Introduction: Performing the Self: women's lives in historical perspective

Abstract

Two recently discovered letters have finally established what has long been conjectured, that the English radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay corresponded with each other. The occasion for the correspondence was the publication of responses by both women to Edmund Burke's Reflection on the Revolution in France. The article explores the nature of their responses and analyses the main differences between them. It concludes that the two women were remarkably close in their ideas on democracy, equality and women's rights ideas ultimately circumscribed by eighteenth-century radicals' notions of property and class     

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.     

Differentiated childhoods: impacts of rural labor migration on left-behind children in China

This article draws on data from research that includes 400 children who lived separately from their migrant parents in 10 rural communities in China, to explore the deep impacts of rural parents' migration on the care-giving and nurturing of children left behind. It shows that parent migration has brought about multiple impacts, mostly negative, on the lives of children, such as increased workloads, little study tutoring and supervision, and above all the unmet needs of parental affection. Children's basic daily care and personal safety could become problematic since surrogate caregivers, mostly elderly, are usually exhausted with livelihood maintenance. With illumination on the family dysfunction in children's development due to migration-induced family separation, this article highlights the social cost to rural families of parental migration. Urbanization in developing countries is obtained at the expense of rural migrants and their families, especially children left behind. Further attention is required to improve left-behind children's well being within split family structures and interregional migration.     

The impact of the 1970s’ oil boom on Iranian agriculture

This article challenges the dominant strand of thinking on Iranian agriculture, which has hitherto stressed the depressing effects of the 1970s’ oil boom on the rural economy. In highlighting the nature of the economic boom both in the rural and urban areas, it delineates new constraints imposed on agriculture and offers a new explanation as to its outcome. The precipitated outflow of agricultural workforce in this period is thus shown to have been a common source of difficulty to the sector, and not a mere manifestation of its demise. The reasons for this process are located in new developments in the rural non‐farm and urban construction sectors, rather than in the ‘decay’ and ‘disintegration’ of agriculture.     

Reconsidering the links between poverty,international labour migration,and agrarian change: critical insights from Nepal

The role of international labour migration in processes leading to the (re)production of rural poverty in the rural South continues to shape critical academic and policy debate. While many studies have established that migration provides an important pathway to rural prosperity, they insufficiently analyse the profound effects that migration and remittances have on agrarian and rural livelihoods. This article uses the case of rural Nepal, where over half of the households are involved in foreign labour migration, as a ‘window’ to understand the processes shaping how migration effects poverty. The paper analyses how migration generates outcomes across the domains of rural people's changing relationship to land and agriculture, their experience of migration, and rural labour markets to advance our arguments. First, it argues that migration leads to the commodification of land, generating changes in patterns of land uses and tenancy relations. With respect to rural people's engagement with agriculture, migration generates both processes of ‘deactivation’ and ‘repeasantization’. Second, foreign migration offers an exit from poverty for some while also creating processes of deeper impoverishment for others. Third, migration leads to structural changes in rural labour markets, reducing the supply of agrarian labour. Consequently, in contrast to the simplifying ‘narrative’ accounts of a migration pathway out of poverty, this paper concludes that the effects triggered by migration are highly contradictory, providing an exit from poverty when linked to diversification strategies, while engendering rising inequality and rural differentiation.     

‘Fanm Se Poto Mitan’: Haitian Woman,the Pillar of Society

In this paper Marie-Jose N'zengou-Tayo draws on a variety of sources, both historical and contemporary, to describe the journey of Haitian women from nineteenth-century post-War of Independence, to present-day Haitian society.The paper is divided in two sections. In the first, the author traces a brief social history of women, quoting anthropological and sociological studies from the 1930s to the 1970s. She begins with rural peasant women noting their significant involvement in farming, marketing and in the internal food trade sector. The development of polygamy and common law unions as the most common form of conjugal union is seen as a practical response to survival in rural Haiti. The author notes the major impact on women's lives of continued political upheavals, violent repression, rural degradation and migration to the cities. Opportunities for employment in a deprived urban setting, and women's initiatives in income generating are also described under the Duvalier regimes. A brief overview of the lives of the middle class is included, although there is a paucity of research in this area available to the author. Violence against women is a regular threat facing domestic workers, and a means of repression used by the state against women across classes.In the second section N'Zengou-Tayo addresses the literary representation of Haitian women by both female and male Haitian writers. The paper examines how female writers have developed subversive narrative strategies to shape a female identity in order to break away from the stereotypes portrayed in men's writing.N'Zengou-Tayo concludes that the tremendous contribution of Haitian women to their society has neither been recognized nor documented. Despite this, the resilience of Haitian women, whether in their daily lives or in their writing, has enabled them to make strides towards improving their lives.     

Oil versus agriculture a case of dual resource depletion in Iran

This paper discusses the performance and prospects of the rural sector in the ‘agricultural’ oil economies in general, and in Iran, in particular. It proposes an analytical framework within which the damaging effects of the oil revenues for the political economy — its structure and its relation — and their specific impact on agriculture and the rural society may be studied. It produces empirical evidence for the rapid destruction of Iranian agriculture in the past fifteen years and it demonstrates that the plight of the Iranian peasantry is a direct consequence of the increase in the oil revenues, and the adoption of public expenditure strategies which they have encouraged. It concludes that unless a radical change in public policy is effected, the Iranians will experience a depletion of both their oil and their agricultural resources within the foreseeable future.??     

