questioning global vaginahood: reflections from adapting <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Vagina Monologues</Emphasis> in Hong Kong

Drawing on the author's experience in devising a localized version of The Vagina Monologues in Hong Kong, this paper critically appraises the ‘global vaginahood’ in the globalization of The Vagina Monologues and the V-Day movement that reproduces a core-periphery relationship in the transnational women's movement. As a theatrical performance and a worldwide movement, these productions are remarkable for the manner in which they raise awareness about women's sexuality and violence against women in different parts of the world. Critical questions, however, remain on the rhetoric of universalism and the ethnocentric methods of the global campaign, with US women's experiences and agenda defining those of women in other parts of the world. As a worldwide campaign, the V-Day movement reproduces a hierarchical model between the global North and South, with an emphasis on Western leadership rather than coalition between partners with different experiences, priorities, and strategies. The paper argues that feminists may develop more effective coalitions with local women by recognizing and identifying locally derived creative efforts to respond to issues that are pertinent to their lives. As such, the paper is a push for dialogues in the V-Day campaign and transnational women's movement in general.     

‘Equal Laws Based upon an Equal Standard’: the Garrett Sisters,the Contagious Diseases Acts,and the sexual politics of Victorian and Edwardian feminism revisited

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), co-founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, and Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), leader of the constitutional suffrage movement, were centrally involved in the Victorian and Edwardian campaign for women's equality. Both women attempted to maintain a separation between the suffrage movement and the sexualized realm of the female body, which was subject to state intrusion during the debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts and again during the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes some forty years later. But the Garretts had to negotiate the intersection of gender, class, and sexual politics in order to advance the cause of feminist social reform.     

Constructing women's citizenship in the interwar period: the Edinburgh women citizens’ association

As a new stage in women's political participation, enfranchisement brought new efforts to advance gender equality and women's social position and new organisations were formed of women voters, including the women citizens' associations. Concerns with women's and children's welfare and social reform that had been important to sections of the pre-war women's movement were repositioned alongside the pursuit of an equal franchise, equal pay and opportunities and women's representation, in relation to women's new political status. Study of the women citizens' associations in Scotland supports an account of the period 1918-30 as one of considerable political activity, particularly in developing women's role and influence in relation to established political institutions and civil society. It suggests that the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ feminisms after 1918, mapped onto the binary of equality and difference, was not necessarily a tension for women's organisations. It gives insight into the meaning of ‘citizenship’ for women activists and how the status, rights and responsibilities of citizenship articulated and shaped a distinctive women's politics, bridging political, civil and social rights.     

Women,Wives and the Campaign Against Pit Closures in County Durham: Understanding the Vane Tempest Vigil

The majority of the women who campaigned to save the Vane Tempest Colliery from closure in 1993 were involved because of their political understanding and allegiances rather than as a consequence of their practical involvement in mining life. Even those women who were married to miners did not conform to the stereotypical conception of ‘miner's wife’. However, the supporting labour movement and the media persisted in conceptualizing the Women's Vigil through romantic and masculinist discourses of miners and mining communities which could only locate the women as ‘wives’, which confined the campaign within historical stereotypes no longer appropriate to the actual situation and which persistently set the idea of socialism against that of feminism. This not only situated the women's campaign as secondary and subject to that of the NUM but it also subverted the possibilities of the women fully articulating their own experience and understanding within the campaign. The situation was further complicated by memories of the miners' strike of 1984-5 in which women played such an important role. One aspect of this role, that of maintaining mining families in the face of hardship, continued to inform understanding of the women's role in the fight to prevent closure, although it was no longer appropriate.The Women's Vigil engaged with a much wider set of concerns and with a wider range of individuals and groups than did that of the miners themselves. There were serious possibilities for broadening the political campaign around the women's slogan of ‘Jobs, community and environment’ which were never fully exploited because of the difficulties of admitting that women could inhabit any position other than that of ‘miners’ wives'.This experience of the Vane Tempest Vigil indicates the significance and the centrality of gender issues within class based political action.     

