On the bottom rung: A discussion of women's work in sociology

Women, Women's Work and ‘Women's Studies’ are in a disadvantaged and marginal position within academic settings. This is a reflection of women's position in society in general, and it should be no surprise to find it to be the case in sociology as elsewhere. Women's studies has achieved some respectability within the social sciences, but rather than this being seen as a straightforward success, the disadvantages of this ‘respectability’ must be understood, as must the subtlety of male incorporation of feminist ideas not at a conscious level but within and through the male defined ethos of academia. The use of a qualitative methodology to get behind the ‘facts’ of qualitative differences in women's and men's positions is important. The lives of women postgraduates and researchers in Great Britain, those women on the bottom rung, can give us insights into the difficulties for women's studies and into the possibilities for the direction that attempts to redress the imbalances between men and women in academia might take.     

Foetal politics and the birth of an industry

In early Western society, women were considered to have a minor role in the reproductive process. Their social status was, correspondingly, secondary. Since the eighteenth century, women's contribution to procreation has been widely accepted, yet their social status remains. Women's importance in the reproduction of the species has not guaranteed them social prestige and the argument of this paper is that women's social standing is being further assaulted by the legal and economic consequences of innovations in birth technology. Two well-publicized innovations, Artificial Insemination by Donor, and In-Vitro Fertilization (or ‘test-tube babies’) have provoked legal, political and economic considerations which focus upon the possibilities of extensive bioengineering. The significance of this for women is that birth technology is not being fashioned after the interests of its clients but, instead, is becoming a new mercantile frontier in which women's needs may well be eclipsed by commercial and political ambitions.     

Women's projects and co-operatives in France at the beginning of the 19th century

Seamstresses, washerwomen and midwives establish co-operatives in order to organise their own work, independent of employers, and to divide their profit amongst themselves and to assure a reserve for harder times, for periods of sickness, for their old age. Women's collectives publish feminist magazines, including a daily newspaper by and for women; they found co-operative schools or an organisation for the support of single mothers. Women live in communes, make plans for women's houses and women's meeting-centres. And all this took place in the France of 1830–1848.In my paper, I would like to present some of the self-organised women's projects and co-operatives of that time and thereby also uncover information and sources which have remained buried under prevailing historiography. Moreover, my further intension is to refuse the commonly-held prejudice which dismisses the ‘proletarian’ or ‘socialist’ Women's Movement of the 19th century far too easily as having been ‘male-dominated’, a verdict frequently passed in Women's Studies in Germany. In view of this, it seems to me important to highlight historically the autonomous projects of proletarian and socialist women and to pay appropriate tribute to their significance for the history of the Women's Movement (not only in France!). Finally. I would like to approach a methodical problem which confronts me again and again in my work: the contradiction between historical distance and personal proximity and identification with the historical theme. By this, I mean the toilsome process of approaching history as something which is extraneous and yet related to us; this problem of, on the one hand not wiping out our present-day knowledge, feelings, values and norms from our research, and on the other hand, not using these as a distorted gauge from the women of former times.     

Women who do and women who don't,join the women's movement

Twenty-four women from five countries were asked to discuss their attitudes towards the women's movement. Half of this group were feminists and half were antifeminists. They ranged in background over class, race, age and sexual preference, and their comments formed the body of the book Women Who Do and Women Who Don't, Join the Women's Movement. This paper begins by discussing the women's movement as a social movement, its origins and the major issues involved in its struggle. The antifeminist ‘backlash’ is then analysed and its platforms clarified. The contributors' comments are summarised, bringing the issues alive, creating a diverse patterns of women's interpretations of ‘being female’. The issues of contention such as men, motherhood and the family are discussed, and the bases of the differences between feminists and antifeminists are analysed. Surprisingly, similarities between the two groups also emerge, particularly in terms of their experience of ‘self’. I conclude the paper by discussing why these splits among women occur, why one woman becomes a feminist while another is an antifeminist, and what this means for the future of women and of feminism.     

Indian women and the new movement

During the last few years there has been a resurgence of women's groups in India. Whereas, in previous years, women's struggles took place within a framework of the broader independence movement, women now are addressing issues of rape, dowry and marriage and property laws directly. This paper argues that women's organizations in India have received considerable support over these issues because they affect an urban middle-class elite and leave the status quo relatively untouched. Women's organizations should turn their attention to more fundamental issues of women's oppression within the context of hunger, poverty and work-issues which, hitherto, have been neglected.     

