Women catapulted into a different social order: women in East Germany1

The collapse of the ‘socialist' system in East Germany in October 1989 was welcomed by women and men of all social strata as desirous of putting an end to a police state and replacing it by a really democratic society. It enabled numerous independent women's groups affiliated to the Independent Women's Federation founded in November 1989 to place women in all important decision-making bodies. In a few months, however, portentous changes began to take place. The stagnating and declining, although still viable, economy was destroyed. Mass unemployment, hitherto unknown, soared, affecting women particularly badly. The financial, social, political, educational, cultural and legal structures were replaced by the respective West German ones. Most of the social achievements enjoyed by women have been eliminated or replaced by inferior legislation. Women's groups figure prominently among those who resist the ruthless dismantling of their rights     

Colonising motherhood: evangelical social reformers and Koorie women in Victoria,Australia, 1880s to the early 1900s

Abstract

This article examines the separate worlds of evangelical social reformers of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union and mission-based Indigenous women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the colony of Victoria. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) activists, characterising themselves as the organised motherhood of the world, claimed maternal moral authority to promote for their sex a legitimate place in public life and full citizenship. Simultaneously Koorie women on the scattered mission stations of the colony, their lives under increasingly intrusive surveillance, were forced on painfully unequal terms to negotiate with mission managers and colonial officials for the right even to raise their own children. Unable to perceive the plight of Koorie mothers, the WCTU reformers, characterising themselves as the organised motherhood of the world, aligned themselves with the so-called ‘civilising’ endeavours of their fellow evangelicals, the missionaries, oblivious to their collusion in the colonial state's grievous assaults on Koorie human rights and civil liberties     

Women with(out) class: social workers in the twentieth-century United States

This article examines women's work culture in professional-managerial labor in the twentieth-century United States through a history of social workers, an occupation particularly well suited to examine how race and gender shape work cultures. It suggests a chronology for understanding the changing ways in which social workers adopted middle-class identities that draw upon both professionalism and unionism. Imaging themselves variously as workers and ‘middle-class’ professionals, each identity had implications for their ability to understand and respond to the changing working conditions at both the beginning and end of the twentieth century that threatened to undermine them. Middle-Class Worker and Professional Worker identities in the 1930s and 1960s armed male and female social workers to defend their unions and fight for their clients against economizing bosses, and miserly state politicians. At the end of the century, however, the rush of social workers into the role of therapists gave them a work identity that relatively disempowered them to deal with the welfare cutbacks or the new work of deindustrialization with ‘jobless recovery’.     

Women scientists in British industry: technical library and information workers,c.1918-1960

Technical librarianship and information work emerged as a new scientific career in interwar Britain and rapidly became one of the few types of professional industrial employment that was routinely open to both women and men. Drawing on a range of sources, including the records of professional organisations, industrial firms and individual practitioners, this article uses a study of the patterns and practices surrounding women's work in technical libraries and information bureaux to illuminate the ways in which ideas about gender shaped their early non-manual employment in industry. It argues that the hybrid and ambiguously gendered nature of the work involved, which spanned scientific research, librarianship and clerical work, opened up the field to female science graduates but frequently left them confined to those posts which did not confer full recognition of their status as scientists and offered few prospects for career progression. Nevertheless, within these limitations a striking number of women were able to carve out responsible, even pioneering, careers. They did so chiefly as technical librarians who, although usually expected to relinquish any pretensions to equal status alongside their scientific colleagues, could claim distinctive knowledge and expertise within an industrial organisation.