Striking fictions: Women writers and the making of a proletarian realism

The development of proletarian realism in the United States was part of a political strategy, although it was distinct from the Communist Party programme, which sought to portray a united, revolutionary working class. However, four of the earliest and most influential proletarian novels show that when writers focussed on women as both labouring and sexual subjects, the literary format was compelled to recognise a pattern of difference which conflicted with that goal of unity. Written in response to a 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, Mary Heaton Vorse's Strike! (1930). Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread (1932), Olive Tilford Dargan's Call Home the Heart (1932) and Dorothy Myra Page's Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932) all conflict with the very literary and political conventions in which they aim to operate and, in so doing, add a significant dimension to what has been generally regarded as a formulaic and predictable genre.     

Women and American history

Psychoanalysis and Feminism, by Juliet Mitchell. New York : Pantheon Books. 435 pp. $8.95.     

Life (Hi)story writing: The relationship between talk and text

This paper is based on my experience of life (hi)story work with Aboriginal women. It will focus mainly on the development of a collaborative methodology between Patsy Cohen and myself and the process of creating the text Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs ¹.

Life (hi)story writing lies uneasily on the boundary between biography and autobiography and as such challenges many of our assumptions about telling and writing a life. It has traditionally been regarded as ‘an extensive record of a life told to and recorded by another who then edits and writes the life as though it were autobiography‘². More recently feminist researchers have redefined this process to emphasise its collaborative nature ‘in life history, two stories together produce one. A speaker and a listener ask, respond, present and edit a life‘³. Such a definition focuses our attention on the relationship, the inevitable power relations involved in the processes of the production of knowledge, the interface between talk and text and the need for alternative models to conventional biography and autobiography. Both the process and the text produced by this method are potentially deconstructive of conventional autobiography and biography. They are not simply deconstructive, however, as new narratives and new forms can be created out of this process which enable us to re‐evaluate the telling of all our lives.     

Bosnian refugee women in (re)settlement: gender relations and social mobility

Bosnian refugee women adapted more quickly than their male partners to their host environments in Vienna and New York City because of their self-understanding and their traditional roles and social positions in the former Yugoslavia. Refugee women's integration into host societies has to be understood through their specific historical experiences. Bosnian women in exile today continue to be influenced by traditional role models that were prevalent in the former Yugoslavia's 20th-century patriarchal society. Family, rather than self-fulfillment through wage labor and emancipation, is the center of life for Bosnian women. In their new environment, Bosnian refugee women are pushed into the labor market and work in low-skill and low-paying jobs. Their participation in the labor market, however, is not increasing their emancipation in part because they maintain their traditional understanding of zena (women) in the patriarchal culture. While Bosnian women's participation in low-skill labor appeared to be individual families' decisions more in New York City than in Vienna, in the latter almost all Bosnian refugee women in my sample began to work in the black labor market because of restrictive employment policies. In contrast to men, women were relatively nonselective and willing to take any available job. Men, it seems, did not adapt as quickly as women to restrictions in the labor market and their loss of social status in both host societies. Despite their efforts, middle-class families in New York City and Vienna experienced substantial downward mobility in their new settings. Women's economic and social downward mobility in (re)settlement, however, did not significantly change the self-understanding of Bosnian women. Their families' future and advancements socially and economically, rather than the women's own independence and emancipation remained the most important aspect of their being.     

Women have servants and men never eat: issues in reading gender,using the case study of mass-observation's 1937 day-diaries

Abstract

The category ‘gender’ has become axiomatic to feminist analysis: analysing the dynamics and outcomes of gender has come to be seen as constituting ‘what academic feminists do’. Within feminist analysis, gender is positioned as ana prioricharacteristic of social life; and gender is also analytically privileged as the most salient characteristic of people and social situations. Both assumptions are challenged. This article argues instead that gender is not a discovery, something innately ‘there’ in social life, but is rather to be understood as an invention, an imposed analytic category of great utility for academic feminism, but also one which creates as many analytic troubles as it solves. The article problematises thea prioriand privileged status of gender within feminist analysis by discussing various interpretational issues involved in analysing a set of day-diaries written by women and men for Mass-Observation in 1937, in particular focusing on reading and writing as interpretational acts which are often treated as analytically transparent. Here, however, this epistemological bracketing is suspended, and instead both are scrutinised in analytical detail. Although the argument is discussed in relation to these specific historical materials, it is argued that the same epistemological issues arise in relation to the analysis of all kinds of research materials, whether historical or present-day, for reading and writing are the crucial elements of interpretation, and interpretation is itself central to feminist as to all other analysis.     

Silences: Irish Women and Abortion

This article considers the forces which act to prevent women in Ireland from speaking about their experiences of abortion. It considers the various forms such silencing can take and the complexity of feelings and circumstance which women who have had abortions are subject to. In so doing it raises important questions about the way public debate about abortion between pro-choice and pro-life arguments - couched in terms of rights - acts to further silence women. Finally, the article calls for the creation of a new public and intellectual space in which the complexities of the issues can be realized. A new public space such as this could then facilitate the enactment of permissive legislation which in turn could enable women to decide the best pregnancy option available for them at any particular moment in their lives.