Equality versus difference and gender versus class in Danish women's history

The articulated goals of feminist research and politics in Denmark have been changing during the last twenty years, from “liberation” to “equality” and now perhaps to “difference”. Open theoretical debates on these changes have been rare in the Danish context, but the need for such debates has been made topical by the latest theoretical and political discourses in Denmark on equality and difference, gender and class. The American feminist historian Joan W. Scott has shown the detrimental effects to feminist research and politics of constructing the concepts of equality and difference as binary oppositions. She argues that women's equality with men could be claimed on the basis of sameness/ similarity as well as on the basis of difference. The same detrimental effects occur, however, when sameness/similarity and difference, gender and class, are constructed dichotomously. The history of the women's movements in Denmark around the turn of the century shows that some women have tried to avoid such dichotomies. Other women have contributed to them, however, and their arguments have been sustained by the hegemonic discourses of the time. Women's history research is part of competing discourses on gender. It may have political impact on the gender relations of today. Therefore, an important purpose of feminist history is to expose the way dichotomous discourses act against feminist goals, and to avoid making such discourses part of one's own theoretical framework.     

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 establishing of women's studies in Bulgaria: or how far can you go?

This article examines the problem of establishing women's studies as a legitimate area of study in Bulgarian universities. With the change from a communist to a post-communist society, Bulgaria is finding itself open to outside cultural influences. However, reactions to feminism and to women's studies are largely hostile. This is partly a legacy of the now discredited communist times when words like ‘emancipation’ and ‘equality for women’ were common, words that now have negative connotations in a society where it is assumed that men and women are equal. In addition, the specific social difficulties that Bulgaria is now facing make any new divisions between men and women, which women's studies can imply, yet another dividing line. Various strategies that have been adopted for introducing women's studies into Bulgarian universities are described.     

Introduction: Performing the Self: women's lives in historical perspective

Abstract

Two recently discovered letters have finally established what has long been conjectured, that the English radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay corresponded with each other. The occasion for the correspondence was the publication of responses by both women to Edmund Burke's Reflection on the Revolution in France. The article explores the nature of their responses and analyses the main differences between them. It concludes that the two women were remarkably close in their ideas on democracy, equality and women's rights ideas ultimately circumscribed by eighteenth-century radicals' notions of property and class     

Feminism,imperialism and race: a dialogue between India and Britain

Abstract

During the partition period and up to 1918, Polish women's interests and aspirations outside the family were in increasingly frequent cases directed to taking up paid work and resorting to other measures in order to sustain their family. In other cases women's activity was shaped by experiences of resistance to national and sometimes also religious discrimination. In the early twentieth century only small groups of women put forward demands for equality, and even if they did so, they usually thought that this would be possible only after the rebirth of an independent foolish state. It is to this supreme aim that they subordinated their interest and their struggle for equality.     

Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election: right-wing feminism,the Great War and the ideology of consumption

This article examines the roots of Christabel Pankhurst's Women's Party in the Women's Social and Political Union's adoption of right-wing feminism during the Great War. It explores the blending of radical-right and imperialist ideology with a feminist agenda that combined a demand for women's rights with an anti-Bolshevik economic policy based on the power of female consumers. This blending of feminism and nationalism won Christabel the ‘coupon’ endorsement of the Lloyd George coalition and became the ideological platform for her parliamentary campaign in the Smethwick election. Although Christabel lost the election by 775 votes, it is contended that the Women's Party platform offers clues to the attraction of right-wing ideology to some notable figures in the women's movement.     

