development rhetoric and international women's liberation to show that Kenyan women were already fulfilling mandates to develop themselves and their fellow Kenyans through education, wage labor, consumer habits, and moral respectability. Viva reveals the ambitions, strategies, and desires of Kenya's educated women, not only for themselves but also for their nation and their rural ‘sisters’.     

The sabotage of patriarchy in colonial Rhodesia,rural african women's living legacy to their daughters

Evidence from a University of Zimbabwe oral history project suggests that many rural women in colonial Rhodesia played an active role in undermining patriarchal customs which they experienced as oppressive. These women defied family norms by choosing their own marriage partners, prioritizing the formal education of their daughters and finding ways to generate income to secure greater degrees of autonomy. This study compliments other research which depicts women's primary form of resistance to be moving from rural to urban areas, by showing what options some women exercised while remaining within rural society.     

养育子女影响了女性劳动力市场参与吗？ ——基于中国劳动力动态调查的实证检验

生育政策调整会影响女性生育率和劳动力市场参与率,进而对经济和社会产生影响。本研究利用中国劳动力动态调查(CLDS)2016年数据,分析不同子女年龄对女性劳动力市场参与的影响。研究发现：学龄前儿童对女性的劳动力市场参与有一定的阻碍效应,这种阻碍效应会在儿童进入正式学龄阶段后逐渐消失;其中,0—3岁子女对女性劳动力市场参与存在显著的负向影响,且对农村女性的负向影响大于城镇女性。因此,为了进一步促成我国生育政策调整目标的实现,需要完善我国女性生育支持行动策略,在推动0—3岁儿童照料支持体系建设的同时,更要关注城乡社会托育服务体系的同步发展。     

‘No Suggestion of Suffragettism’: the Blue Blouses in Ireland, 1933–1936

In July 1933 membership of the Irish fascist organisation, the Blueshirts, was officially opened to women for the first time. Within a year the Blue Blouses, as the women's auxiliary was colloquially called, became the largest women's political organisation in Ireland. This article examines the group as a vehicle for the politicisation of conservative pro-Treaty Irish women. The Blue Blouses willingly used parades, mass rallies, athletics, and a specific discourse of domesticity to articulate a strategy of political involvement that did not conflict with the patriarchal presumptions of inter-war Irish political culture. As such, this analysis is intended to augment the history of inter-war Irish women politics that to date has focused almost exclusively on feminist organisations.     

‘Fresh attractions’: white slaveryand feminism in New Zealand, 1885–1918

Abstract

New Zealand women participated in an international debate over white slavery from the late nineteenth century. Features of that debate were common to several countries, but local commentators drew upon New Zealand's colonial position to evoke images of old-world ills in a new country. Ironically, however, New Zealand women were not convinced of the existence of white slavery in their country. As part of a catalogue of men's sexual and social oppression of women, the portrayal of gender relations in the anti-white slavery campaign was stark, but deliberate. In their demands that men take responsibility for ensuring that women had the right to walk the streets in safety, New Zealand feminists deployed the rhetoric of white slavery to argue for women's sexual and social freedom.     

‘A career in christian charity’: women's benevolence and the public sphere in a mid-nineteenth-century Canadian city

This article investigates the relationship between women's charitable work and the public sphere, focusing on the Hamilton Ladies Benevolent Society which operated in nineteenth-century Ontario. It argues that although women were barred from participation in the public sphere by patriarchal notions of ‘reason' and ‘independence,’ charitable associations offered political schooling wherein women internalized and problematized ‘publicness.’ An investigation of the annual reports of the Hamilton Ladies Benevolent Society and Orphan Asylum reveals that charitable women used particular discursive tactics and techniques of display to make claims upon the public sphere. In their attempt to appear public – universal, rational, and in pursuit of an objective, common good – these women rejected the tropes of true womanhood and evoked Christian metaphors to justify their activities. For these women, Christianity provided the language with which they claimed universality, rationality and even citizenship