UN decade and women's studies in Latin America

Women's Studies programs developed rapidly in the 70s especially in the United States, which did not happen in other countries. The Simone de Beauvoir Institute, at Concordia University, in Canada, is an exception. Even in Europe, very few universities have been including such programs for more than ten years, at the beginning of the 80s. By that time, in Central and South America, Women's Studies were still in their early stages and few regular programs had been really implemented. One of these was the Center for Women's Studies created at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in early 1981, with an offer of special courses and seminars and conducting research projects.A Regional Seminar on Women's Studies in South America and the Caribbean was held at that University in November 1981 with the financial support of UNESCO, to evaluate the situation of teaching and research in 11 countries: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, México, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Chile and concluded that much still needed to be done in that field.Nonetheless, the feminist movement, in its struggle for equal rights, against sex discrimination, for better opportunities for all women and their effective integration into national development and political participation, has been supported by thousands of women and gained a great momentum in the 70s.The Women's International Year (1975), The World Plan of Action (1976–1985) and the Copenhagen Conference (1980) have been concrete expressions of the effort initiated by the UN to call the attention of all nations and governments to the need of definitively eliminating all forms of discrimination against women and to adopt measures to ensure that the capacities of women will be utilized in a more fruitful way, aimed to national development. The Decade played an important role in the implementation of Women's Studies programs in Latin American.     

The support function and social change—A feminist case history

The first part of this article describes the history of a Belgian anglophone organisation—W ♀ E (Women's Organisation for Equality)—from the perspective of its role in the process of social change and women's liberation. It then analyses the reasons for W ♀ E's longevity and effectiveness as a feminist support group and as a bridge for women emerging into feminism. Finally the paper suggests how W ♀ E might continue its effectiveness as a support group, but at a new level, taking into account the fact that though women are continuing to need support as they wake up, there is now a large group of awakened women who have been struggling as feminists for a long time.     

Inside an integration project: A case study of the relationship between balancing the curriculum and women's studies

This paper presents an ‘inside view’ of a federally-funded integration project in a small women's college in the Eastern US from the perspective of the project director. The author illustrates various stages and kinds of ‘Women's Studies’, pointing out that the integration project has resulted in increased Women's Studies course offerings, as well as a minor at the college. She makes distinctions between superficial integration and more profound efforts, which lead to a real struggle between traditional and feminist scholarship.     

“It’s Another Way Of Making A Really Big Fuss” Human Rights And Women’s Activism In The United Kingdom: An Interview With Tania Pouwhare

Following the “Encountering Human Rights” conference in January 2007, Emily Grabham interviewed Tania Pouwhare, a women’s rights activist working at the Women’s Resource Centre in London. Their discussion engaged with the professionalisation of activism, funding constraints and New Labour policies and their impact on immigrant women. Against a background of financial insecurity and huge demand for their services, many women’s organisations in the United Kingdom struggle to use human rights law to advance women’s rights. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of human rights remains powerful within women’s activism, and law remains relevant as a potential form of ‘direct action’ and “another way of making a really big fuss”.     

The different worlds of women and men: Attitudes toward pornography and responses to not a love story—A film about pornography

Men and women viewing the anti-pornography documentary Not a Love Story were surveyed about their opinions and attitudes toward pornography and toward the film. Women were found to be significantly more negative toward pornography than men, and experienced greater attitude and belief changes from the film. In addition, men's and women's attitudes toward pornography were found to differ in their factor structure; the authors infer that acceptance or rejection of pornography has different significance for men and women. Background variables such as current marriage, sex of children, and amount of pornography previously seen affected men's attitudes more than women's. The authors conclude that gender-free, ‘humanist’ standards according to which pornography could be evaluated do not exist, and that approaches to pornography control based on its role in the particular oppression of women are valid.     

