Women's work,artisanal discourse,and community: a response to Sheila Blackburn

This article is a comment on Sheila Blackburn's response to the author's original essay, ‘Gender Constructions and Gender Relations in Cotton and Chain-making in England: a contested and varied terrain’, which appeared in Women's History Review (6[3], 1997). As the author repeats in this response, the apparently dominant artisanal discourse of the male chainmakers of nineteenth-century Walsall, supporting the exclusion of female labor from the trade, was undermined by conditions existing in Cradley Heath, where the community depended on that labor. Foregrounding this division regarding gender understandings, it is argued, provides a vantage point from which to gain a fuller and more accurate picture of the ways in which those understandings, as well as gender and community relations, were negotiated in one industry towards the end of the nineteenth century     

Women's Voices in Swedish Towns and Cities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: municipal franchise,polling, eligibility and strategies for universal suffrage

This article examines women's polling and eligibility in the municipal elections in Swedish cities and towns in the decades round the 1900 turn of the century. The aim is to present the patterns of suffrage, voting behaviours and representation that emerge from statistics produced by the women's movement and to discuss how these relate to the women's movement's strategies for women's political citizenship and national suffrage. The results are furthermore analysed in comparison with eighteenth-century conditions, when legally competent women who paid taxes could vote in some elections.     

Women's right to work: The interplay of state,market and women's agency

This article addresses questions central to the conception of women's citizenship: Do women have the same right to wage work as men have? That is, do women have the same access to and chances to keep jobs as men? Is women's right to employment perceived as an individual right, disconnected from men's traditional prerogative to hold jobs as breadwinners? Women's right to work is conceptualized as a complex structural and ideological construct, shaped by the interplay of the labour market, welfare state and women's agency. The empirical analysis takes one of the Scandinavian welfare states, Norway, as its main case. The study concludes that women's individual right to work was significantly strengthened from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.     

Shaping the online fat acceptance movement: talking about body image and beauty standards

Over the past decade, in Canada and the United States, blogs have become a popular and important space for fat women and their allies to create and further develop discursive strategies to contest the gendered anti-fat discourses perpetuated by the media, governments and the field of medicine and institutions of public health (e.g., Elliot, C. (2007). Journal of Canadian Studies, 41, 134–149. Gimlin, D. (2002). Body work: Beauty and self-image in American culture. Berkeley: University of California Press; Herdon, A. M. (2006). Social Semiotics, 15, 127–141. Rice, C. (2007). Women's Studies International Forum, 30, 158–174. Currently, popular discourses pertaining to fat people, particularly women, tend to range from larger bodies implicating a ‘moral deficit’ to a ‘risky behaviour’ to ‘political discrimination’ where elements from each discourse shape how fat women's bodies are read within the broader culture (Fikkan, J. L., & Rothblum, E. D. (2011). Sex Roles, 66, 575–592. Kwan, S. (2009). Sociological Inquiry, 79, 25–50. These messages in positioning the thin body as the ideal body are embedded in neoliberal discourses around citizenship that, in emphasizing personal responsibility, encourage (sometimes) punishing regimens of strict diets and exercise, and perpetuate an image of responsible citizenship as an extension of modern interpretations (Herdon, 2006). Using content and thematic analysis, we systematically analyze how four female self-identified fat acceptance (FA) bloggers discuss beauty standards and body image as a means to challenge these discourses. Findings suggest bloggers import elements from LBGTQ movements to extend dominant discursive strategies, model alternative forms of fat embodiment, and address the economic marginalization of fat women in industry. Moreover, through discussions on beauty and body image, bloggers use online spaces to contest anti-fat discourses and to develop discursive strategies that move beyond the binary of fat as a lifestyle choice, and body size as biologically or genetically determined that dominate the fat acceptance movement.     

activism,imagination and writing: Avtar Brah reflects on her life and work with Les Back

Avtar Brah (AB) was interviewed by Les Back (LB) on 3 July 2009 at a colloquium held to mark her retirement where, inter alia, her work was discussed. The interview is a reflection on her politics, activism and scholarship. It touches on some key moments of her life.     

Power,Danger, and Control: Slave Women's Perceptions of Wilderness in the Nineteenth Century

In 1979, along with several other women, Patricia Reaux led her Houston neighborhood in a fight against a local landfill (Blum 284-335).     

Women in the world of work: Past,present, and future

Women have not been usually credited with much Utopian writing, but in fact a number of women writers have projected societies which seek to improve the condition of their sex. This paper examines three eighteenth century English women writers's ideas of feminist utopias: Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal, Sarah Robinson Scott's Millenium Hall, and Clara Reeve's Plans of Education. It discusses their ideas on the rationale and organization of communities of women and how these communities could extend their benefits to society as a whole. It will also discuss the limitations of the thinking of these women for the reform of society especially in regard to woman's place.     

Recognising Place,Space and Nation in Researching Women's Movements: Sisterhood and After

Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project has attempted to capture regional and national as well as ethnic diversity within the complex geographical and political entities of the United Kingdom. We argue against generalising about the UK or ‘British’ movement, important as the cities of England and specifically London have been to the development of political mass, acknowledging the independent networks in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Our findings suggest that in contrast to English activists' tendency to be suspicious of the state, in the ‘Celtic periphery’ of Wales, Scotland and – more complicatedly – Northern Ireland, feminists have more often sought state–level political opportunities to advance claims within these jurisdictions.