The Movement for Women's Emancipation Within the Bengali Muslim Community in India

This article examines the changing role of Muslim women in Bengal in the early twentieth century. Lack of education and backwardness in social ideas were responsible for women's inferior position in society. Scholars such as Ghulam Murshid, Gautam Neogi and Meredith Borthwick have shown in depth how Muslim Bengali women worked to improve their own position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; key figures included Begum Rokea Sakhawat Hossain, Begum Shamsunnahar Mahmud and Begum Sufia Kamal. This article focuses on obstacles to social progress as well as on the positive role played by a section of the Bengali Muslim community in enabling modernisation through a programme of social reform designed to emancipate women from their traditional position of bondage in the male‐dominated society. It examines the writings (in Urdu) of women involved in the social reform movement and focuses in turn on three issues: purdah, women's rights, and education for women.     

the reinvention of feminism in Pakistan

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.     

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN IN MULTICULTURALISM?

Abstract This article discusses the need to re-imagine multiculturalism and feminism in order to better accommodate women in minority cultures who are religious. It begins and ends with comments about multiculturalism and ‘difference feminism’ in Australia. In the body of the paper I use anthropological field-work in Indonesia, first to show that culture and religion are not separate and immutable, and secondly to show how Muslim women in the women's movement in Indonesia are using Islam to build a multicultural discourse. Finally I apply my findings about Muslim women activists in multicultural discourse in Indonesia to multiculturalism in Australia.     

Field-faring women: the resistance of women who worked in the fields of nineteenth-century England

In nineteenth-century England, women worked on farms at many different tasks. They frequently did laborious, repetitive work in the fields. In the 1860s this labour was defined as unfeminine by the middle class. The women who did it were described as unsexed and immoral. Working-class radicals took up and adopted this imagery in order to demand a male breadwinning wage when they fought their employers. However, the women also directly challenged their employers' authority and were frequently at odds with the development of that new male working-class respectability which stressed women's role as wives and mothers. This paper looks at the resistances of the field women and the response to their action by the radical, mainstream and feminist press of the second half of the nineteenth century. It highlights the complex relationship between class and gender.     

The Conflicting Interests of Women's Organizations and the League of Nations on the Question of Married Women's Nationality in the 1930s

This article investigates the question of legal equality in citizenship and nationality in the inter-war years. The first conference for the codification of international law was hosted by the League of Nations in The Hague in 1930. One of the topics of the conference was married women's nationality, and international women's organizations did everything in their power to persuade the conference that married women deserved to be treated equally to non-married women and to men. Women lobbied the League, but they were ultimately unsuccessful. The study highlights the conflicting aims of a movement struggling for social and political change and the official aims of an international organization. Whereas previous research has focused on the actions of the women's organizations, this article directs its interest towards the interaction between the League of Nations and the women's organizations. In questions regarding women's rights and claims for equality the League of Nations adapted an overly cautious, even conservative, position. However, the article shows that the international discourse provided arguments and documents useful in national struggles. This will be illustrated by the debate on independent nationality in the Swedish feminist press.     

The victorian female civilising mission and women's aspirations towards priesthood in the Church of England

This article analyses the effects of the Victorian female civilizing mission, with its central motif of spiritual womanhood, in shaping women's aspirations towards the Anglican priesthood during the twentieth century. The considerable development of nineteenth-century women's ex officio ministry is documented, and the ensuing clash in early twentieth-century male/clerical and female perspectives on women's appropriate role within church life is analysed. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the legacy of the Victorian civilising mission evident within the post-1960 Anglican debate over women's ordination.     

‘Purifying’ the public world: feminist vigilantes in late Victorian England

In late nineteenth-century England, a number of feminists confronted prostitution through the closing of brothels and the expulsion of prostitutes from places of entertainment. Feminist historians have either understood this behaviour as reflective of feminist' powerlessness within the largely non-feminist movement for social purity, or they have neglected the behaviour and concentrated on the aspects of these women' work that appear more positive to feminists today. Neither approach attempts to understand why women took this more repressive stance and thought of it as feminist. To understand the actions of these women, it is necessary to recognise that their vision of a ‘purified’ public and private world was often informed by religious beliefs and adherence to temperance. Concern with the morality of public space also related to women' desire for safety in public places. And their ‘repressive’ and statist actions related in part to feminist philanthropist' changing attitude toward local government.     

