The value of narrative in understanding Mongolian and Australian women's journeys of survival recovery and remaking of self,through and beyond domestic violence

In this article I argue that a narrative method and analysis may work across cultures to aid in the understanding of women's experiences of survival, recovery and remaking of self following domestic violence. This article draws on a cross-cultural narrative analysis of eleven Mongolian and eleven Australian women's stories of survival, recovery and remaking of self following domestic/intimate partner violence. The very diversity of the Mongolian and Australian women offers a case for the value of narrative method. The focus of the article is the rationale for and explanation of feminist, qualitative, cross-cultural and narrative research methods which underpinned the study. Interspersed throughout the discussion are illustrative excerpts from the women's stories which support the argument that there are some deep similarities between the experiences of Mongolian and Australian women.     

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.     

Escaping Assimilation's Grasp: Aboriginal women in the Australian women's military services

During the assimilation era of the 1930s–60s, most Australian Indigenous women living in proximity to white Australia were forced to work as domestic servants with few other education or employment prospects. One significant yet under-studied exception was employment in the armed services' women's auxiliaries. As a consequence of such employment, Aboriginal ex-servicewomen learned new skills and new opportunities to improve their social statuses. Through analysis of oral histories from four Aboriginal ex-servicewomen who served in the 1940s–60s, this article examines how work in the women's forces empowered Aboriginal women and represented an escape from assimilation policies.     

MARRIAGE ‘AMONG THE MURKANS’

Abstract Stella Miles Franklin (1879–1954) is best known for contributions to a uniquely Australian literary tradition. However, during her American years (1906–1915) when she worked in Chicago with the National Women's Trade Union League, Franklin wrote much unpublished fiction in the New Woman literary genre common to early-twentieth-century US women's traditions. This paper focuses on two such little-known unpublished stories: ‘Uncle Robert's Wedding Present’ (1908) and ‘Teaching Him’ (1909), discussing ways their entanglements with questions of marriage and economics are grounded in Franklin's work and personal life and in the intellectual influences that shaped her writing.     

The Women's Movement and Government

Some scholars have suggested that institutionalisation and professionalisation of women's movement organisations leads to ‘feminist fading’. This article examines whether such propositions hold true for the Australian women's movement. It maps changes in the women's movement that had emerged by the 1990s, including increased diversity and increased national and international networking as well as increased institutionalisation. It finds that loss of political influence has less to do with institutionalisation than with a changed discursive environment that constructed the welfare state and women's reliance on it as a problem. Nonetheless, women's movement institutions have continued to sustain feminist values and engage in differently organised but effective campaigns. A case study of the women's health movement in Victoria shows how it succeeded in having abortion removed from the criminal code in 2008. Repertoire had changed since the 1970s but the goal remained the same.     

The Australian National Council of Women

This article describes the political style and practice of the Australian National Council of Women (ANCW) as it developed up to 1975. The historical significance of this lies in the fact that, during the first three quarters of the last century, the ANCW was effectively the peak body representing the great majority of women's groups in this country: groups whose activities focused on politics, religion, morality, health, education, the media, philanthropy and also peace, women's economic and political rights, child welfare and legal reform. The Council spoke on behalf of these constituents to all levels of government, and internationally through the International Council of Women. It generally did not represent women associated with trade unions and the Australian Labor Party, and the politically active women amongst its leaders tended to be members of the Liberal Party. The conduct of the Council avoided party politics; its leaders co-operated with trade unionists on issues of women's rights such as equal pay, and worked as willingly with Labor governments as with non-Labor ones. An assessment of the effectiveness of the Council's political activities is therefore an assessment of the political practice and achievements of mainstream Australian feminism before the advent of radical feminism in the 1970s.     

Towards an Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint Theory

In this article I outline an Australian Indigenous women's standpoint theory. I argue that an Indigenous women's standpoint generates problematics informed by our knowledges and experiences. Acknowledging that Indigenous women's individual experiences will differ due to intersecting oppressions produced under social, political, historical and material conditions that we share consciously or unconsciously. These conditions and the sets of complex relations that discursively constitute us in the everyday are also complicated by our respective cultural differences and the simultaneity of our compliance and resistance as Indigenous sovereign female subjects.     

The Republic is a Feminist Issue

The growth during the 1990s of a republican movement in Australia has stimulated among other things a feminist examination of both the gendered nature of republicanism and the under-representation of women in senior positions in republican organizations. Feminists have adopted several critical perspectives on Australian republicanism: one involves the claim for the redesign of Australian political institutions in order to maximize the representation of women and women's interests; another suggests that the neglected history of women's involvement in constitutional politics during the last century needs to be understood to throw light on ways in which republicanism can be made more meaningful for women now, while a third argues that republicanism is not essentially a feminist issue and should not be pursued as such. The article challenges this conclusion.     

