Peasant counter‐revolution?

This paper discusses some aspects of the wide peasant support of Spanish counter‐revolutionary movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This support should not be viewed as a mere manipulation by the church of the religious ‘fanaticism’ of the rural population, but as a political reaction consistent with the peasants’ perception of their antagonisms with other classes. The peasant opposition to liberalism does not necessarily signify support of the old order but can be understood as the expression of a preference for an alternative to that project which was materialising in the politics of the liberal governments.     

Entering Religious Life,Claiming Subjectivity: Irish nuns, 1930s–1960s

Despite the number of Irish women who entered religious life, especially in the decades following independence, very little is known about their motivations for joining or experiences therein. Based on their oral histories, this article explores how Irish women religious articulated their attraction to religious life. Providing the reader with a contextual background in which to place the narratives, it highlights the significance of several factors affecting the women’s decision to enter and, in particular, illuminates the claims to subjectivity revealed in the women’s accounts. Through varied responses, the women collectively rejected any notion that they were forced into religious life, asserting the decision to enter as truly their own. Comparing the ways the women framed their vocation with their families’ response to it, the article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital to explore the ways in which women are positioned as ‘social objects’ but present themselves as ‘subjects’.     

Negotiating the Politics of Inclusion: Women and Australian Labor Governments 1983 to 1995

The Hawke and Keating Labor governments have tended to practise a politics of inclusion in which women, along with other social groups, are seen to have an important part to play in building the new, internationally competitive Australian economy of the twenty-first century. Australian politics have therefore had a very different nature from that of the more exclusionary politics practised by British Conservative governments. While the politics of inclusion have given feminists room for manoeuvre, and facilitated some positive developments in areas such as affirmative action and childcare policies, feminists have had little success in challenging the overall direction of the governments' right-wing economic policies. Furthermore, the ‘economic’ has functioned as a meta-category which dissolves difference and conflict. The Australian experience therefore has both practical and theoretical implications for British feminists who may be experiencing a Labour government themselves before too long.     

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.     

"A Trade Union Oriented War on the Slums": Harold Gibbons,Ernest Calloway,and the St Louis Teamsters in the 1960s*

Michael Ross was international affairs director for the American Congress of Industrial Organizations from 1945 to 1955 and for the merged American Federation of Labour—Congress of Industrial Organizations from 1958 until his death in 1963. As such, he played a prominent role in the bitter anti-communist international trade union politics of the day. Ross, however, had been a communist in his younger years. Making use of Ross's own writings and an extensive secondary literature on the politics of the period, this article seeks to describe and explain his ideological journey. It argues that, while there were significant shifts in Ross's politics, there were also underlying consistencies. Specifically, it is contended that Ross retained a consistent commitment apparent throughout his career—as advocate of Soviet communism, New Deal bureaucrat, and trade union official—to working-class interests advanced by technocratic planning. It notes, however, that the radicalism and ambition of this politics were diluted both by the successes and constraints of Ross's career advancement and, more substantively, by a political context hostile to planning ideals in the US after 1945.     

Fieldwork experience: Relived and reconsidered. The Agrarian society of Uttar Pradesh∗

Fieldwork is currently regarded as basic to the anthropologist's method of studying rural communities. Though I studied social anthropology as a student, my interest in fieldwork in U.P. villages in the early 1950s came from different sources ‐from the tradition of fieldwork‐based rural studies initiated by R.K. Mukerjee in my university and from my contact with the writings of Mao Tse‐Tung in the course of my brief involvement in revolutionary politics. What gave special significance to my fieldwork was my theoretical interest in exploring the relevance of the concept of class as a tool for understanding the dynamics of predominantly agrarian, ex‐colonial countries. Fieldwork helped me to gain an insight into the peculiarities of the agrarian structure in an ex‐colonial country which showed rural‐urban antagonism more sharply than internal class polarisation. It is through fieldwork that I became aware of the role played by ecological and geographical factors in determining the peculiarities of the agrarian structure in each region. Field experience also made me aware of the conflicting pulls of class conflict and community solidarity operating simultaneously in Indian villages. The inadequacy of fieldwork as a method was also revealed to me sharply inthe course of fieldwork itself. When I tried to explore how the evolution of the agrarian structure in a region was shaped not merely by the natural factors specific to a region but the political‐economic forces operating from outside the region, I found I had reached the limits of field work. In the absence of a broader perspective of a macro theory of social change, fieldwork yielded only a bewildering mass of facts and information but no meaningful insights.     

Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption

Abstract

Historically, socialist strategy has privileged production over consumption, yet consumption was a space in which socialist women could have constructed a woman-focused politics. This article discusses the possibility of a politics of consumption where consumption provided the focus for overt political demands around which consumer-centred tactics were developed. It explores an attempt by British socialist women to create a politics of consumption around shopping for food. Although Margaretta Hicks and the National Women's Council of the British Socialist Party ultimately failed to reorder socialist priorities, they did try to build a politics of consumption in the years 1912 to 1915. Their significance was to imagine one way in which the border between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘political’ could be dissolved so that consumption and production could be recognised as complementary and equally necessary spheres of socialist politics.     

Uncovering the ‘saintly Anchoress’: myths of Medieval anchoritism and the reclusion of Katharine de Audley

This article uncovers the lost history of the early fourteenth-century religious recluse, Katharine de Audley, a woman whose life came to be both distorted and romanticised by legend and literary adaptation in the centuries that followed. Tracing first the various literary treatments of Katharine as medieval anchorite, and second, her lived history as it emerges from the records, and by placing both within the historical and ideological context of medieval anchoritism, the author argues for the female anchorite as forming part of a critical practice which continued to address socio-religious and personal needs both in her own day and long after she and her vocation had fallen from immediate cultural consciousness.     

Bolshevism,Stalinism and the Comintern: a historical controversy revisited

ABSTRACT

‘Bolshevization’ and ‘Stalinization’ have been used variously by historians of American and British Communism to designate and date the processes by which the Comintern and national parties were subordinated to Soviet policy. Despite their pervasive influence on the American and British left, this literature reveals little curiosity or consensus about the politics of Bolshevism and Stalinism, their history and relationship, indeed, these labels have sometimes been employed inexactly and interchangeably. In some narratives, Bolshevization dates from 1924 and was completed from 1929. In others, the Comintern and its affiliates were Stalinized from 1924, in still others, from 1929. The historiography of the Soviet Union, in contrast, includes forensic interrogation of Bolshevism and Stalinism, their meaning, periodization and consequences as well as the continuities and disjunctures between them. This work has been overlooked by historians of the American Workers’ Party and the British Communist Party. The present article assesses both literatures. It utilizes insights from Sovietologists to argue that Stalinism constituted a politics and practice connected with but distinct from Bolshevism. Reviewing Comintern and party history, it proposes a specific periodization. State Bolshevism, 1919–1923, saw subjugation of the American and British parties to Russian imperatives. Incipient Stalinism, 1924–1928, witnessed restructuring of the politics of subordination. From 1929, Stalinization accomplished a distinctive subordination. It enthroned a politics and practice foreign to that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks which endured, through different phases, until the 1950s.     

Rumours,sects and rallies: the ethnic politics of recent Hmong Millenarian movements in Vietnam’s highlands

ABSTRACT

Contrary to modernist assumptions, millenarianism has not died out but continues to influence the politics of many marginalised groups in upland Southeast Asia, including the Hmong. This article summarises and analyses post-World War II Hmong millenarian activity in Vietnam, focusing on three case studies from the 1980s onwards, within the political backdrop of ongoing government suspicions of ethnic separatism and foreign interference. Far from being isolated or peripheral, Hmong millenarian rumours and movements interact with overseas diasporas, human rights agencies and international religious networks to influence state responses, sometimes in unexpected ways.     

CLARE EVANS MEMORIAL ESSAY PRIZE 2006: Liberty,Citizenship and the Suppression of Female Religious Communities in France, 1789–90

This article examines how nuns reacted to the proposed suppression of religious orders by the National Constituent Assembly during the French Revolution. Drawing upon petitions sent to the Assembly by female religious communities, as well as the letters of their individual members, it explores how these women harnessed revolutionary discourse to argue for their rights as citizens, revealing in the process their sentiments towards the religious state. Whether they were happy to leave their convents or professed a desire to stay, their correspondence encapsulates the dilemma faced by the Assembly in determining how to ensure liberty for all without overriding individual rights.     

