women developing women: Islamic approaches for poverty alleviation in rural Egypt

Through an ethnographic account of a social reform project led by Islamic activist women in the village of Mehmeit in rural Egypt, this article analyses women's Islamic activism as a form of worship. Women's experiences of activism are at the centre of this account, which highlights their attempts to economically and socially develop a destitute rural community. Their development ideals mirror the embedded principles of liberal secular modernity and offer a tangible example of the concomitance of these so-called binaries of religion and secularism in women's religious activism. Normative assumptions regarding religion and secularism as two binary constructs have largely dictated a monolithic view of women who engage in Islamic activism as religious subjects primarily devoted to a spiritual, internal faith. Persistent models of religious selves engaged in a continuous exercise of self-fashioning towards a fixed ‘religious ideal’ overlook the complexity and seamlessness of the desires that animate these subjectivities. Moreover, it is inaccurate to represent participants in Islamic activism as homogenized into one overarching group that adheres to standardized religious membership criteria. Discourses of modernity have also constructed separate spheres of what is defined as religion and secularism. Yet, these spheres, in practice, are not always so neatly demarcated as they are in modern principles. Societies shaped by the historical and temporal dynamics of colonialism, modernization, secularization and nation building projects present more complex and heterogeneous forms of subjectivities in their members. This article illustrates how a theoretical concomitance of religion and secularism opens up new possible considerations of women's activism in Islamic movements. The author argues that the desires and subjectivities of Islamic women that inform their activism are ultimately linked to the historical emergence of secularism and state modernization schemes aimed at transforming Muslim subjects into modern citizens of liberal democracies.     

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.     

The conscientization of women: A rite of self- initiation with the flavour of a religious conversion process

In traditional societies, young men and women are initiated separately into the adult world and, for various reasons, the male rite has typically been much more dramatic and elaborate. In western industrialized society, the formal education system became the initiation rite, par excellence, by which boys passed from childhood and the world of women into the public, adult world of men. By gaining access, albeit belatedly, to this male initiation rite, many women have thus gained access to the public, adult world but have found that they have had to give up being women. Other women have remained with the traditional female initiation rites of marriage and motherhood and have discovered that society does not really consider them to be adults. Another group of women have tried both routes to adulthood and have been unable to integrate their identities as women and adults.When these women get together in consciousness-raising groups they find themselves undergoing a rite of self-initiation made necessary by the fact that neither the traditional female rites of marriage and motherhood nor the masculine rites of formal education are adequate for women who wish to be considered both female and adult. Women in CR groups develop a strong sense of themselves as adult women and then are faced with the crucial question of how to relate to a patriarchal society which does not accept or affirm this new identity. There is a parallel in the process of religious conversion which, if probed, can help feminists to reflect on what are the most effective ways for a minority group to influence the mainstream of society without losing its identity and original values in the process.     

The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture

The normative figure in Western feminism remains the liberal autonomous individual of modernity. ‹Other’ women are those who have their freedom to choose restricted. Typically, ‹other’ women are those burdened by culture and hindered by their communities from entering modernity. If we remain in the terrain of thinking about women as vulnerable or imperilled, and some women as particularly imperilled, as we generally do of Muslim women, we remain squarely within the framework of patriarchy understood as abstracted from all other systems. A modernity/premodernity distinction will continue to invade any projects intending to help Muslim women. This paper shows the persistence of the modernity/premodernity distinction in contemporary debates around applying Sharia law to the settlement of family law disputes under the Arbitration Act in Ontario, Canada. I argue below that in their concern to curtail conservative and patriarchal forces within the Muslim community, Canadian feminists (both Muslim and Non-Muslim) utilized frameworks that installed a secular/religious divide that functions as a colour line, marking the difference between the modern, enlightened West, and tribal, religious Muslims. I suggest that feminist responses might have helped to sustain a new form of governmentality, one in which the productive power of the imperilled Muslim woman functions to keep in line Muslim communities at the same time that it defuses more radical feminist and anti-racist critique of conservative religious forces. I end by exploring how this effect could have been restricted.     

Lavinia seabrooke,gender and state formation in late nineteenth-century South Australia

The strained relations between feminist organisations and the labour movement have often been attributed to the male dominance of the labour movement rather than the influence of class and political loyalties. This article questions that approach. Using the minutes of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society, labour movement organisations, and Glasgow City Council and newspaper accounts, it examines relations between the Independent Labour Party in the west of Scotland and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society. These highlight how the class and political loyalties of feminists from this organisation were as destructive to any potential feminist and non-feminist alliances which would improve the lives of working-class women as the ‘male dominance’ of the Independent Labour Party.     