Cooperation and conflict: A case study of a women's research network in Norway

During four years (1978–82), 25–30 Norweigian women social scientists formed a research network of small local groups, studying ‘Women's mutual relations’ in various settings. Women's friendships, their cooperation in factories and local communities and in women's organizations were the focus of our research. This article, however, is not about the results of our research—although some of them are reported in the notes—but we describe the organization of our association, its purposes, structure and positive results, as well as our tendencies to build up conflict, fractionalism and withdrawal. The research network was established in opposition to male social science, both with respect to the choice of its main themes and its organizational form. A supportive work style, a ‘horizontal’ structure and a playing down of conflicts was more or less deliberately chosen by the network members. We discuss here some of the types of conflict that developed in the network, and the ways we dealt with them. Most conflicts were either solved ‘talking through’ or handled by avoidance. We ask the question if deliberate conflict avoidance is functional for a feminist network of organization. The case is made for a ‘horizontal network organization as a positive and fruitful supplement to usual academic organization structure.     

A women's international quarterly over 30 years. Are the arguments to be feminine or feminist?

Women Speaking (first entitled Speaking of Women) was published from 1951 to 1982. Its aim—to encourage women to make their voices heard on public issues—involved discussion of legal, educational and occupational discriminations, evidenced internationally by contributors involved in the struggle to overcome such handicaps in their own countries and through the United Nations Organisation. ‘East’ or ‘West’ the problems are found to be the same, even if immediate priorities differ, and the Journal's stance became radical feminist: ‘…sexism underlies all other ims, and Nationalist, socialist, communist, “Churchist” (Christian or Islamic) movements are at best peripheral and at worst deadly to human progress unless the universal problem of women's oppression is faced’ (editorial July 1980). Patterns of thought which from infancy undermine women's self-confidence stem from belief in a male God; hence a central interest in the struggle for ordination of women to the priesthood. At the outset the editors posited the achievement of peace between nations as the ultimate goal of women's emancipation and their prominence in movements towards this end have been consistently chronicled. The question, however, remains: is it in women's nature, any more than in men's, to seek peace? In the earliest and the last issues may be found the answer ‘Yes’, expressed in almost identical terms. But the last editor argues that in the sum total of interrelated issues we should rather affirm the human need and potentiality in both sexes for cooperative living.     

The image of women's studies

We are three feminists, one Australian, one American and one English, who surveyed the image of Women's Studies in the sphere of Adult Education. This article gives the results of our survey; it illustrates both the problems and the potential of the image of Women's Studies in Adult Education in London—and by implication throughout the UK. Each of us is involved in teaching several Adult Education classes in a variety of subjects, not all of them within the sphere of Women's Studies. We polled our classes to assess their image of Women's Studies, finding it largely negative except in those classes specifically titled ‘Women's Studies’. More depressing, however, was our poll of administrators and staff in Adult Education and of non-feminist community groups of women, the ‘average’ women in the UK. Finally we query whether the problem is one of image or name or whether it is more deeply rooted in English misogyny, a heritage of patriarchy.     

Women's experience of world war one: Suffragists,pacifists and poets

The period of 1914–1918 was a time of immense change for women in Britain. The Suffragist movement, begun in 1867, gained irresistible force, culminating in the Act of 1918 in which women were given the vote at thirty and men at twenty-one. It was not until the 1928 Act that for the first time in the history of Britain there was full adult suffrage, granting the vote to both sexes at twenty-one. The picture is a complex one; Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel identified their movement with the war effort, indeed their pre-war militancy became militarism. Mrs Fawcett, an avowed non-militant suffragist before the war, who believed in the verbal power of argument over revolutionary tactics, also supported the war effort and nationalism. However, there were other suffragists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Hobhouse, Catherine Marshall, Helena Swanwick, Olive Schreiner and Kate Courtney, who were opposed to the war. Mrs Pankhurst believed if women couldn't fight, they shouldn't vote. The pacifists believed that this view simply gave in to the argument for physical force. They also saw militarism as yet another version of the strong oppressing the weak and thus an emphatic form of patriarchy. However, although the suffragists were bitterly divided in their moral view of the war, they were united in the cause of women's emancipation.The war itself provided all classes of women with important opportunities to work outside the home, as munition workers, land-army workers, police-women, doctors and nurses. The experience of change caused by the suffrage movement, together with the effect of the war upon women's lives, transformed women's image of themselves in radical and irreversible ways.My paper draws on some 125 poems by 72 women poets; Scars Upon My Heart is the first anthology of its kind and testifies to women's involvement in the war and the impact it had upon their lives. The anthology is necessary reading, together with the soldier poets like Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and Rosenberg, whose war poetry has been known to us for the past sixty years, for a full understanding of the significance of war for women and men.     