Property and proper chastity: Women's land rights in South Asia today

Bina Agarwal's ambitious and wide‐ranging book, A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), is reviewed. Agarwal's argument is that women in South Asia should have the same land rights as men. She considers, in detail, the pervasiveness with which such land rights are absent (although they do exist in certain limited areas), why this is so, and the means by which such rights might be obtained. Among the issues raised are: the need for women's organisations at the village level, whether legislation on its own can confer genuine rights (the answer is ‘no'), how control of women's sexuality connects with male control of land, and regional differences within India (especially between North and South). The book is seen to be a magisterial study of high quality. The one criticism made of it is the implication of Agarwal's theoretical discussion that gender ideologies are determined by economic causes. This is contested.

A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, Bina Agarwal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp.xxii + 572. £60 (hardback); £24.95 (paperback). ISBN 81 85618 63 1 and 64 X.     

troublesome threesome: feminism,anthropology and Muslim women's piety

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.     

Women's Citizenship and the First World War: general remarks and a case study of women's enfranchisement in Austria and Germany

Historians' views about the impact of World War I on women's citizenship have diverged. Some scholars have emphasized that the war changed cultural understandings of suffrage due to women's patriotism and dedication to the war effort. Others have underlined that the politics of electoral reform determined whether or not women attained voting rights. Based on the cases of Austria and Germany where women were enfranchised in the context of revolutionary unrest triggered by the war, this article argues that the political process was in fact crucial. However, the claim of women's suffrage during the war is to be contextualized within a general understanding of republican citizenship and the concept of the ‘citizen soldier’. This discourse was essential to keeping the issue alive during the war. Nonetheless, further studies are still required to assess the war's impact on women and citizenship in the subjective sense of participation.     

Gender,resistance and land: interlinked struggles over resources and meanings in South Asia

This article examines the nature of women's resistance to gender inequities in resource distribution and ideological representation. It argues that to understand how women perceive these inequities it is necessary to take into account not only their overt protests but also the many covert forms their resistance might take. At the same time, to significantly alter gendered structures of property and power it appears necessary to move beyond 'individual-covert' to 'group-overt' (organized collective) resistance. These issues are examined here especially in the context of women's struggles for land rights and gender equality in South Asia. Although historically South Asian women have been important participants in peasant movements, these movements have not been typified by women demanding independent land rights or contesting iniquitous gender relations within the movements and within their families. Some recent challenges in this direction indicate that attaining gender equality in the distribution of productive resources will require a simultaneous struggle against constraining ideological constructions of gender, including (in many regions) associated social practices such as purdah. And in both types of struggle (namely concerning resources and gender ideologies), group-overt resistance is likely to be of critical importance.     

Nothing Special? Propaganda and Women's Roles in Late First World War Britain

Women's roles and work did not dramatically change during the First World War; their contributions as citizens simply received greater recognition. This article explores women's roles as subjects, objects and producers of National War Aims Committee propaganda in Britain during 1917–18. It examines differing representations of, and outlines the production of, ‘special’ propaganda for women, discussing women's interactions with and employment by the Committee. Finally, it analyses a series of articles which mixed patriotic rhetoric, practical domestic tips and observations on women's ‘new’ work. Far from uncritically accepting their ‘special’, separate place, the evidence suggests that women, as both objects and producers of propaganda, engaged with it on their own terms as British citizens.     

Jane Eyre's Daughters: the feminist missions of Mary Carpenter and Josephine Butler in India

The nineteenth-century literature served as a theatrical space wherein culture and politics merged to constitute women's subjectivity. Charlotte Brontë's literary imagination of the heroine's ‘mission’ in Jane Eyre heralded Mary Carpenter's reform of Indian women's education and Josephine Butler's campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in India. This article explores the way in which the writings of both feminists betray imperial/anti-imperial and domestic/political aspects of their activities, as Brontë represents such complex issues through the deliberate articulation of the protagonist's subject-position, seeking the configuration of the female political network which stemmed from Jane's individual engagement with nineteenth-century gender politics.     

beyond emancipation: subjectivities and ethics among women in Europe's Islamic revival communities

This article addresses the complex reflections regarding gender relations expressed by women active in the contemporary Islamic revival movements in Europe (especially France and Germany). Much recent research conducted among these groups aims to counter the rather negative accounts prevailing in public discourses on gender and Islam. This literature notably argues that women's conscious turn to Islam is not necessarily a reaffirmation of male domination, but that it constitutes a possibility for agency and empowerment. However, when faced with certain ‘traditionalist’ positions defended by these women, even this well-meaning literature seems precarious, left in a state of uncertainty. Taking this puzzlement as a point of departure, this contribution aims to think about the dilemmas involved in articulating a language for women's dignity and self-realization, which competes with dominant languages of equality, individual rights and autonomy. This project is rendered even more intricate by the fact that these pious Muslim women socialized in Europe have also been partly fashioned by the liberal discourses against which they want to position themselves.     