FROM RESCUE MISSIONS TO DISCIPLINE

This paper maps a shift in emphasis in the representation of Muslim women in Western discourse from that of victims in need of Western rescue to that of active participants in Islamism and the ‘Islamisation’ of the West. Muslim women activists have developed an articulate response to representations that depict them as passive victims, emphasising that many women undertake their religious practices (in particular, those relating to dress) by ‘choice’ and play an active role in resisting patriarchal practices imposed in the name of their religion. Their responses to representations of Muslim women as perpetrators of Islamic extremism who must be disciplined into acquiescing to Western/Enlightenment/secular norms, however, are still evolving.     

Women,the other academics

In Britain, women academics occupy an elite position and therefore have not excited much feminist sympathy. Yet when compared to their male counterparts such women are clearly disadvantaged. This paper analyses three persistent problems British women academics typically encounter. The first involves the coordination, over time, of demands of two ‘greedy institutions’: home and work. The second is the management of colleague relations while occupying token status in a department. The third is the task of understanding and confronting biases reflecting male dominance in what is considered acceptable professional knowledge and practice. What links all three is the marginality, the ‘otherness’ of women academics. Their vulnerability is high and their political potential low; yet by advancing feminist scholarship they can turn their talents to good use.     

Rethinking Monastic Suppressions in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Italy: how women religious negotiated for their communities

Female religious communities and individual women religious confronted the monastic suppressions in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Italy by actively negotiating with authorities both during and after the suppression decrees. The lack of the voices of the suppressed women religious in current scholarship has led scholars to argue for top-down, predetermined reorganization and destruction of religious life in revolutionary and Napoleonic Italy. A comparison of the three main suppression decrees reveals, instead, an evolving approach to religious institutions during this period. The petitions by women religious underscore how compromise and accommodation characterized the interactions between female communities and local and central authorities. The suppression of monasteries was not imposed on monastic women unilaterally; rather, these women actively negotiated the suppressions to optimize the outcome for their communities and for themselves.     

Women in counselling

During the last few years many new types of counselling institutions, offices, firms, and agencies dealing with giving advice have come into existence. In Poland, women's participation in these new institutions as well as in the traditional counselling offices differs depending on the type of problems which are solved there. Women more often fulfill the role of counsellor in counselling offices dealing with health, family, and childcare, which are traditionally treated as women's issues. At the same time, more women than men apply for counsel in these types of counselling offices. By contrast, in the new types of counselling/guidance offices dealing with economic, legal, and management problems, a woman counsellor appears more rarely than a man counsellor. When there are women in these new types of counselling offices, these women are forced to continuously demonstrate their competence and expertise. Women also more rarely use counsel given in the matters of economy, law, and management, but, as counsellors noticed, if a woman applies for advice, she is usually better informed and better prepared for taking advantage of the advice.     

Educated doubt: women,religion and the challenge of higher education,c. 1870-1920[1]

Abstract

The advent of higher education for women, with its emphasis on reason, on scientific thought and on critical approaches to knowledge, constituted a potential threat to religious belief. The stories of male ‘doubters’ are legion but what happened to thoughtful women, confronted with challenges to their belief systems? This article shows that educated doubt was not only a male affliction. Women responded to the challenge in a variety of ways. Some rejected belief, turning their religious impulses to aesthetic or social ends. Others brought scientific reasoning to bear on religious phenomena, hoping to ‘prove’ the existence of spirituality. Some saw in science and reason a further manifestation of the spiritual impulse; in education further possibilities of the life of the spirit. A common thread unites the responses, the search for a voice, an authority which women sought in the new secular institutions of higher learning.     

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.     

‘First wave’ feminism in nineteenth-century France: Class, family and religion

The history of ‘first wave’ feminism in France raises several questions of relevance to the contemporary women's movement. Organized French feminism began during the struggle to replace a Catholic monarchy with a rationalistic, republican form of government. Because of the allegiance of most Frenchwomen to the church, however, even the republican and socialist supporters of feminist reform in educational institutions and in civil rights opposed political participation by women. Feminists, who themselves emphasized reforms in family law and economic opportunities, formed numerous organizations, published journals and held national and international meetings, but remained less a movement than a mosaic of leaders and groups divided by class, religion and personal rivalry. More importantly, they were estranged from the majority of Frenchwomen by questions pertaining to the relationship of women to the traditional patriarchal family, which continued to play a dominant role in the religious, economic and social life of the country. Internal conflict developed over protective legislation and women's ‘right to work’, while external opposition centered about the politically reactionary potential of religious women, and the alleged ‘anti-patriotic’ individualism of those who rejected motherhood as the ‘natural vocation’ and only career of women. By pitting feminism against a particular form of the family, antifeminists obscured the reality of women's oppression and succeeded in alienating the potential support for feminism of most Frenchwomen.     

What Was Margaret Thatcher's Legacy for Women?