The ‘Great Offender’: feminists and the campaign for women's ordination

Few scholars have investigated the relationship between feminism and religion in the aftermath of suffrage. This article explores how feminist organizations and individual feminists supported campaigns for women's ordination within the Anglican Church and their concern for gender equality within British churches more broadly during the forties and fifties. Focusing in particular on the 1944 ordination of the first female priest within the Anglican Communion (The Bishop of Hong Kong Ronald O. Hall ordained Chinese Deaconess Florence Li Tim Oi) and the institution of female chaplain's assistant positions in 1942, it argues that a full understanding of mid twentieth-century feminism requires consideration of the struggle for women's representation in their churches. The forties and fifties have often been portrayed by historians as the nadir of twentieth-century feminism, yet feminists continued their work for women's rights and religious identity and issues could be motivating factors for their activism. Feminists were neither anti-religious nor militantly secular and this article seeks to foster work which explores the connection between religion and women's political and social activism since the nineteenth century.     

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.     

Women's Organizations and Movements in the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Response to Global Economic Crisis in the 1980s

In this paper I explore the emergence of women's organizations and feminist consciousness in the twentieth century in the English-speaking (Commonwealth) Caribbean. The global ideas concerning women's equality from the 1960s onwards clearly informed the initiatives taken by both women and states of the Caribbean. None the less, the paper illustrates, by use of examples, the interlocked nature of women's struggles with the economic, social and political issues which preoccupy the region's population. I examine in greater detail two case studies of women's activism and mobilization around the impact of structural adjustment policies in the two territories of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. By tracing the connections between and among the organizations and initiatives of women in the region, the paper situates the feminist movement in the English-speaking Caribbean as a continuously evolving one, fusing episodic struggles in different territories, engaging women of different classes and groups, and continuously building on past experience.     

‘Bless the Gods for my pencils and paper’: Katie Gliddon's prison diary,Percy Bysshe Shelley and the suffragettes at Holloway

This article discusses the life and imprisonment of the largely unknown middle-class artist and British suffrage activist Katie Gliddon and analyzes her extensive prison diary, secretly written and drawn in her copy of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley at London's Holloway Prison in March and April 1912. By creating a platform for the voices of ‘ordinary’ prisoners and by opening up a space for a transgressive gaze between suffragettes, ‘ordinary’ prisoners and female officers, Gliddon's writings allow us to complicate our understanding of cross-class relations within the women's suffrage campaign and in women's prisons more generally speaking.     

DON'T SHUT UP: AUSTRALIA'S FIRST PAID PARENTAL LEAVE SCHEME AND BEYOND

Through the perspective of women's conflicting roles, this paper examines the capacity of the Australian Paid Parental Leave scheme to assist Australian families negotiate paid work and parenthood. Drawing on comparisons with other nation-state policies and interview data with Western Australian women, this paper argues that women's choices remain limited despite the introduction of the Paid Parental Leave scheme. I suggest that while Paid Parental Leave is an important reform for gender equality and improving work/life balance for many Australian families, it is not sufficient. The policy and culture of Australian workplaces need improvement.     

‘Hand in hand with the women,forward we will go’: welsh nationalism and feminism in the 1890s

This article explores the history of women's liberalism in Wales in the 1880s and 1890s, during the period of the Liberal nationalist movement known as Cymru Fydd or Young Wales. The Welsh Union of Women's Liberal Associations (WUWLA) was founded in 1892 to provide an important bloc of votes for the Progressive (Suffragist) faction in the Women's Liberal Federation, but its aims combined Liberal, Nationalist and feminist objectives. This article argues that briefly, and uniquely, in the 1890s, the WUWLA was able to bring together feminism and nationalism in British party politics, despite some opposition from its own nationalist members. The active intervention of women ensured that the masculinist language of nationalism shifted to an emphasis on equality of the sexes. In 1895, Cymru Fydd, embodied in the Welsh National Federation, espoused women's suffrage among its objects, and gave women's organisations special representation in its structures. This change is explored both through the writings and the events – a series of meetings and conferences – which led to the formation of both the WUWLA and the Welsh National Federation. But the weakness of liberalism at the end of the 1890s, together with divisions within Wales, meant that the new politics was short lived. The decline of women's national organisation after this period, though not fully explored here, can be linked to those problems, but also to the rifts created between Liberals, women and men, over the issue of women's suffrage in the Edwardian period.     

