British Women Missionaries in Nineteenth‐Century China

There were only a few women among the first Protestant missionaries to settle in China, and most were married, yet by the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of missionaries were women, many of them single. This article focusses on British women missionaries, discussing their motivation for going so far at a time when women were supposed to be confined to the world of home and the family. It looks at their lives in China, the role models they presented to Chinese women, and their own rather conservative views of what their influence should be.     

Dehumanizing representations of women: the shaping of hostile sexist attitudes through animalistic metaphors*

Women are frequently depicted as non-human objects or animals. While female animalization has typically been conceptualized in the psychological literature as communicating a unitary perception of women, linguistic research suggests that there are at least two distinct animalizing linguistic metaphors for women that depict women at opposite ends of a sex-based power differential: ‘women-are-predators’ and ‘women-are-prey’. Are these linguistic metaphors able to shape sexist attitudes towards women? US Male and female undergraduates read an article, which concerned women voters in an election year, containing language that described women as predatory, prey-like, or in a humanized manner (baseline). They then reported their ambivalent sexist attitudes towards women in general. Consistent with both metaphors’ emphasis on sex-based power differentials, both male and female participants, who read about predatory women, exhibited greater agreement with hostile sexist attitudes than participants who read about prey-like women. This study suggests that the continued transmission of animalizing metaphors for women may help perpetuate prejudicial beliefs about appropriate roles for women in society. Media communicators might learn to identify and eliminate the use of the animalizing terms in their own work.     

The Female Body,Work, and Reproduction in Deland,Cather, and Dreiser

After the turn of the century and in large part motivated by the Suffragist movement, women in America were working both to support families at home and for surplus spending money, as Nan Enstad documents. Census reports from the time reveal women working at everything from menial labor to banking and canalboat captaining (Albertine 240-49). Correspondingly, the popular literature of the early twentieth century tells the stories of working- class women in which work, instead of men, becomes the seductive force from which young women must be rescued (Hapke 6). In spite of the popularity of these dime-novels, contemporaneous works like Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman (1911) and Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) also exist that show working women as executing important leadership work, instead of factory work or domestic labor, that was not typically assigned to women at the time. Furthermore, in going beyond the common turn-of-the-century tale of the oppressed factory girl, these works instead show an important and unique relationship between women and work that has yet to be considered by scholars of American literature.     

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.     

Margaret Thatcher is my sister: Counselling on divisions between women

This paper looks at the ways in which women are divided from themselves and each other as women: at the internalised oppression which results from THE oppression of patriarchy, at the systematic mistreatment of women as a group by men as a group reinforced by the social structures of male power. It also looks at the ways in which women are divided from each other as a result of other oppressive systems such as class and/or race or religion or physical ability or age.The paper then describes how the particular theory and practice of Re-evaluation Counselling can be used to ‘deconstruct’ or ‘discharge’ the internalised oppression of patriarchy and other oppressive systems, making the principles of Women's Liberation and sisterhood a practical possibility for ‘everywoman’ and all women—including Margaret Thatcher. Throughout, the word ‘patriarchy’ is used to mean the system of male power usually regarded as synonymous with sexism.The paper includes a basic summary of Re-evaluation Counselling theory and practice.     

Gender,Care, and the Normalization of Violence: Similarities between Occupational Violence and Intimate Partner Violence in Finland

According to the statistics, violence against women is quite common in Finland, particularly in partner relationships and in care work. The present article looks at the similarities in the ways in which victims of occupational violence in care work and victims of intimate partner violence understand their experiences of violence. The commonalities among interpersonal relations are highlighted in order to offer new insights to the analysis of gender in research on occupational violence. Drawing on empirical data and research literature on the experiences of violence of Finnish women, this article suggests that minimization, naturalization and legitimization of the encountered violence is typical for women in care work as well as for quite ordinary women in their intimate relationships.