Feminist politics: The Feminist Party of Canada

The Feminist Party of Canada was founded in 1979. This discussion is based on my own and others' personal experiences as founding members. So far as it is possible to ascertain, this was the only organization of its kind thus far in Canada: an autonomous feminist political party, founded and run by women, with the aim of introducing feminist politics into the public arena. It arose out of a shared perception that party politics and the three main political parties in Canada did not adequately reflect women's concerns and that there was a need for such a party. Although the FPC is at present on hold, the time has come to assess this experience. It is, firstly, important to record this development, in order that it may not be lost from our collective memories. Secondly, it is useful to explore what can be learnt and what conclusions drawn from this event and the related issue of women and party politics.     

The agrarian question and class contradictions in South Africa: Some theoretical considerations

The article first considers two dominant approaches to black rural social formations in South Africa, those of neo‐classical populism and radical political economy, examining their ideology and politics as well as their theoretical inadequacies. The major part of the article then provides a general interpretation of the theory and politics of the agrarian question in Marxism, which has strategic implications for the current phase of national democratic struggle in South Africa, as for democratic and socialist struggles elsewhere. This discussion concentrates on issues concerning the land question, the agriculture/industry contradiction and the worker‐peasant alliance, petty commodity production and class differentiation vs. a homogenised rural mass ('the people'), and the centrality of the agrarian question to national democratic struggles and those for socialist transformation.     

Women's political participation in inter-war Poland: opportunities and limitations

Abstract

This article analyses women's participation in public lifewithin the framework of the democratic-parliamentarian Polish state (Poland's Second Republic), rebuilt in the wake of the First World War. It examines the activity of women in parliamentary elections in connection with obtaining political rights equal to those enjoyed by men, as well as the role of women's representation in the two male-dominated chambers of Parliament (the Sejm and the Senate). The minimal presence of women in the state apparatus and in political parties and professional organisations is explained in relation to male hostility towards women's active participation in political life, religious opposition (especially from the Catholic Church) and the unwillingness of women themselves to become engaged in ‘pure politics’. Finally, it examines the rapid growth of women's associations (cultural, educational, cooperative, and professional) which, whilst weakly linked to feminism, bonded with competing political parties and blocks. The associations were divided along the lines of national allegiances within the multiethnic state and, during the 1930s in particular (the era of the authoritarian rule of Pi?sudski and the socalled sanacja camp), succumbed to nationalistic tendencies. Nevertheless, it is possible to see women's growing involvement in education and professional careers as a form of participation in public life.     

Religion and modernity: Gender and identity politics in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh as in other Muslim majority societies, Islamist forces have emphasized the importance of women adopting traditional religious practices, such as wearing “the veil”, as a cultural symbol and a weapon in the movement of Islamization against Western Modernization. On the question of modernity although some Islamic groups hold extreme attitudes of imagining it as ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’, there are other activists who negotiate to engage modernity by controlling its negative impacts through reinventing Islamic tradition. The discursive shift is mainly towards establishing modern civil society based, middle class led and urban organizations. In reaction to the image of commodification of the woman's body in Western modernity, they construct women wearing hijab in the public space as an image of “Modern Muslim Women”. This article explores how women negotiate modernist and Islamist discourses and thereby engage in the politics of everyday living. It argues that woman's agency moves beyond analysis of women as mere victims of ideological constructions.     