Feminist Contestations of Institutional Domains in Iran

Iranian Feminists outside Iran are divided on women's positions in Iran under the Islamic state. Some have argued that the process of Islamization has marginalized women. Others have argued that the dynamic nature of Shari'a interpretation and the debate among religious scholars in Iran have shaped the indigenous forms of feminist consciousness, feminisms and women's involvement in the process olf change. This paper, based on field research, is challenging both views. It will be argued that the contradictions of the Islamic state and institutions led to the process of feminist consciousness. In the period 1990–2000, Muslim and secular feminists in Iran have found their own ways of coming together, making demands and pressurizing the State and institutions to reform laws and regulations in favour of women's rights. But women are divided by the nature of their diversity. As their alliance has challenged the limitation of the Islamic state, the breakdown of their alliance (2000–2001), could have a great impact not only on gender relations, but also on the process of democratization and secularization.     

Lineage networks,land conflicts and rural migration in late socialist China

A new form of migration in parts of rural China involves the members of small descent groups being pushed out of their residential villages by larger descent groups and relocating to their ancestral villages. Although such households were said to be ‘returning’ to their ancestral villages it was often decades or centuries since the immigrants' direct family members last had contact with members of their ancestral villages. So the returnees were in fact new immigrants to new communities. This article draws on original fieldwork to consider how the place-claiming activities of revived traditional social networks underpinned this household relocation. Our analysis of this phenomenon contributes to a wider body of literature on the revival of traditional networks in late socialist societies. In particular we suggest that the revival of these networks and their territorialisation of space are responses to the conditions of late socialism such as ‘fuzzy’ land and property rights, and insecure economic livelihoods.     

Linkages of oil and politics: oil strikes and dual power in the Iranian revolution

ABSTRACT

Looking at the oil strikes during the Iranian revolution (1978–79), this article challenges dominant narratives of the relationship between oil and politics and the processes that shaped the outcome of the revolution. The main arguments of the article are developed in a critical dialogue with Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy. Firstly, the article argues that the scale of the oil strikes and their central role in the creation of organs of revolutionary power call into question the generalization about the material characteristics of oil that supposedly prevented mobilization. Secondly, the article argues that the fact that oil workers were able to organize mass strikes, but failed to create an independent organization, calls for an explanatory approach that combines material factors with the role of consciousness, ideology and organization. This leads to a rereading of the Iranian revolution that highlights the essential role of the oil strikes in the emergence of dual power in early 1979, and the contingency of their outcome.     

Bias and inequity in rural incomes in post‐reform China

Official statistics report a rapid increase in nominal income for much of China's rural population. However, an examination of sources and distribution of the rise in rural incomes reveal significant statistical bias in the data. Further, studies of some Western scholars indicate that income gains have been distributed inequitably. This article examines official statistics and academic accounts of China's recent rural incomes to expose the causes and effects of these biases and inequities.     

David L. Behncke,The Airline Pilots,and the New Deal: The Struggle for Federal Labor Legislation

In the first half of the twentieth century, South Africa's two main coal-producing provinces, Natal and the Transvaal, were regarded as having separate industries. Comparing the two, the article shows that their geology, markets, ownership and organization were distinctive. In contrast, the patterns of labour struggles were alike, reflecting labour processes, racial divisions, and legal and ideological frameworks that were similar. The historiography of South African mining labour has emphasized the role of black migrants, who ‘oscillated’ between the mines and the rural areas from where they originated and to which they retired. While structuralist analyses argued that migrancy was the bedrock of a cheap-labour system that underpinned white power, leading social historians stressed that migrants were primarily rural men. The account presented here rejects the thrust of both positions, showing that a high proportion of coal miners settled around the mines. More of them would have done so had this been permitted, and the same applies to Africans working on the gold mines. Given that cheap-labour theory strengthens the exceptionalism that runs through much South African history, rejecting it can open up new possibilities for comparative study. In passing, the article reveals that black workers participated in the militant 1913 strike by the Witwatersrand's white mine workers.     

women developing women: Islamic approaches for poverty alleviation in rural Egypt