The article identifies gendered ideals of caring as an area overlapping and in disjunction with violence at work and at home. These contribute to the ways in which women tend to belittle the impact of violence targeted at them in both these spheres of life. Women are traditionally assumed to be responsible for taking care of others and for maintaining interpersonal relations. In the Finnish context, the responsibility for care is associated with an assumption of endurance that Finnish women show even in violent situations. However, the complexities involved in the phenomenon of interpersonal violence give rise to a need of conceptualizing gender in a more multi‐faceted manner than as a binary opposition between men and women. While analysing the gendered meanings of care we should bear in mind the dynamic nature of gender as a process of signification.     

Family law,family law politics and family politics

The analysis of state institutions where the state is geared towards the patriarchal family shows that it aims—in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, at least—at abandoning women to a civic freedom where they lack protection and real rights. Women are ‘emancipated’ in the true sense of the word by the liberalisation of divorce laws, which is accompanied by drastically reducing maintenance claims of divorced women.This development which—at first glance—seems to be in men's interests only, at the same time assists in the development of conditions where women, historically placed in the position of object, can gain the position of subject and lead a fight for equal changes in a society that guarantees to them (though only on paper) legal equality. These conditions will make women fight to gain effective equality.Every effort is made through family politics and the application of patriarchal family ideology to force women to retire rather than fight. However, all these legal and ideological efforts will finally be in vain, because a family ideology that pretends protection and security, while the law systematically cuts down this protection, cannot be sufficiently strong to fool the female half of the population.     

Trade union censorship

This article describes the author's experience of commisioned reseach, outlining its main findings and the response of the funding body to the final report. The research examined the effects of shiftwork on women. It was found that the sexual division of labour within the family in Britain makes it difficult for women to work certain hours, including the ‘normal’ full-time day hours, and so hours of work can discriminate against women with responsibility for young children. Protective legislation is not the cause of inequality in wages and affords some protection to women from certain hours of work in industries that are covered by these laws. Trade union attitudes and practices towards women at local level help to reinforce rather than transform the sexual divisions of labour within the workforce and within the family.The final report contained three pages specifically on trade unions and their attitude towards women and shiftwork. The trade union group at the evaluation colloquium demanded their exclusion from the final report, virtually accusing the researchers of fabrication.     

Stages of identity development and problem drinking in college women

Deviation from age-appropriate identity-developmental stage and problem drinking in 75 undergraduate women was investigated. A quantity/frequency scale assessed problem drinking. Two measures of identity, one projective and one observational, were used. May's Deprivation/Enhancement fantasy pattern measure assessed sexual identity. The College Women's Assertion Sample assessed the cognitive-style component of identity. The results supported the hypotheses that younger (freshman/sophomore) women deviating from their age-appropriate identity stage of dedifferentiation, and older (junior/senior) women deviating from their age-appropriate stage of identity integration, were significantly more likely to experience drinking problems than were women who had entered their age-appropriate identity stages. The findings support psychodynamic theories of identity development in late adolescence, and suggest that problem-drinking women in different age/ developmental stages of identity drink for different reasons and should be treated differently.Doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Teaching Associate with the Psychological Services Center there. She has also served on the clinical staff of the Amherst College Counseling Center, the Community Care Mental Health Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Franklin/Hampshire Community Mental Health Center in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her primary interest is in the area of identity development in women.Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Clinical Fellow of the American Psychological Association. She has held faculty appointments at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Hawaii, the University of Connecticut, and Smith College. Her primary interests are in the areas of statistics and assessment, and clinical gerontology.     