Matilda sturge: ‘renaissance woman’ 1

Abstract

This article notes the virtual exclusion of women from accounts of the ‘Renaissance’ within late nineteenth-century British Quakerism. A focus upon a hitherto neglected figure, Matilda Sturge (1829-1903), author and Quaker minister, reveals her long-standing involvement in the aspects of Quakerism crucial to the Quaker Renaissance and as an active participant in the debates which preceded it. But Matilda Sturge also was active in the Home Mission movement, a project of Evangelical Friends, which has generally been represented as antithetical to the liberals of the Quaker Renaissance. Foregrounding women's experience introduces new perspectives on late nineteenth-century British Quakerism.     

“Norwegian Women Got Gender Equality Through Their Mothers' Milk,But Anti-racism Is Another Story”—An Analysis of Power and Resistance in Norwegian Feminist Discourse

This article seeks to explore majority feminists' difficulties in addressing minority women activists' claims in contemporary Norway. The article identifies different representations of feminism in the Norwegian women's movement. Findings indicate that minority women are excluded in the hegemonic representation of feminism by being defined as “different” and not included in this understanding of “women”. Inspired by discourse analysis, intersectionality, and perspectives from black and post-colonial feminist theory, the article argues that the hegemonic representation of feminism is so persistent because it resonates with dominant representations of “Norwegianness”, racism, integration, and gender equality. Within the hegemonic representation of feminism, the asymmetrical relationship between “immigrant women” and “Norwegian women” is unreflected, and racial horizons of understanding (race thinking) are not acknowledged. Racism is not considered to be a relevant issue in the Norwegian context and is thus silenced. The article also identifies counter-hegemonic representations that challenge the hegemonic understanding; however, these understandings are still marginal within feminist discourse in Norway.     

Edith södergran and the sexual discourse of the fin‐de‐siècle

This article focuses on women's business positions in Swedish porn publishing from the 1950s to the 1970s, i.e. when pornography was legalized and when sexually explicit magazines made their commercial breakthrough. The research draws on statistical information on women's entrepreneurial roles in the overall publishing industry, which is then compared with women's agency in porn publishing. According to the findings, women seem to have had a slightly more central role in pornography than within the mainstream publishing industry. The analysis is also expanded with details about a few key female pornography entrepreneurs, tracing their publications and business strategies connected to the Freedom of the Press legislation. It is argued that women's presence in pornographic print and in the overall publishing industry were in fact similar, with a high ratio of family businesses. Women's entrepreneurship in pornography thus followed a more general historical pattern whereby women engaged in small-scale business with relatively low barriers to entry.     

Feminist Contestations of Institutional Domains in Iran

Iranian Feminists outside Iran are divided on women's positions in Iran under the Islamic state. Some have argued that the process of Islamization has marginalized women. Others have argued that the dynamic nature of Shari'a interpretation and the debate among religious scholars in Iran have shaped the indigenous forms of feminist consciousness, feminisms and women's involvement in the process olf change. This paper, based on field research, is challenging both views. It will be argued that the contradictions of the Islamic state and institutions led to the process of feminist consciousness. In the period 1990–2000, Muslim and secular feminists in Iran have found their own ways of coming together, making demands and pressurizing the State and institutions to reform laws and regulations in favour of women's rights. But women are divided by the nature of their diversity. As their alliance has challenged the limitation of the Islamic state, the breakdown of their alliance (2000–2001), could have a great impact not only on gender relations, but also on the process of democratization and secularization.     

the home,the veil and the world: reading Ismat Chughtai towards a ‘progressive’ history of the Indian women's movement

This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the ‘waves’, ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ of the Euro-American women's movement and adopted to postcolonial women's movements, such as those in India, Jamaica and South Africa, is belied by the piecemeal legislative gains won by activist efforts. Some of the questions governing my enquiry are: What lessons can a questioning of teleology teach us about the gains and losses of postcolonial women's movements? If the alternative to teleology is, as I suggest, a genealogy, then what constitutes a genealogical enquiry into the women's movement in India? In face of apparent and self-acknowledged losses and ineffectiveness in recent times, would the movement's apparent unity across religious differences be a way of initiating such an inquiry or is another mode of analysis required? The paper directs attention to the Indian women's movement's attempts at bringing together women of different religious persuasions, legislative, and religious edicts related to Muslim women's right to co-habitation and divorce, and ‘cases’ that serve as testing points of the movement's struggle against religious and state authority. It also points to the neglected factor of economic security for women as a way in which a genealogical inquiry can proceed so as to strengthen the legislation and the movement itself.