Women's and Men's Access to Employer-Provided Benefits: An Assessment of Women's Acceptance as Breadwinners

abstract This article asks whether the rising number of women in the paid labor force over the last half-century has been accompanied by a parallel trend of increased recognition of a breadwinning status for women, or if traditional role conceptions have persisted in spite of women's changed economic and social circumstances. I theorize that employer-provided benefits are a unique form of compensation that, by helping parents balance work and family, directly affect parents in their capacities as breadwinners. As such, assessing women's and men's access to these benefits over the period of women's rising labor force participation can be very revealing of the acceptance of women as breadwinners. To acquire a general picture of women's and men's access to employer-provided benefits, I compare access to benefits from 1940 to 1990 in a modal women's occupation ("professional nurses") to a modal men's occupation ("automobile mechanics and repairmen"). Through the studied time span, these occupations are the largest comparably sized women's and men's occupations that are also similar in pay level and extent of unionization. This allows me to control for pay level and unionization, important alternative explanations for women's restricted access to benefits. I hypothesize that nurses have had more restricted access to employer-provided benefits than have auto mechanics. I find a disadvantage for nurses relative to auto mechanics through most of the time period, which nonetheless diminishes and then reverses slightly at the end. Taking into consideration subtleties, as well as patterns masked in the data as presented, these findings suggest at best a rather slow rate of acceptance of a breadwinning status for women, and at worst, a continuation of traditional gender norms.     

Lifestyle and the Depoliticisation of Agency: Sex as Power in Women's Magazines

Sex, due to its connotations of dangerousness and the non-traditional, has been used heavily in women's magazines and other mass media to signify core values of power and freedom as part of their brands. Through this process, other forms of agency for women have tended to be excluded. In these magazines women are shown to be assertive, powerful and independent, not through the political views that they hold, not through the way that they act upon society, but through the way that they seduce men and behave sexually. We show, using a number of examples, that for this to happen a fantasy space has to be created: a space where real-world obstacles and meanings are erased, allowing a repertoire of theatrical sexual play to operate. This is typical of the lifestyle society in which we now live. In this society, we define ourselves not on the basis of who we are, in an older sense of gender or social class, but in terms of what we do and the values we hold. The way we communicate these values is often through our use of consumer products, which allows us to align ourselves with the core values and meanings with which the products have been loaded. But while lifestyle itself may be a matter of choice, the choices available to us are often created to serve the interests and needs of large corporations, of consumerism. Sex is one such choice of which we must be very careful.     

State Feminism and Women's Movements

This article offers a brief reflection on the emergence of the study of gender and politics over the past 30 years and its influence on European political science. It goes on to discuss the early results of a recently completed comparative project, the RNGS project (Research Network on Gender and the State) on the influence of women's movements on public policy decisions. The RNGS project reflects both developments in the sub-field of gender and politics and the influences of changes in approaches to the study of politics of the last 30 years or so.     

唐代女性体育活动研究

运用文献资料法研究唐代女性参与体育活动的情况,找出唐代女性体育活动高度发达的原因,结合现代体育项目分类方法,总结出唐代女性参与体育活动的分类及特点如下:唐代女性参与体育运动具有广泛性,上层贵族女性具有娱乐表演性质,下层平民体育运动反映了休闲性质。     

Direct Democracy and Women's Political Engagement

What are the conditions that promote gender equality in political participation? In this article, I propose that the presence of direct democracy expands gender equality in political participation by signaling the system's openness to women's voice, confirming their political competency, and highlighting their stake in political decisions. To test this argument, I leverage a quasi‐experiment in Sweden in the aftermath of the introduction of universal suffrage, where the type of municipal political institutions was determined by a population threshold. My findings lend strong support to the effect of direct democracy on the political inclusion of women. I find that the gender gap in electoral participation was smaller in municipalities using direct democracy than in similarly sized municipalities that only had representative institutions.     

矿难丧偶女性生活图景之窥探——基于山西X村妇女的叙述分析

矿难丧偶女性是一个鲜为社会关注的群体。文章以山西某个村落为田野展开研究,凭籍于当事人口述和作者转述的方式铺陈了三位丧偶女性的生命故事,从而通过拓展个案的方法揭示出,在现代科学理性、传统文化、资本市场和父权制的合谋之下,矿难丧偶女性被撕裂与抗争的身体、被规训与形塑的婚姻及其被污名与排斥的命运。     

列宁的妇女解放思想及其当代价值

妇女解放一直是人类发展历程中不变的话题,妇女地位随着人类社会的发展起伏不定。当今中国,不仅在学术界而且在整个社会,妇女问题再一次成为主流话题,受到越来越多人的关注和重视。列宁关于妇女解放问题的思考和在社会主义国家的积极实践,为妇女解放事业积累了宝贵的经验,是我国开展妇女工作的重要参考依据。因此,重新回顾列宁的妇女解放思想,研究其产生背景、主要内容和价值启示尤为重要。     

Women's suffrage and the growth of the welfare state

In this paper we test the hypothesis that extensions of the voting franchise to include lower income people lead to growth in government, especially growth in redistribution expenditures. The empirical analysis takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by Switzerland's extension of the franchise to women in 1971. Women's suffrage represents an institutional change with potentially significant implications for the positioning of the decisive voter. For various reasons, the decisive voter is more likely to favor increases in governmental social welfare spending following the enfranchisement of women. Evidence indicates that this extension of voting rights increased Swiss social welfare spending by 28% and increased the overall size of the Swiss government.     

