The gendered geography of the english co-operative movement at the turn of the nineteenth century

Abstract

This article examines the gender politics of the English Cooperative Movement between 1880 and 1920 from the perspective of geographic space. It shows which sections of the country were most likely to exclude women from participating in the government of co-operative enterprises and offers explanations for their exclusion. Using numerical data compiled by the Women's Co-operative Guild to illustrate its points, the article finds that male co-operators in the north-west were more likely than those in the south to deny women access to management committees and national offices. It argues that men in the north-west countered women's demands for public roles with an increased insistence on domesticity for wives, and it attributes the more generous attitudes of male co-operators in the south to their need to attract women to their struggling stores as shoppers. In the north-west, Co-operation was prosperous and well established; men there had no need to curry the favor of working-class housewives to guarantee the success of their establishments     

Towards the formation of a professional identity: women artists in Greece at the beginning of the twentieth century

In nineteenth-century Greece women of the upper and middle classes were usually occupied with some form of art destined for the private sphere of their familial or friendly circle or sold for philanthropic purposes. The foundation of a female class for painting and sculpture at the state School of Arts in Athens in 1894 seems to have given women the chance to demand and assure equal academic opportunities with men in the first decade of the twentieth century, despite strong objections from their opponents on the issue of the life-class. For some women this was the first step away from amateurism and towards professionalism and was to be followed by a series of initiatives, including the maintenance of a well-organised atelier, steady participation in exhibitions and artistic unions, the adoption of modern art tendencies and publicity through the press, all of which guaranteed their professional engagement with art. Next to contemporary feminist demands for emancipation and female attempts to enter traditionally male professions, women artists' endeavours contributed, as can be detected in some painted and photographic portraits of Flora, Laskaridou and Asprioti, to the formation of the image of the New Woman as well as to the promotion of female artistic individuality.     

Narratives of race and nation in china: Women's suffrage in the early twentieth century

This paper explores the ways in which the Chinese women's suffrage movement used racializing narratives to alter the boundaries that had excluded women from full participation in politics in the first two decades of the 20th century. It extends existing work on the connection between narratives of race and women's suffrage in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA to explore how “race” was mobilized in China in the late-Qing and early Republican period. The article has three main areas of innovation. First, it explores the deployment of racializing narratives within the broader discourses of modernity circulating in China wherein modernization was premised on a racialized notion of national identity—that is “modernization as Han chauvinism.” Second, this article aims to participate in the process of extending the history of women's suffrage from primary reliance on class analysis and towards methods that explore the multiple categories of exclusion and inclusion. Third, this article aims to explore the manner in which narratives of race were invoked within a feminist political campaign that occurred in a nation without a history of European colonization. The article demonstrates that the multiplicity of possible gains sought under the banner of “race” makes it an unreliable category to invoke for struggles that are ultimately determined by “gendered” divisions.     

Two models of infant welfare in the first half of the twentieth century: New Zealand and the USA

In New Zealand, as elsewhere in the Western world in the early twentieth century, maternal and infant health became a national concern and the task of organising health services was taken up by women in a voluntary capacity. In the USA this culminated in the Sheppard-Towner (Maternity and Infancy) Act of 1921. However, within a decade American paediatricians had assumed control of the services. By contrast, the services in New Zealand remained in the hands of a female-run voluntary organisation, the Plunket Society. From the foundation of the Society in 1907, health services for mothers and their infants became the site of territorial disputes between various health providers – the Health Department, the Plunket Society and paediatricians. This article explores why and how the Plunket Society managed to retain control of this important area of public health in the face of challenges by these other health providers. It will be argued that the reasons relate to the tenacity with which the ‘maternalists’ claimed the territory as their own, their informal access to channels of power, their public support, and their success in maintaining medical respectability through their own honorary and paid professional staff.     

The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women's suffrage movement in Britain

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which vegetarianism was found in the militant and non-militant strands of the women's suffrage movement, and looks at some of the other movements contributing to vegetarian and suffrage thinking. The arguments linking the two movements are discussed, ranging from the psychological identification of women with animals as victims of male brutality, to the empowering idea that women confined to a homemaker's role could still help to create a new and more compassionate world by adopting a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism and the women's movement are seen as linked with each other, and also with theosophy and socialism, as complementary ways of creating that longed-for new world.     

On being one of the boys: An exploratory study of women's professional and domestic role definitions

In this study, I analysed the definitions of male and female professionals' domestic responsibilities, and the consequences of these definitions for the career histories of these male and female professionals. The architectural profession was used as the illustrative case. I surveyed a cohort of women and men who graduated from architectural schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and conducted in-depth interviews with selected men and women. The findings showed that role perceptions and career histories differed for male and female professionals in a number of significant respects.     