A CELEBRATORY FEMINIST AESTHETICS IN POSTFEMINIST TIMES

In 2011, something surprising happened in terms of Australian feminist cultural memory: a celebratory feminism arrived in the shape of the hugely popular ABC television mini-series, Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo. Eschewing dour social realism for a stylish and ludic narrative, Paper Giants uses the story of the women's magazine Cleo to tell the story of Australian women's liberation. This essay analyses the components of the mini-series' celebratory feminist aesthetics, examining the ways in which it mobilises feminist tropes to speak an intelligible feminist language in postfeminist times. Further, I detail how women's liberation becomes central to the national historical narrative underpinning the programme.     

‘Sugar,Sugar’: questioning the sexual division of labour on Jamaica's sugar plantations in Sistren's The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong and Sweet Sugar Rage

Through an analysis of Sistren Theatre Collective's play The Case of Miss Iris Armstrong and the Collective's documentary film Sweet Sugar Rage, this article looks at the way the sexual division of labour on Jamaica's sugar plantations during the 1980s was based on the following gendered myths: women's labour capacity is lower than their male counterparts; and men are the breadwinners for their families. The article also critiques the sexism in the Jamaican union movement which did not support female workers and actively kept women's wages lower than men's on the plantations.     

Women's right to work: The interplay of state,market and women's agency

This article addresses questions central to the conception of women's citizenship: Do women have the same right to wage work as men have? That is, do women have the same access to and chances to keep jobs as men? Is women's right to employment perceived as an individual right, disconnected from men's traditional prerogative to hold jobs as breadwinners? Women's right to work is conceptualized as a complex structural and ideological construct, shaped by the interplay of the labour market, welfare state and women's agency. The empirical analysis takes one of the Scandinavian welfare states, Norway, as its main case. The study concludes that women's individual right to work was significantly strengthened from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.     

the home,the veil and the world: reading Ismat Chughtai towards a ‘progressive’ history of the Indian women's movement

This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the ‘waves’, ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ of the Euro-American women's movement and adopted to postcolonial women's movements, such as those in India, Jamaica and South Africa, is belied by the piecemeal legislative gains won by activist efforts. Some of the questions governing my enquiry are: What lessons can a questioning of teleology teach us about the gains and losses of postcolonial women's movements? If the alternative to teleology is, as I suggest, a genealogy, then what constitutes a genealogical enquiry into the women's movement in India? In face of apparent and self-acknowledged losses and ineffectiveness in recent times, would the movement's apparent unity across religious differences be a way of initiating such an inquiry or is another mode of analysis required? The paper directs attention to the Indian women's movement's attempts at bringing together women of different religious persuasions, legislative, and religious edicts related to Muslim women's right to co-habitation and divorce, and ‘cases’ that serve as testing points of the movement's struggle against religious and state authority. It also points to the neglected factor of economic security for women as a way in which a genealogical inquiry can proceed so as to strengthen the legislation and the movement itself.     

Women and workplace training: Power relations positioning “the other”

This article presents selected details from an empirical study that examined organisational practices in some Australian workplaces in relation to women and training. The background to the study was Australia's Training Reform Agenda of the 1990s, which offered workers the possibility of significant gains in skill and occupational advancement. The particular focus of my study was training opportunities for women working in “ordinary” jobs, lower down in organisational hierarchies. Feminist poststructuralist theory informed an examination of gender power relations within four workplaces, particularly in relation to training. This theoretical perspective offered insight into how a range of discursive practices in the organisations positioned some women as certain kinds of subjects with low work affiliation and no career path and highlighted the impact of this positioning on women's training opportunities.     

protagonists and victims: women leading the fight for a democratic Colombia

This paper offers an account of the relationship between gender, class and notions of happiness. It draws on recent research conducted into the experiences of working class women who play the UK National Lottery. In particular, it explores the notion that gambling offers working class women the opportunity to dream of the ‘good life’ – of enhancing their lives and of making ‘improvements’ to their own and their families’ well-being. In this paper, the discourse of happiness will be examined, and the tacit assumption that working class women in particular are prone to turning to gambling as a last ditch attempt to personal and emotional fulfilment will be challenged. The paper argues that developing understandings of culture and consumption practices is imperative for producing a more complex understanding of the subjective realities of working class women's everyday lives. By engaging with feminist accounts of respectability, daydream and fantasy, the paper will present a thorough exploration of National Lottery play in working class women's everyday experiences of happiness.     