女性文学批评的几个关键问题思考——从“对话与参与”的角度谈起

中国女性文学批评正是由于缺乏与本土男性批评者的对话意识,才导致了对西方女性主义某种程度的认同与盲从.对于女性文学批评而言,如何理解“对话”的含义、如何理解“性别身份”、如何处置西方女性主义与本土女性文学批评的关系、如何对待女作家创作是保持批评生命活力的几个关键问题.身处主流批评领域的男性批评者能够参与女性文学批评的对话,是在为女性文学批评的更好发展提出意见.     

The Temporary Importance of Role Models for Women's Political Representation

This article investigates the supply side of women's political representation by focusing on how the election of female politicians affects the motivation of women to run for office in other units. The analysis relies on an original data set of over 1,500 municipal elections in Switzerland, starting with the first election after the introduction of women's suffrage. In the first election in which women could participate, the election of a woman in a given municipality was associated in the next election with an additional female candidate in 10% of its neighbors. The relationship decreases over time, fades away after 16 years, and is driven primarily by new female candidates in units where no female incumbents are running for reelection. These findings suggest that role models are important for improving women's representation, but only in its early stages. This conclusion could be relevant for understanding the political representation of other underrepresented groups.     

Increasing Women's political representation: the limits of constitutional reform

In 1999 and 2000 the French parliament passed a constitutional revision and a set of legislation with the aim of achieving parity of representation between men and women in France's elected assemblies. France was the first country in Europe to institute such radical reform to address the issue of women's under-representation in politics. The success of the parity reforms in achieving equal representation for women has been limited, however. This paper will discuss how and why the issue of parity progressed onto the French political agenda, and will identify the main factors which have limited the impact of these reforms. It will be argued that both the electoral system and the attitudes of political parties remain important obstacles to achieving true parity in elected institutions.     

Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua

Foucault's inspiration from Nietzsche in terms of writing critical histories is difficult to overestimate. However, this article advances an interpretation of Foucault's approach to history which focuses on another, less readily evident, dialogue partner, namely the Marxist tradition and, more precisely, French Maoism. The first part of the article details Foucault's involvement in the Maoist-inspired activist group, Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP). It is argued that Foucault's practical experience from GIP left crucial marks on his contemporaneous statements on the genealogical method and his critique of “totalizing institutions,” “uniform discourse” and “juridical universality.” The second part of the article offers a close reading of Foucault's reflections on genealogy in his 1976 lecture series which demonstrates how the Maoist activist principles noticeably resonate in these statements. The aim of the article is threefold. First, to bring attention to largely neglected sources of inspiration for Foucault's genealogical approach, which complement those represented by Nietzsche. Second, it seeks to obtain a better understanding of Foucault's relationship to Marxism, a relationship often portrayed as unambiguously negative. And third, the goal is to demonstrate how principles developed in Maoist political activism are not only realized in Foucault's activities within the GIP, but also in his lecture-hall formulations of genealogy, power, and critique.     

Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates

This article challenges the thesis that the publication of William Godwin's scandalous Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 minimized the philosophical impact of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work the Rights of Woman in nineteenth-century American political thought. Instead, we demonstrate that leading nineteenth-century American women's rights advocates—Hannah Mather Crocker, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Grimké, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony—understood themselves to be in a critical, philosophical dialogue with the text of the Rights of Woman , and in some cases, the Memoirs , and defined their own, distinctive philosophies of sex equality partly within this context.     

国外妇女参政政策及对我国的启示

妇女参政是衡量一个国家文明程度和民主建设进程的重要尺度,目前,国外的妇女参政,无论从数量和比例上还是从任职结构和质量上来说,都取得了令人瞩目的成就。总结梳理世界各国近年的政策和实践经验,以期对提高我国妇女参政水平以启示。     

农村妇女草根组织的推动手法

建立一个形式上的妇女草根组织容易,要使其能够持续发展下去并保持良好的运作却相当困难,需要花大力气促进组织成员的意识提升与能力增长,才能使之最终走上自我管理、自我发展的道路,通过河南社区教育研究中心多年推动妇女草根组织的经验,总结了农村妇女草根组织发展的多样化推动手法。     

The Political Mobilisation of Women's Interest Issues: The Failure of Childcare

The Women's Liberation Movement achieved political success with several issues - but not with childcare. This article addresses the reasons for the success and failure of various WII's, examining the nature of pressure politics, methods of organising, public and private debates before focusing on women's attitudes to the childcare issue. The conclusion drawn here is that the more successful feminist issues' do not challenge gender roles to the same extent as childcare does - which could explain the nonmobilisation of childcare as an issue.