Labour market attainment of Canadian women in 1921: influences of religious affiliation,ethnicity, and linguistic proficiency

The 1921 Canadian Census is exploited to examine the labour market attainment of Canadian women. Acknowledging the general context of Catholic and Protestant divide and the tensions between francophones and anglophones during the WWI, special attention is paid to the influences of religious affiliation, ethnicity, and linguistic proficiency. Working urban women, overwhelmingly unmarried, are found to earn between 68 and 29% less than their male counterparts, depending on occupation and religio-linguistic group. The gender earnings gap is found to be the largest among francophone Catholics. When the sample is restricted to unmarried urban women, francophone Catholic females are found at a large disadvantage compared with anglophone Catholic and Protestant females. Bilingual Catholic women, mostly of French Canadian ethnicity, were the second lowest earning group in Canada of 1921. Bilingual Protestant women, on the other hand, are found to have had the most favourable labour market outcomes. The cumulative weight of the results indicates that among religious affiliation, ethnicity, and linguistic proficiency, ethnicity had exercised the strongest influence on the labour market attainment of Canadian women at that time.     

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.     

A sporting chance: The anatomy of destiny?

We begin this paper by drawing a parallel between women's exclusion from sport and their exclusion from science. Both are stereotypically masculine fields, which women enter only at risk of losing their identity. Moreover, both have justified the exclusion of women by recourse to biological arguments that women are inferior. It is thus not surprising that the combination of these fields in “sports science” adds further justification. We look at some of these biological arguments here, and at how they serve to limit women's participation in sport. Feminists have accepted that biological differences between women and men exist, and have either (i) argued for integration in sports, assuming that the differences are, or will be, unimportant, or (ii) argued for separate spheres, because of existing sex/gender differences. But both of these viewpoints still see our biology as fixed. We argue instead that “biology” can itself be subject to change, and that a truly feminist understanding of women and sport must take the possible transformation of physiology into account.     

from pillar to post: understanding the victimisation of women and children who experience domestic violence in an age of austerity

The dismantling of the welfare state across the United Kingdom (and indeed a number of other Western industrialised democracies, such as Canada and the United States) and the reductions to welfare provisions and entitlements are having a detrimental impact on women’s equality and safety. Towers and Walby argue that the recent cuts to welfare provision in the United Kingdom, particularly for women’s services, could lead to increased levels of violence for women and girls. This paper makes the argument that female victims of domestic abuse experience violence on two levels: first, at the intimate/personal level through their relationship with an abuser and, second, at a structural level, through the state failing to provide adequate protection and provision for women who have experienced violence in intimate relationships. Using a specific example of post-violence community services delivered to both the children of women who have experienced domestic violence and the women themselves, this paper draws on empirical research carried out in 2010–2011 with London-based third-sector and public sector organisations delivering the Against Violence and Abuse Project ‘Community Group Programme’. We argue that the lack of services for women involved in, or exiting, a violent relationship can amount to state-sanctioned violence, if funding is withheld, or indeed, stretched to breaking point.     

Moral Dilemmas and Women’s Rights: the attitude of the Mothers’ Union and Catholic Women’s League to divorce,birth control and abortion in England, 1928–1939

In order to ensure that women benefited from their newly won rights as citizens in 1918 and 1928, the Mothers’ Union and Catholic Women’s League campaigned, along with feminist and political women’s organisations, to enhance the role and status of women in society. Difficulties emerged, however, when changes in public attitudes led to the liberalisation of the law in relation to divorce and birth control coupled with the growing demand within the women’s movement for safe and legal abortion. This article examines the arguments put forward by the two groups on how these reforms would undermine the role of women as housewives, mothers and citizens. It is argued that despite the fact that both groups appeared to be out of step with the wider women’s movement, they succeeded in highlighting a number of major social and welfare concerns facing many women at this time. As a result, they too made a significant contribution to the campaign for women’s rights during the interwar years.     

Who wants to be a woman? young women's reflections on transitions to adulthood

The focus of this article is on how Finnish young women construct their transitions to adulthood and how they imagine their futures as women. Tensions in this process are analysed: many young women want to accelerate their shifts towards independent adult status. At the same time, some of them attempt to postpone the point of being locked into the lives of adult women. They look forward to acquiring the legal status of an adult citizen and to moving to homes of their own. But they want to stay young, which means time for relationships, studying, work and travel, and definitely not children at an early age. Being an adult woman does not seem to be a very tempting position for some young women; being a girl is considered by them to open more possibilities. Those young women who are keener to embrace female adulthood are also discussed, focusing on ways in which they envisage their futures, and what contradictions they experience. These tensions are explored drawing from the research project ‘Tracing Transitions — Follow-Up Study of Post-16 Students’. In the study, 40 young women and 23 young men aged around 18 years were interviewed individually, in paris or in groups of three. The project is grounded on ethnographic research in which the same young people were followed when they started secondary school at the age of 13 years.     