Warmth and Unity with All Women? Historicizing Racism in the Australian Women's Movement

In this paper I discuss the four Women and Labour conferences which were held in Australian capital cities over the seven years between 1978 and 1984. I explore the ways in which the history of Australian feminist activism during this period could be written, questioning in particular the claim that the Women and Labour conferences have been central to the history of Australian feminism. I discuss the ways in which a historical sense could be established, using writings about the conferences as historical ‘evidence’, that race and ethnic divisions between women had not been important to the ‘women's movement’ until 1984. In other words, I challenge the construction of this conference as a turning point - not only in the feminist politicization of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions. More broadly, I am interested in how a history would be written if it aimed to get to the ‘truth’ about racism and about the feminist activism of immigrant women. How would the apparent lack of written ‘evidence’ - at least until 1984 - of immigrant women's feminist activism, and of the awareness of Australian feminists about issues of racism, be written into this history? In addition, I suggest that it is important to the writing of feminist history in Australia that published documentation has been mostly produced by anglo women, and is thus partial and mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women. Finally, my intention is to interrogate commonly understood narratives about Australian feminist history, to challenge their seamlessness, and to suggest the importance of recognizing the tension within feminist discourses between difference as benign diversity and difference as disruption.     

Correlates of drug abuse in adolescents: A comparison of families of drug abusers with families of nondrug abusers

This study was designed to compare drug-abusing adolescents and their families with nondrug-abusing adolescents and their families by (1) a comparison of the adolescents on measures of self-esteem and perceived parental behavior, (2) a comparison of the parents of drug-abusing adolescents with the parents of nondrug-abusing adolescents on child-rearing attitudes and on distortion in perceived parental behavior, and (3) an identification of the salient factors contributing to the prediction of drug-use in adolescents. The subjects in this study were 26 clinical inpatient drug-abusing adolescents and their parents and 26 nondrug-abusing adolescents and their parents. Testdata consisted of the adolescent's self-esteem score on the Self Esteem Inventory (SEI), the adolescent's factor score on the Child's Report of Parental Behavior Inventory—Revised (CRPBI-R), and the parents' scale score on each of the five factors of the Parent Attitude Survey (PAS). Findings indicate that the adolescent's self-esteem and perception of parental behavior, the ability of the parents to predict the child's parental perceptions, and the professed parental attitudes toward confidence and responsibility in child rearing all combine to suggest a set of factors differentiating the drug-abusing adolescent from the nondrug-abusing adolescent.     

Migration to the bars of Bombay: Women,village religion and sustainability

This article deals with the migration of Bangladeshi village women to the bars of Bombay. For about twelve years (1992 to 2003), ladies' bars provided a lucrative source of income for young women from villages of Jessore and Satkhira. With the money they earned, families were enriched and village economies were invigorated. From being burdens to their families because of the dowry required for their marriage, daughters became assets; wives provided for their husbands, daughters-in-law sustained parents-in-law and sisters established their siblings. No one could deny the widespread benefits of women's migration to Bombay. But how could their activity be reconciled with village norms requiring women to restrain their movements, show modesty and remain under the authority of guardians? How could women's migration be accommodated with village religion and principles of life held to be fundamental to an Islamic way of life and to the good order of society? How could women's earnings be enjoyed without reprobation or disturbances?     

Beyond hagiography: new books on gay and lesbian life writing

Abstract

The records of women's rights organisations active in Birmingham during the 1870s and 1880s indicate that these societies were dominated by women and men from families connected with the city's leading Unitarian chapel, the Church of the Messiah. In this article, I explore this phenomenon as a way of illuminating the relationship between religious belief and feminist activism. The shared social, economic and political values and progressive outlook of the Unitarian elite underpinned their emergence as a feminist network. This collective reformist consciousness was channelled into concern to improve the position of women by the ‘feminist gospel’ preached by Henry Crosskey, the minister of the chapel from 1869 to 1893. Furthermore, Crosskey's influential role, along with the substantial presence of other Unitarian men in local women's rights associations, reveals how denominational affiliation could operate to stimulate male support for feminism.     

The ‘Great Offender’: feminists and the campaign for women's ordination

Few scholars have investigated the relationship between feminism and religion in the aftermath of suffrage. This article explores how feminist organizations and individual feminists supported campaigns for women's ordination within the Anglican Church and their concern for gender equality within British churches more broadly during the forties and fifties. Focusing in particular on the 1944 ordination of the first female priest within the Anglican Communion (The Bishop of Hong Kong Ronald O. Hall ordained Chinese Deaconess Florence Li Tim Oi) and the institution of female chaplain's assistant positions in 1942, it argues that a full understanding of mid twentieth-century feminism requires consideration of the struggle for women's representation in their churches. The forties and fifties have often been portrayed by historians as the nadir of twentieth-century feminism, yet feminists continued their work for women's rights and religious identity and issues could be motivating factors for their activism. Feminists were neither anti-religious nor militantly secular and this article seeks to foster work which explores the connection between religion and women's political and social activism since the nineteenth century.