Women in conversation: a wartime social survey in Melbourne,Australia 1941-43

This article examines the gendered dimensions of relationships in the conduct of a major academic Australian social survey in Melbourne in the early years of the Second World War. Despite its grounding in methodology current in Britain at the time, its execution and outcomes mirrored the gendered and classed nature of the survey, with its male direction, middleclass female interviewers, and largely working-class respondents. The value of ‘women's conversations’ was reflected in the fullness of the findings that were made publicly available in subsequent years.     

Book Review: Magic,body and social order

Specifically designed for single‐family use, the type‐planned house of the 1940s was a new form of dwelling. As a social system and in the domestic practice upheld by them, these houses differed from previous housing models in Finland. In rural and urban areas, these architecturally conventional and characterless houses were built using ready‐made type drawings, and according to a fixed set of housing principles. The prevalent view of the proper organization of everyday life reached its most tangible monument in the architecture of these houses; they were “model houses for model families”. Instead of a purely aesthetical perspective, this study analyses the housing ideology and the notions of family and gender implanted in their architecture. Crucial is the concept of dwelling: dwelling is analysed as a cultural signifying system, in which‐spatial arrangement produces and maintains a certain ideology, conventions of behaviour, and notions of family and gender. Accordingly, it controls and orders people's lives, and also structures gender identities at a certain level. In creating a new differentiation of space, the type‐planned house also differentiated the genders.     

Citizenship and social order: gender politics in twentieth-century Norway and Sweden

This article is about the dilemmas embedded in the economic status of married women which have caused some of the main controversies within twentieth-century feminism. In spite of the undoubted success of equal status politics, no final solution to the ambivalent economic position of married women has been found. Even in advanced liberal democracies women are not necessarily included fully in the basic civil right of economic liberty, while their position outside the market economy is either not recognised or is undervalued. These dilemmas are a feature of all industrialised democracies. Nonetheless, the way in which they have been conceived and managed during the twentieth century has differed a great deal between countries. This article uses the case of Norway and Sweden to explore some of these differences.     

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’.     

immigrating into the occupation: Russian-speaking women in Palestinian societies

This article explores sex selective abortion (SSA) as a form of structural violence within the broader notion of women’s ‘protection’ in contemporary India. While SSA tends to be framed more generally within ethical and choice-based frameworks around abortion access and reproductive ‘rights’, and specifically in India around preference for sons as a discriminatory, cultural, technological misogyny, this article argues that sex selective abortion in India needs to be understood as an outcome of broader systemic economic, political and social processes. The deepening of neoliberal values through state policies has impacted significantly on social relations, shaping SSA as a manifestation of structural violence. State-driven policies in India reflect a neoliberal governmentality through state patriarchy that is implicit within the neoliberal developmental, governmental and capitalist paradigm of contemporary India. This article argues that SSA is structurally produced and therefore cannot be remedied through awareness-raising strategies such as beti bachao or financial inclusion as a means to ‘protect’ or ‘save the girl child’. Indeed, it is neoliberal economic forces that actively, though seemingly inadvertently, promote anti-women, sex selective abortion as a reproductive strategy, which is then disciplined through neoliberal governmentality. This highlights SSA as a form of gendered and structural, rather than discriminatory, violence.     

Women on Trial: representation of women in the courtroom in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama

As is well known, women labored under severe disabilities in the Renaissance court system. It was especially difficult for married women to litigate on their own behalf. Widows litigated more frequently, often to address issues of property or inheritance. To date, little attention has been given to the depiction of women at trial in the plays of the period. Unexpectedly, when we look at the trial scenes in the plays, the women are anything but shy and retiring. In the trial scenes examined, married women litigants prove to be forceful advocates of their position, often accusing hegemonic figures of injustice and unfair process. In conclusion, it is suggested that through the vehicle of presumptively vulnerable women defendants, the playwrights could dramatize the problem of overbearing, partial judges, and other problems that plagued the Renaissance legal system.     

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.     

Charismatic women in religion. Power,media and social change

ABSTRACT

‘Charisma’ can be a catch-all term that obfuscates more than it reveals. What it does reveal often says more about the historical and cultural context in which ‘charisma’ was deployed than about its subject. In this introduction we trace the concept’s contextual shifts across its intersections with gender, religion and power. We explore the different ways in which women in the religious sphere have been considered charismatic, thereby addressing Max Weber’s definition of ‘charisma’ as well as its subsequent reinventions in the social sciences and the humanities. Particular focus goes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the mediatization of ‘charisma’ created new opportunities and risks for women in religion.     

Women United for the United Nations: US women advocating for collective security in the cold war

This article details the creation of Women United for the United Nations (WUUN), a coalition of US women's non-governmental organizations created in the wake of the Second World War to advocate for the United Nations and the efficacy of collective security. The article illuminates the strategies the organization used to flourish in the 1950s, an era characterized by suspicion of political activism and conformity for US women. It describes WUUN's initiatives and documents the way the organization clashed with a more radical women's peace group, WOMAN. The article places the discussion of WUUN in the context of work done by other historians on the fate of other US women's organizations in the 1950s and provides a detailed account of the measures WUUN took to navigate the complexities that confronted women activists in the Cold War.