This article considers the legacy for women of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), Britain's first and to date only woman prime minister. It is suggested that although Thatcher had to struggle against many of the sexist prejudices of her day to achieve her political ambitions, she was no feminist. The hard ladder up which she had climbed was drawn up and not extended to other women. Yet for some women, such as the Spice Girls, she was the pioneer of their ideology of girl power. Overall, it is concluded that Thatcher was a polarising figure whose legacy is one of much divisiveness, in which the divisions between women is only one of many strands.     

Entering Religious Life,Claiming Subjectivity: Irish nuns, 1930s–1960s

Despite the number of Irish women who entered religious life, especially in the decades following independence, very little is known about their motivations for joining or experiences therein. Based on their oral histories, this article explores how Irish women religious articulated their attraction to religious life. Providing the reader with a contextual background in which to place the narratives, it highlights the significance of several factors affecting the women’s decision to enter and, in particular, illuminates the claims to subjectivity revealed in the women’s accounts. Through varied responses, the women collectively rejected any notion that they were forced into religious life, asserting the decision to enter as truly their own. Comparing the ways the women framed their vocation with their families’ response to it, the article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital to explore the ways in which women are positioned as ‘social objects’ but present themselves as ‘subjects’.     

From Rice to Prawns: Economic Transformation and Agrarian Structure in Rural Bangladesh

This article investigates the changes in agrarian structure brought about by the development of export-oriented freshwater prawn cultivation in south-western Bangladesh. Prawn farming in this particular context has spread among agricultural producers so rapidly within the last decade that many of the agrarian institutions have been carried over or been adapted to the new production regime. Thus the institutions governing landholdings and contractual labour arrangements involved in prawn farming have many things in common with those involved in rice production. While landholders generally have benefited from the new prawn economy, it is difficult to say whether the position of landless men and women from poor households has improved on a sustainable basis. Thus the employment gains of local male workers are currently under threat from cheaper migrants, while new jobs for women from poor households are highly intensive, potentially hazardous, and poorly paid.     

‘The salvation of them’: emigration to North America from the nineteenth-century Irish women's convict prison

ABSTRACT

The systematic transportation of criminals from Ireland to the colonies ceased in 1853 and was officially abolished by the Penal Servitude Act of 1857. Yet this did not end the international movement of Irish women from the convict prison. Using the gratuity earned through their industry, and with the assistance of the prison department, religious men and women, philanthropic societies, or family members and friends, women departed Ireland from the convict prison. Assistance took the form of passage tickets, money, clothing or provisions for the trip, accommodation before or after the journey, as well as contacts in the new world. This article, based on the overseas movement of discharged female prisoners in the wake of transportation, argues that emigration from prison was not an attempt to export Ireland's serial offenders. While the Irish authorities might have wished to rid Ireland of women with criminal records, increasingly rigid immigration regulations prevented this practice from developing on a large scale.     

First Nations Women,Games, and Sport in Pre- and Post-Colonial North America

The historiography of games among First Nations women still is in its infancy. Yet Indian women had access to a wide range of recreational activities that were deeply rooted in each stage of their lives and more especially in all that was ceremonial, ritual, magical and religious. This paper proposes a synthesis of the history and cultural anthropology of these practices in the American Indian history of pre- and post-Columbian North America, through to the end of the Indian Wars in the 1890s. It explores how a gendered approach allows renewed analysis of the contact between traditional American Indian games and modern sports and examines the impact of sporting acculturation on these activities at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The case of the Fort Shaw ‘Blues’ is used to explore the complex relationship that American and native cultures hold with modern women's sports.     

Breaking the Silence: Gender Mainstreaming and the Composition of the European Court of Justice

Why has it taken so long for member states to appoint women to the Court of Justice? Despite having won relatively significant policy instruments for equal treatment at work and high levels of legislative representation, women in the European Union have been slow to extend the demand for gender mainstreaming to courts. Prior to 1999, the Court of Justice had had one woman member until Ireland appointed Fidelma Macken in late 1999, and Germany appointed Ninon Colneric and Austria appointed Christine Stix-Hackl Advocate General in 2000.The 1995 U.N. meeting in Beijing was a catalyst for the demand for balanced participation of women and men in decision-making processes within the E.U., and it coincided with Sweden, Finland and Austria joining and championing the cause of gender equality. In 1999, the Commission published a report on women in the judiciary and women lawyers began to organize across Europe. After tracing the appointment process, I review the European Parliament's role in championing women on the Court and consider recent developments. Courts, particularly supranational and federal courts, are representative institutions even if their representative function differs from legislatures. Non-merit factors have always been a factor in judicial appointments and thus the demand for women on the bench is not a terrible deviation from merit. An all male bench is no longer legitimate.