Using biographical narrative and life story methods to research women's movements: FEMCIT

This paper discusses the use of the biographical narrative interpretative method (BNIM) in a research project that investigated the ways in which intimate life and intimate citizenship have changed in the wake of the cultural and political interventions of women's movements and other movements for gender and sexual equality and change. It outlines the research design of the study, which was the “Intimate Citizenship” work package of the FEMCIT research project, and describes how the biographical narrative interpretative method enabled the project's central research questions to be addressed.     

From movement protest to state feminism: The women's liberation movement and unemployment policy in Denmark

The new Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s took a negative attitude towards the state, seeing it as capitalist and patriarchal. Today, this attitude has changed, with many former activists now supporting the “state feminism” that has developed in all the Nordic countries. The case of unemployment policy in Denmark is used to illustrate the changing relations between the radical and leftist feminist movement and the state. In spite of strong resistance in most political parties to any kind of radical feminism, many of the unemployment projects and training courses for women which have flourished since the mid‐1980s have been based on the ideas of the radical feminist movement and have been staffed by women from the movement of the 1970s. The methodologically complicated issue of studying social movement effects is approached here by studying changes in discourse and actions. Four factors are used to explain the changing relation between movement and state.     

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.     

Kinship and friendship: quaker women's networks and the women's movement sandra stanley holton

Women Friends (or ‘Quakers’) were largely absent from the debates on the position of women in Britain in the 1830s-50s. But a significant group of women Quakers emerged at the forefront of organisations formed in the 1860s to campaign for Women's rights, participation in which was still by no means a norm among their co-religionists. A notable presence among them was a group of women Friends, identified here as the Bright circle, linked by kinship, religion and radical politics. This article analyses the relationship between public and private lives among the Bright circle, especially in terms of the strength of the political networks on which they were able to draw. It examines the church culture of Friends in general, the domestic culture of this circle in particular, and the basis of its networks in domestic life. It concludes that the values and activities on which this network was built illustrate the way in which personal and public lives may overlap, so that the women among this circle were able to sustain identities that were authoritative, and simultaneously family-centred, outward-looking and publiclyminded.     

Feminism, suffrage and the nineteenth-century English women's movement

The nineteenth-century English women's movement has usually been studied in terms of its attempts to increase the access of women to the public and political spheres. This approach to the movement ignores the immense concern amongst its members with the private and domestic lives of women. Within the movement there were widely differing views as to how reform in the private sphere and in the public sphere should be integrated.This concern is most clearly evident in the many discussions of marriage which accompanied not only the campaign to reform the legal status of married women, but all the educational, suffrage and employment campaigns as well. These differences came to the fore in the early 1870s in the controversy aroused by the Contagious Diseases Acts. The split within the suffrage movement over this issue reflected differing views as to whether political rights or sexual and moral questions ought to be the primary concern of the movement.     

Overcoming Inner Division: post-suffrage strategies in the organised German women's movement

German women were working within a context strikingly different from either the USA or the UK following the granting of suffrage in 1918. Focusing on the largest of the bourgeois women's organisations, the Federation of Women's Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF), this article situates the post-suffrage strategies and priorities of the German women's movement within their particular national context. The BDF have been accused of failing to fully utilise the vote as a tool for change, but a study of their journal, Die Frau, shows that it was the weight of external factors that reduced the BDF's impact, rather than any failure of courage or commitment by the women. An overview of German press coverage of female suffrage before, during and after the war sets out the mental landscape within which the women were operating and gives for the first time a much-needed indication of public response to the issue.     

The food movement in Canada: a social movement network perspective

In the Global North, there has been increasing analysis of the ways that alternative food initiatives (AFIs) are developing viable, place-based solutions that challenge the corporate-led industrial food system; however, there has been little study of the interrelationships among them. In an effort to better understand the possibilities for food system transformation, this paper builds on existing studies to investigate the increasing collaborations among AFIs occurring through provincial food networks in Canada. I pay particular attention to the attempts to foster and maintain these networks by exploring the history of collaboration since the late 1970s and the development of provincial networking organizations (PNOs) as central to this process. Contrary to assumptions that AFIs act in isolation, I demonstrate that they are part of actual and existing mobilizations through robust social movement networks. Together, these collaborative efforts may be illustrative of a new wave in food activism that is represented by the emergence of a multi-scaled and cross-sectoral ‘food movement’ – a network of networks.     

Cicely Hamilton's warriors: dramatic reinventions of militancy in the British women's suffrage movement

The campaigns for women's enfranchisement in Britain have been associated with public spectacle, metropolitan activity and sensational acts of militant law-breaking. The circumstances of the development, adaptation and performance of Cicely Hamilton's play, A Pageant of Great Women, provide an insight into the dynamics of local suffrage activism. This forgotten play reached several thousand spectators at a time all over Britain, promoting the activity of women's history-making as much as women's suffrage. It normalised the idea of women's achievements, and the cross-dressing warriors especially, drawn from several countries, unsettled a dominant anglocentric perspective, normalising militancy as national heroism.     

The rhetoric of positioning in women's studies

The article examines the requirement of positioning (or localization) often presented in the recent epistemological discussions of women's studies. The paper argues that these discussions include two different epistemological conceptions. First, there is the moderate idea according to which researchers should explicate their personal and political positions, not only their theoretical starting points. The paper demonstrates that this requirement is not feasible, if imposed on individual researchers. Secondly, there is the more radical view according to which adequate positioning is impossible in principle. Against this relativist notion the paper argues that theories about radical differences are self‐defeating.