Refugee women in Serbia – invisible victims of war in the former Yugoslavia

In this paper, I explore the experiences of women who found refuge in Serbia during the war in the former Yugoslavia. I look at the women's experiences of both leaving home and coping with everyday life in refuge. The exploration of refugee women's experiences is mainly based on analyses of their own stories, which I collected while researching women and war. In spite of all the hardship of their lives, refugee women who fled to Serbia have been treated by Western media, the public and aid organizations as ‘UNPEOPLE’ or as non-existent. Making their experiences visible as women, refugees and citizens is the main purpose of this article.     

By women for women: Caring for the frail elderly

The care of the frail elderly should be a subject of especial and growing importance to the women's movement. Two-thirds of the 75+ age group in England and Wales are women, who, when subject to the disabilities of advancing age, are usually assisted or cared for by other women. Current government policies emphasize care at home and assume the availability of unpaid female labour. Care in residential institutions depends largely upon the low paid labour of women. How can the dilemmas posed by different policy options be resolved? Can modes of care be devised which do not rely on exploiting women's labour and which offer choice to elderly women?     

Chilean women and the UN decade for women

This article analyses two aspects of the reality of Chilean women during the United Nations Decade of Women: political participation and labour force participation. This analysis takes into account some of the proposals of the Regional Plan of Action for the Integration of Women into Latin American Economic and Social Development as well as the consequences of the political, cultural and economic model established by the Chilean military government. The effects of the Decade of Women on Chilean women is not analysed primarily because the specific proposals contained in the Plan of Action are based on the prerequisites of development and participation—which are not applicable to the Chilean case during this period.Notwithstanding the fact that all forms of popular participation have been effectively eliminated, there have emerged women's organizations whose concerns include calling into question the oppression of women on the basis of sex. With respect to labour, women's participation in the labour force has increased. However, this increase is not a response to improved opportunities or a more equalitarian treatment of women workers, but rather as the consequence of elevated unemployment rates especially in lower class families where women have greater access to certain kinds of marginal employment.On a final note, the article also includes a discussion of recent trends in research on women, trends which provide a challenge to the more traditional forms of research.     

Indigenous Struggles for Land and Culture in Cauca,Colombia

This article examines the multiple and interrelated struggles of the indigenous population - composed in the main of smallholding peasants - of Cauca in Colombia. The article discusses not only their struggles against economic exploitation, political and cultural oppression, and military violence, therefore, but their role in a revolutionary process that seeks to build a society based on social justice and respect for human rights. Through a peaceful and persistent collective action, they have recovered a large part of their ancestral territories, elevated the level of literacy and conscientization, and revived many aspects of indigenous culture. However, the intensification in militarization and repression that has accompanied neo-liberal economic policies imposed 'from above' has in effect undermined the formal recognition by the Colombian Constitution of their territorial and cultural rights. It is argued here that current mobilization undertaken by indigenous communities is characterized by two interrelated challenges: resistance that is peaceful, plus a failure to transcend locality and to ally with other non-rural anti-systemic movements.     

Texts in context: Afro-Colombian women's activism in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia

This paper speaks across the divide between feminist theorists and praxis-oriented gender experts to argue for a more enabling reading of postcolonial feminist critiques of gender and development. Drawing on the activism of Afro-Colombian women in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia – most especially Matamba y Guasá, a network of black women's organizations from the state of Cauca – it brings attention to the independent ability of women in these locations to reflect and act on their own realities and claims.     

Ireland and the UN decade for women

The Irish Government has made little or no direct response to the UN decade for Women. The ‘convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women’ still has not been signed. This paper considers why the reticence persists and argues that women must insist that the Convention is signed by 1985.     

The UN decade for women and Japan: Tools for change

Rapid industrial growth in post-World War II Japan has contributed to radical external changes in the lives of Japanese women. Among them, the increase in the average woman's lifespan and the decrease in family size have given women a number of years when they are relatively free of childcare and therefore available to enter the job market. Nevertheless, traditional values help to maintain rigid sex-role stereotyping and are woven together with the aims of the capitalist, corporate society to form a complex socio-economic fabric in which women are kept in a subordinate position economically, socially and psychologically. It is against this background that the International Women's Year and the UN Decade for Women have been introduced to Japan and have had the positive effect of providing both validity to the efforts of individuals and organizations struggling for sexual equality, and tools with which to apply leverage in the struggle to change discriminatory social institutions. In this brief paper, a number of issues that are being confronted by women in Japan today will be discussed within the context of the general socio-economic trends with the aim of clarifying gains in the struggle to ensure equality for women as well as some of the challenges which lie ahead.Note: As this paper was written in the summer of 1984, the political situation has changed somewhat since then.     

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.     

Marketing edwardian feminism: Dora Marsden,votes for women and the freewoman

Although Dora Marsden had resigned from the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and repudiated the principles of the women's suffrage movement by the time she founded The Freewoman in 1911, she recognised the marketing potential of her suffragette persona. Thus, despite envisioning her journal as a post-suffragist ‘little magazine’, she used her status as a famed WSPU organiser prior to The Freewoman's publication to garner suffragette subscribers and advertisements for women's goods and services. After The Freewoman's debut, Marsden lost most of her original advertisers and subscribers, many of whom accused the editor of having misled them as to the nature of her journal. The author argues that Marsden's rejection of the journalistic model provided by the mainstream suffrage press and willingness to allow The Freewoman to slide into bankruptcy signalled a strategic bid for the ‘cultural capital’ that accrues to writers who forego mass readerships in order to gain avant-garde reputations