Calling a Spade a Spade: Tackling the ‘Women and Peace’ Orthodoxy

In her lecture, ‘Are women peaceful?’, Professor Hilary Charlesworth outlines what she perceives to be the current orthodoxies of the international women and conflict discourse. These include assumptions that women are natural peace-builders, suffer more from conflict, have a right to participate in peace processes, and that gender should be mainstreamed. Based on Charlesworth’s analysis, the authors argue that wars and peace processes are inherently gendered affairs and as a consequence a focus on equality or mainstreaming of gender remains challenging. The authors also note that although equality is a useful platform for ensuring women’s participation in peace processes, feminists should not expect equality arguments to do more than they were designed to do, that is, to ensure seats for women at decision-making tables. Ensuring that women can put forth their concerns and that they are listened to demands a different set of tools.     

The nature of woman and the development of American folklore

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between women and folklore in America on ideological, social, metaphoric, and disciplinary levels. Initial observations tie women into American folklore studies in three major ways: as a study of women, a study by women, and a womanly study. It goes on to investigate the intellectual climate of the late 19th century, with its focus on sex and gender, and the scientific doctrines, which prescribed social and organizational behavior, which brought this into being.Through analogies and ‘congruities,’ the methodology of late Victorian science, women became connected with others on the lower end of the evolutionary scale: plants, animals, children—and the folk. This resonance between women and the folk explains the numbers of women drawn to the American Folklore Society; it also proposes a feminized identity for the study of Folklore itself. Implications of these connections at the formative stage of the Society are explored.     

Women and Lancashire Conservatism between the Wars

The activism of women Conservatives helped Tory democracy to adapt and survive in inter-war Lancashire at a time when it was under strain due to the arrival of Labour as a significant electoral force. This article utilises the surviving records of the party in Lancashire to examine the various ways that women entered, navigated, justified and expanded their membership and function in inter-war Conservatism. It acknowledges the limits on women's advancement and influence, but it also highlights how some women made significant progress in rising through the party structures, and how women's branches facilitated this political mobility. It challenges the assumption that women Conservatives were preoccupied with sociability and discussing domestic issues, and reveals their contribution to the electoral success of the party at local level, and interaction with Lancashire's distinct tradition of Conservatism.     

Leaving home: Irish press debates on female employment,domesticity and emigration to Britain in the 1930s

Although Ireland has had a long history of female emigration, the 1930s saw an important shift in emigration patterns. In the context of southern Irish nation-building, the emigration of tens of thousands of young Irish women to Britain raised serious questions about the opportunities and roles of women in the Irish Free State. This article analyses the Irish print media of the 1930s as discursive spaces within which female emigration was repeatedly highlighted and debated. Discussions of female emigration were usually related to issues of female education, female employment and the duties of women within the home. These issues need to be located within the specific context of Irish Free State economics and politics. The Conditions of Employment Act (1936) and the Constitution of 1937 were legislative measures that attempted to define and regulate the role of Irish women. But that is not to imply a simple ideological hegemony in the Free State; I argue that the media debates reveal the competing discourses surrounding women's roles in the newly established nation state. For example, one view was that young women and girls should be given training and preparation for emigration, another view was that plenty of jobs were available at home, while a third view was that women should be content to remain within the domestic sphere. The much-repeated view that women would be better off (at home) illustrates the overlapping constructions of home – domestic sphere – and home – the nation. The overlapping and interconnecting of these home spaces signified a blurring of boundaries that meant Irish women were expected to carry the responsibility for national as well as domestic well-being.