Intersections and Inconsistencies. Framing Gender in Right-Wing Populist Discourses in Austria

The paper contributes to the discussion on (re)framing processes of gender equality focusing in particular on right-wing populist discourses in Austria. Our frame analysis of 50 texts published by four right-wing (extremist) parties and movements reveals that traditional (family) values, women's “free choice”, and LGBT rights play important roles in right-wing populist (re)framing processes of gender equality. Our data also show notable inconsistencies with regard to the meanings attached to gender and gender equality within the discourses studied. For instance, right-wing populists are, on the one hand, concerned with the protection of “the traditional family”—which means being against e.g. same-sex marriage and emphasizing women's wish to stay at home. On the other hand, these same actors argue against immigration by using gender arguments in a different and even contradictory manner, claiming that e.g. Muslim men are bound by their “culture” to discriminate women and LGBT people. Our intersectional approach, analytically focusing on different meanings that gender equality acquires at the intersections with ethnicity, nationality, religion/culture, and sexuality, shows that within right-wing populist discourses inconsistencies in the framing of gender and gender equality arise in relation to the shifting meanings attributed to the essential dichotomy of “us” versus “them”. While the discursive construction of antagonistic positions is essential for right-wing populism, the groups/people designated to fill these “slots” might differ according to topic. We argue that “intersectionality from above” is one of populists' instruments to gloss over inconsistencies and to (re)frame gender equality in an on-going process of (re)negotiations of meanings.     

Patchwork politics in the Netherlands, 1946-50: women,gender and the world war II trauma[1]

Abstract

This paper describes the campaign launched in 1946 by a prominent Dutch feminist, resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, to make women wear so-called National Celebration Skirts, homemade patchwork skirts constructed of, for instance, old pieces of cloth of family members and friends that were killed by the Germans or of Jewish children hiding from the German persecutors. The skirts were to be worn on public holidays as well as in private celebrations. The campaigners supposed that by making such skirts women could cope with their wartime experiences. The Celebration Skirt is analysed as a female mode of political expression to be understood in the context of the politics of war, reconstruction and gender. The story of the skirt refutes some standard Dutch historiography on (the failure of) post-war renewal; it gives new information on what happened to women after the war, and on the ways in which some women tried to overcome their grief; and it contributes to the women's studies debate on, ‘equality and Difference’.     

Sports and women's culture

This article focuses on the fact that women and men belong to two different cultures. Concerning sport participation, there exists a double standard in the way girls and boys are socialized into sport. As a result, sport has never played an important part in many women's lives. This is illustrated by data from different empirical studies that have been done in Norway during recent years.In discussing the future development of women's sport, three approaches are discussed: (1) when women become more and more like men, (2) when women preserve and develop what has been defined as typical female characteristics and activities, and (3) when the androgynous person becomes the normative objective. The author demonstrates that the development so far is the one mentioned in the first point. This is equality on men's terms. The advantage of such a development is questioned. The ideology of society today, which also is reflected in the world of sport, has to be changed. As a consequence, sport should be humanized. It is therefore necessary that women and the central values in women's culture become a strong influence on the development of sport.     

Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stopes's Married Love and E.M. Hull's The Sheik

This article examines popular discourses of women's sexuality in 1920s England and argues that sex manuals like Marie Stopes's Married Life and sex novels like E.M. Hull's The Sheik, despite their adherence to status quo values, were liberating for women through their affirmation of women's sexual subjectivity. Stopes's enormously popular book contributed strongly to a new understanding of women's sexual drives as natural and autonomous. The changing attitudes were reflected in the numbers of postwar women who actively participated in the creation and consumption of popular sex-novels and films, exercising both economic and sexual freedoms at once. This article focusses on the film version of The Sheik, which experienced great success as part of this growing leisure market catering specifically to women's desire, and in particular on the figure of Rudolph Valentino as a “woman-made” man. The film's “crossed” representations of sexuality (the emancipated “flapper” and the effeminate yet virile “sheik”) challenged traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, and in doing so, were liberating for women consumers at the same time that they threatened the sexual identities of men.