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 right to culture and the culture of rights: a critical perspective on women’s sexual rights in Africa

The opposition of ‘culture’ and ‘rights’ is not uncommon in feminist legal discourse. This article argues that such an approach is fraught with danger as it creates an extremely restrictive framework within which African women can challenge domination; it limits our strategic interventions for transforming society and essentially plays into the hands of those seeking to perpetuate and solidify the existing structures of patriarchy. Drawing examples from a parallel research on Gender, Law and Sexuality, I propose that a more critical and interpretative approach to these two concepts may present a different perspective to portrayals of ‘tradition’ as constraining and/or fixed often displayed in mainstream feminist legal thinking.     

Gender mainstreaming and the framing of women's rights in Europe: The contribution of the Council of Europe

Drawing on published materials from the Committee of Ministers, Assembly and expert working groups of the Council of Europe, this paper investigates the distinctive contribution made to the framing of women's rights over the last two decades by this regional organisation, which recent studies of the `Europeanisation' of public policies have largely neglected. Elements of congruence are identified between the major mobilising themes of second wave feminism and the Council's emphasis on protecting individual rights, and its sensitivity to the incompleteness and shortcomings of `actually existing' democratic institutions and practices. The relative openness of its agenda-setting processes is also underlined. The Council's flag ship policies for women are shown to have centred since the mid-1980s on a `politics of presence' frame and the (contested) concept of `parity democracy', and the tensions between these and the more recent turn to gender mainstreaming are explored. But the paper also points to the Council's role in diffusing into the E.U. governance arena women's claims to equal participation and presence in the policy process, and notes recent French and U.K. legislation as testifying to the continuing salience of these claims at the national level. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Gender mainstreaming and the framing of women's rights in Europe: The contribution of the Council of Europe

Drawing on published materials from the Committee of Ministers, Assembly and expert working groups of the Council of Europe, this paper investigates the distinctive contribution made to the framing of women's rights over the last two decades by this regional organisation, which recent studies of the `Europeanisation' of public policies have largely neglected. Elements of congruence are identified between the major mobilising themes of second wave feminism and the Council's emphasis on protecting individual rights, and its sensitivity to the incompleteness and shortcomings of `actually existing' democratic institutions and practices. The relative openness of its agenda-setting processes is also underlined. The Council's flag ship policies for women are shown to have centred since the mid-1980s on a `politics of presence' frame and the (contested) concept of `parity democracy', and the tensions between these and the more recent turn to gender mainstreaming are explored. But the paper also points to the Council's role in diffusing into the E.U. governance arena women's claims to equal participation and presence in the policy process, and notes recent French and U.K. legislation as testifying to the continuing salience of these claims at the national level.     

发挥高校共青团优势培养新世纪人才

处在世纪之初的高校共青团必须在思想政治教育、校园文化建设、社会实践活动、勤工助学和维护学校稳定等方面发挥重要作用,也就是说共青团必须充分发挥党的助手作用,构建团员青年的思想政治教育新体系;必须以培养"四有"人才为中心,构建校园文化新格局;必须把教育青年和服务青年结合起来,构建服务青年学生的新体系;必须大力加强团的自身建设,构建团组织适应时代要求的运行机制.     

gendered Islam and modernity in the nation-space: women's modernism in the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan

Feminist scholarship on women in religious and right-wing social and political movements has moved from a reductive focus on causal or motivational factors to more sophisticated analyses explicating processes of agency and subject formation. With the aim of expanding and deepening this conceptual space, I will discuss some of my interactions with a group of women in the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, as we attempted to explore the complex meanings of ‘the modern’ that informed the self-understanding of my interviewees. My work corroborates some of the contemporary scholarship on what is referred to as Political Islam in arguing that Islamist movements in Muslim societies are also the catalysts of modernization, rather than simply its interlocutors. This article argues that these processes of social and political organizing entail particular interrogations and the reconstituting of identities in ways that blur the line between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. On the one hand, we need to understand Jamaat women's self-construction as religious or pious women; on the other hand, we must grasp the specificity of their claims to act as modern subjects situated in the time of political and cultural modernity.     

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.     

Chronic stress in the lives of college students: Scale development and prospective prediction of distress

This article reports the development of the 54-item College Chronic Life Stress Survey (CCLSS) and its use in prospective studies of the relationship between chronic stress and psychological distress in college students. Study 1 demonstrated the CCLSS's test-retest reliability and concurrent validity (best friend corroboration of specific items). Study 1 also revealed differential endorsement of specific CCLSS items as a function of gender and year in college. Study 2 cross-sectional and prospective analyses showed that CCLSS chronic stress was a significant predictor of distress. Study 3 cross-sectional analyses showed that the CCLSS effects withstood the statistical control of neuroticism. The findings suggest the value of future research on chronic stress and demonstrate the utility of the CCLSS in studies with college students.Received Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Delaware. Current interests include child sexual abuse, family therapy, and psychology internship training.Received Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Florida State University. Current interests include research on stress-related growth and the role of social cognition in stress vulnerability. To whom correspondence should be addressed.