Opening of the women's library,London

This article interrogates the ways in which post-feminism and third wave feminism are used interchangeably, both within the academy and in the media. As it identifies the ways in which third wave feminism seeks to define itself as a non-academic discourse, it points up the tensions implicit in the contemporary feminist project. It outlines such popular components of third wave feminism as girl culture, the grrrl movement and BUST magazine, before addressing the arguments concerning agency in such icons as Courtney Love, Madonna and the Spice Girls. Positing that the metonymic gap between the personal and the political allows post-feminism to be a viable alternative to feminism, it argues that the wave paradigm paralyses feminism, pitting generations against one another.     

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.     

'Deeds and Words': The Woman's Press and the Politics of Print

The political and constitutional impact of the early twentieth-century British women's suffrage movement has been the subject of extensive research since the advent of second-wave feminism, yet the broader cultural impact of the movement remains a developing scholarly area. Murray examines the role of the Woman's Press, the publishing house established in 1907 as a strategic component of the Pankhursts' influential Women's Social and Political Union. The press is located within multiple and interpenetrative analytical contexts: examined in turn are its role in the various power struggles of the WSPU and the broader British suffrage movement; its significance as an independent means of cultural production around the contested site of the suffragette; and its ambiguity as a feminist publishing house run by male pro-suffragist and lobbyist, Frederick Pethick Lawrence. The Woman's Press and its central London retail outlet figured prominently in WSPU administration as a material concern-as literature packing department, revenue raiser and recruiting centre. Yet, symbolically, the Woman's Press was also integral to the campaigning of the WSPU to an extent that has generally remained under-examined. As an independent publishing house the press constituted a vital conduit guaranteeing the entry of suffrage arguments into public discourse, and a crucial tool for appropriating and refashioning the contested image of the suffragette in the wider politico-cultural landscape of the day. Acknowledging the significance of the Woman's Press provides both a necessary historical context for the post-1970 feminist press boom, as well as a counterpoint to the ongoing political-financial conundrums that beset its modern descendents.     

Assessing the impact of women's movements

Assessing impact of social movements in general is difficult, raising questions about impact on ‘what’ (laws, policy outcomes, culture, people's lives?) and causality (is the social movement the decisive factor in change?). To assess impact, the FEMCIT project on bodily citizenship chose to focus on new public discourses constructed by the new feminist movements over the past decades. Discourses have material effects on institutions, rules, the allocation of goods and values and the formation of new identities. Focusing on two ‘body’ issues, abortion and prostitution, the project analysed how these movements contested the state and the dominant discourses on these issues in four countries: the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden. Feminist groups generally framed abortion in terms of self-determination and autonomy and made a crucial difference to abortion discourse and law. On prostitution feminist groups developed competing discourses about sex work or sexual oppression and were able to affect policy discourses and law in three of the four countries.     

Scottish women's studies

Abstract

This article outlines the content of the first Women's history course established in Bulgaria, at Sofia University, in 1999. The course focuses on Bulgarian women over the period from 1840 to 1940 and includes discussion of statistical data about Women's lives, the family, education and employment, as well as Women's subjectivities and cultural identities. Attention is also given to the analysis of powerful discourses about Women's role in society and the challenge of the Women's movement to these ideas. Wherever possible, comparative material from other Balkan societies and Western Europe is explored, as well as gender differences between men and women     

Reading women's bodies

Jane Ussher, The Psychology of the Female Body (Routledge) London, 1989; Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Open University Press) Milton Keynes, 1989 (1987); Phillida Bunkle, Second Opinion: The politics of women's health in New Zealand (Oxford University Press) Auckland, 1988; Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Basil Blackwell) Oxford, 1988.     

Biography and the search for women's subjectivity

This paper considers women's biography as an important connecting link between the study of microinteractions of social history and macropolitical structures and transformations. As the search for women's subjectivity requires the fullest possible historical contextualization for the subject of women's biography, identifying the sex-class conditions of women is essential. In studying the structuring of sex classes, it is found that both sexism and racism produce domination by essentializing physical or biological differences. But the dyadic character of gender domination differentiates sexism from all other conditions of exploitation. Because gender power is basically dyadic, interpretative interaction is offered as an appropriate methodological approach to women's biography. Further, when meaning and situation are extended to consciousness and praxis, interpretive interaction can encompass the full range of historical structure which shape sex-class. This theoretical-methodological approach forms the basis for a critique of deconstruction which depoliticized gender research by decentering the subject and dismissing binary oppositions such as gender dyads.     

Nordic women's documentation centres

The Norwegian au pair documentaries Mammaranet (“The Mummy Robbery”) (2006) and Herskap og tenarar (“Masters and Servants”) (2013) tell the stories of two Filipina women who have left behind their children to become au pairs in Norway. The films portray the hardship of au pairing and focus on trafficking and labour and sexual abuse. Both films are problem-orientated, and I explore the way in which they construct the figure of the au pair. I argue that the films draw on a global care chain framework to construct au pairs as mothers who are primarily financially motivated, while their children in the home country are cast as self-evidently suffering. Furthermore, the films cross-cut between stories of sexual abuse and scenes of the au pairs' highly feminized self-presentation. This cross-cutting contributes to a construction of the au pairs as vulnerable “girls”, but also as sexually available women. Using Bhattacharyya's concept of “the exotic”, I argue that this particular construction draws on a colonial discourse that makes unequal racialized power relations appear more attractive to the privileged. In conclusion, I discuss the implicit solutions to the problems presented in the films, and argue that their constructions of au pairs contribute to a certain cultural circulation of “truths” that allows for discourses favouring certain policies—namely closing the scheme to mothers and, eventually, to all au pairs from outside the EU/Schengen Area.