Through an ethnographic account of a social reform project led by Islamic activist women in the village of Mehmeit in rural Egypt, this article analyses women's Islamic activism as a form of worship. Women's experiences of activism are at the centre of this account, which highlights their attempts to economically and socially develop a destitute rural community. Their development ideals mirror the embedded principles of liberal secular modernity and offer a tangible example of the concomitance of these so-called binaries of religion and secularism in women's religious activism. Normative assumptions regarding religion and secularism as two binary constructs have largely dictated a monolithic view of women who engage in Islamic activism as religious subjects primarily devoted to a spiritual, internal faith. Persistent models of religious selves engaged in a continuous exercise of self-fashioning towards a fixed ‘religious ideal’ overlook the complexity and seamlessness of the desires that animate these subjectivities. Moreover, it is inaccurate to represent participants in Islamic activism as homogenized into one overarching group that adheres to standardized religious membership criteria. Discourses of modernity have also constructed separate spheres of what is defined as religion and secularism. Yet, these spheres, in practice, are not always so neatly demarcated as they are in modern principles. Societies shaped by the historical and temporal dynamics of colonialism, modernization, secularization and nation building projects present more complex and heterogeneous forms of subjectivities in their members. This article illustrates how a theoretical concomitance of religion and secularism opens up new possible considerations of women's activism in Islamic movements. The author argues that the desires and subjectivities of Islamic women that inform their activism are ultimately linked to the historical emergence of secularism and state modernization schemes aimed at transforming Muslim subjects into modern citizens of liberal democracies.     

‘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’.     

Rural democratisation in Mexico's deep south: grassroots right-to-know campaigns in Guerrero

In Mexico's southern state of Guerrero, rural social and civic movements are increasingly claiming their right to information as a tool to hold the state publicly accountable, as part of their ongoing issue-specific social, economic, and civic struggles. This study reviews the historical, social and political landscape that grounds campaigns for rural democratisation in Guerrero, including Mexico's recent information access reforms and then compares two different regional social movements that have claimed the ‘right to know’. For some movements, the demand for information rights is part of a sustained strategy, for others it is a tactic, but the claim bridges both more resistance-oriented and more negotiation-oriented social and civic movements.     

The agrarian reform

Around 1860–80 all the central areas of rural women's work in Denmark – spinning, weaving and baking – were gradually taken over by the growing industry in the towns. During the 1880s, also, women's dairy work became a field of male labour in the newly‐established cooperative dairies around the country. The sale of dairy products has played a great role in Danish agriculture and in the national economy from the 1860s until today. The article throws light on the place of women in dairy production until the 1880s and examines the factors which determined their being pressed out of this sort of work. Finally the problems and consequences with which women (and men) were faced when the transition to cooperatives dairies gave rise to an entirely new pattern of work and sex roles are examined.     

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.     

Gandhi and India's peasants, 1917–22

The general problem raised here is peasant involvement in Afro‐Asian nationalist movements. As a case study the focus is M. K. Gandhi's attitude to and activities among Indian peasants from 1917 to 1922 and their response, firstly to his broad span of rural work for social reform and the rectification of particular peasant grievances, and then to his India‐wide passive resistance campaigns on continental issues which had no specifically rural appeal. This analysis underlines the fact that ‘India's peasants’ were no monolithic group. They differed from area to area in economic and social position and were further fragmented by the ties of religion, tribe and caste. Consequently the nature and range of their wider public awareness varied, and their relationships with Gandhi were diverse and complicated. In certain areas he attracted wide support, even adulation, particularly where he campaigned on local grievances. But peasant response to his all‐India calls for passive resistance was geographically restricted, and often dependent on a very garbled understanding of the issues at stake and the expected pay‐offs of the movement. Peasant activists were often outside Gandhi's control; and this threat to cohesion and discipline made him very ambivalent towards wide rural participation. His relationship with India's peasantry illustrated the problems any continental leader or organisation faced in trying to accommodate ‘national’ appeals and tactics to the diverse and often specifically local needs of rural groups — an accommodation which was difficult, dangerous yet essential in some degree if nationalist movements were to be broadly based.     

A footnote in history? Mary Gawthorpe,Sylvia Pankhurst,the suffragette movement and the writing of suffragette history[1]

In 1931, the Suffragette Fellowship invited several ex-suffragettes to contribute biographical statements and material to their archive to create a ‘Book of Suffragette Prisoners’ which would introduce the women who had been to prison in pursuit of the vote. In response, the suffragette Mary Gawthorpe, a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) committee between 1906 and 1911, deposited a series of testimonies describing her political activity beyond the WSPU. Gawthorpe's actions were partly prompted by her recent representation in Sylvia Pankhurst's text The Suffragette Movement which dismissed her as having ‘emigrated to America, [taken] up journalism and married’. This article draws on material from Mary Gawthorpe's papers, recently deposited in the Tamiment Library, New York, to investigate Gawthorpe's response to Pankhurst's text. From this perspective, it considers some of the circumstances which provoke autobiographical responses to history.     

‘An Adamless Eden’: counterpublics and women writers' sociability at the fin de siècle through the experiences of Flora Annie Steel

This article focuses on the ‘outsider’ status of late-nineteenth-century women writers by exploring the experiences of Anglo-Indian novelist Flora Annie Steel and her responses to authorial sociability in fin-de-siècle London. Androcentric literary societies are viewed as influential sites which marginalised women writers, containing their incursion into masculine clubland and denying them access to some of the symbolic and practical benefits of professional authorship. Through the lens of Steel's experience, the discussion considers how women writers attempted to transcend exclusion through the establishment of female, literary counterpublics. Such counterpublics fostered a gendered literary consciousness that empowered women and matured in Steel's case into a political prospectus in the service of women's suffrage.