‘Situated Knowledges’ and New Materialism(s): Rethinking a Politics of Location

Abstract

Playing a pivotal role in foregrounding a feminist politics of difference, a politics of location embodies what can be termed second-wave concerns that continue to inform contemporary feminist modes of inquiry and research. However, the attention to material specificity that locatability performs has emphasized the identity of the speaking subject at the same time as it has acknowledged materiality's entangled engagements as suggestive of the complicated production of any identity. In her 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges’, Donna Haraway both raises and responds to the challenge of a feminist politics of location in a way that anticipates a convoluted politics of the subject, in particular where she is not satisfied to relinquish universality and objectivity, or the ‘non-local’, in her provocative thinking through of situated knowledge production. The partial perspective she uncovers insists that the capacity for identity is addressed as a political gesture, with a reminder that any appeal to perspective is a non-innocent participation in what it helps to produce. In taking up Haraway's essay, the author engages with the problematic nature of a politics of location that is confounded by the direction of its critical interventions, and in such a way anticipates and performs new (feminist) materialist concerns. Questioning the nature of non-locatability and its political imperatives, the author suggests an ‘annunciative politics’ through which to consider some of the implications of Haraway's figuring of the partial perspective, to ask after feminism's political impetus with the tensions raised in Haraway's argument kept alive.     

‘I Insisted I Was Myself’: clergy wives and authentic selfhood in England c. 1960–94

From the 1960s onwards, Anglican clergy wives developed a literature of protest by writing letters, newspaper articles and books about their lived experience. Clergy wives were protesting against their own incorporation into their husband's profession. By revealing aspects of their life histories, clergy wives challenged the broader gender inequalities of the Church. The article draws on recent research emphasising authenticity as an important concept for understanding romantic relationships and religious identities in the mid to late twentieth century. Clergy wives articulated a desire for authentic selfhood, which was often manifested in a need for domestic privacy, but could also underpin vocational ambitions within and without the Church. Though the influence was often implicit, contemporary feminist debates were also relevant to how clergy wives perceived their lives. Whilst the discourse of authenticity drew from liberal secular individualism, it continued to be most commonly framed by Christian ideals.     

The Uniform Civil Code: The Politics of the Universal in Postcolonial India

This article speaks of a debate in contemporary India: that surrounding the validity of enacting a civil code that applies uniformly to all communities and religions in the state. In certain feminist arguments, such a code is seen as possibly providing a sphere of rights to Indian women that is alternative to the rights – or wrongs – given to them by the plural religious laws, which form the basis of the civil law in India. India, however, is a heterogeneous polity, encompassing a diversity of cultures and religions, some dominant and others forming minorities. Given these differences, some critics see the feminist call for a Uniform Civil Code as an essentialist move that prioritises gender over other agendas and politics. They argue that the site of the ‚universal’ in this feminist move is a liberal site that inherently excludes marginalised Others and benefits the dominant subjects in India. In my article, I contest this critique and question whether the site of the universal and its authorial subject in postcolonial India is, in fact, an exclusionary liberal ruse of power. I draw insights from the history of the formation of the postcolonial nation-state in India to posit an experience of the state and the universal within it, which is alternative to the Western liberal model. The aim of this article is, therefore, not so much to debate the in/validity of a Uniform Civil Code, as to address certain contemporary post-structuralist critiques of the site of the universal in postcolonial India and posit a departure from them, based on perspectives drawn from history.     

A Quest for Feminist Space and Time

Abstract

This article offers an investigation of practical and political aspects of new materialism on the basis of texts accepted for publication in Women: A Cultural Review. The authors emphasize various political strategies that appear in the collected essays; above all they stress the practical aspects of theory itself. Theory as praxis is a concept inspired by contemporary philosophers such as Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway. It can also be the basis for a politics of location and it highlights the importance of being situated in specific sociocultural, historical, local and geographical contexts. The authors raised the question of the potential alliances between their specific, Polish context and the possibility of participating in and creating a broader feminist movement, which proves to be possible thanks to a variety of perspectives that are considered important and worth considering in new materialism. In the article, the Polish Kongres Kobiet (‘Women's Congress’) initiative is presented as a platform for feminist activity which combines various kinds of political, social and cultural interests, concerns and goals. Along with the importance of space for feminist politics, the authors consider time as a crucial constituent of feminist activism. Both rethinking the past—tradition, heritage, history—and directing reflection towards the future hopes, possibilities, politics and theories, constitute important characteristics of the new materialism approach. The authors conclude by introducing the notion of the ‘politics of squatting’, which serves as a metaphor for a feminist quest for space and time.