United or divided? Women ‘inside’ and women ‘outside’ against male lawmakers in Australia

Is it possible, under patriarchy, for women's liberationists and feminists to instigate and control the direction of law reforms, particularly in areas of law directly affecting women's daily lives—such as rape laws?This article covers one instance, in New South Wales, Australia, where women agitated for law reform and played a large part, at least for a time, in formulating a new law on rape. At the end, however, women's liberation women and feminists lost control because women in the bureaucracy sided with men in the bureaucracy, despite their stance of ‘sisterhood’.Will women ‘outside’ inevitably be sold out by women ‘inside’ the bureaucracy? Once inside, does an allegiance to the establishment (the patriarchy) develop which ousts allegiance to women's liberationism? Or is it true that women inside the system ultimately recognise the system is not ‘of them’, or ‘for them’, and therefore when the barricades are up, will align themselves with women outside, rather than with the true insiders, men?     

Conditions for unity and action: A collective vision

This paper is a collaborative effort that describes a theoretical framework for understanding the diversity of women's experiences by focusing on the lives of the four authors. The model developed looks at individual women within the social contexts of academia and community. Factors put forth that influence women's lives are: the history of each woman, the principles she lives by, the issues she recognizes as important, and the action strategies she develops to survive in an oppressive society. As a collaborative project, this paper also reflects a bond of friendship among the writers that has deepened through their collaboration.     

Women in Eastern Europe: Survey of literature

Since 1975 there has been a considerable increase in the amount of literature, written in English, about the status of women in Eastern Europe. In this article it is argued that the growth of interest is related to the re-emergence of the Women's Movement during the sixties when feminists were looking towards socialist states for role models and for strategies to guide the transition to sexual equality in the West. This article reviews the literature on women in Eastern Europe and considers the impact of Women's Studies on East European Studies as a whole.     

The meaning and effect of the UN decade for women on black women in America

Thirty Black women activists within different age categories, from varied educational and occupational backgrounds, and representing Black women's organizations from different regions of the U.S. were interviewed to determine their views on the meaning and effect of the UN Decade for Women on the lives of Black American women. Their responses to questions about the Decade indicate that the masses of Black women are poorly informed or totally uninformed about the UN Decade for Women. And, among that segment of the Black female population which is well informed about the Decade, positive views on the benefits of the Decade for Black women correlate strongly with employment in a national women's organization or governmental agency dealing with women's issues, and personal involvement in UN Conferences. Many Black women feel that the opportunity to network with third-world women is the major benefit that Black American women gained from the Decade. They also feel that American racism and class bias effectively prevent equitable implementation of a national plan of action to improve the status of women in the United States.     

Toward a holistic paradigm for Asian American Women's Studies: A synthesis of feminist scholarship and women of color's feminist politics

In this paper I propose a Women's Studies method for an Asian American Studies curriculum by incorporating a women-centred feminist historical approach and a holistic feminist anthropological approach with American women of color's feminist politics with an emphasis on the interconnectedness of sexism, racism, classism and homophobia in the American social systems and cultural ideologies.My work is based on the belief that an Asian American Women's Studies method must be founded on a feminist politics which is specifically derived from their own definition of themselves and feminism which are based on multiple consciousness raising and multiple identities of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.     

Women's studies courses: Pragmatic and political issues concerning their establishment and design

When attempting to establish women's studies courses within institutions of higher education, women face a traditional power structure designed to obstruct movements for change. Four factors relevant to a power analysis of this situation are status, concrete resources, expertise and self-confidence. These factors are defined and examined in relation to the fight to establish women's studies courses. Within this background the issue of men as ‘patrons’ as teachers and as students, and the fact of women's anger are examined. Many arguments forwarded by conservative patriarchal institutions are discussed. The paper emerges from the experiences of the author in three universities. It is aimed at clarifying some of the traps set for women so that other women can eliminate any fears that their experiences are idiosyncratic or ‘their fault’ rather than part of a formalized power game.