Extending appropriate technology to rural African women

The vital role of women in the agricultural sector in Africa is gaining wider recognition. It is now apparent that although women are actively engaged in agriculture, they are often denied information on modern agricultural practices.Besides farming, women have other arduous responsibilities. Appropriate technologies of all kinds have been developed to lessen the time women spend on nonproductive tasks, assist them with processing and preserving foods and equip them with income-yielding skills.University Departments of Home Economics can extend the benefits of appropriate technology to village women in several ways. They can carry on research studies in collaboration with international agencies. They can revise their syllabi to include appropriate technology and make agricultural subjects a requirement in the Home Economics Extension Programme. Students can be given more research and practical projects related to appropriate technology. Lastly, universities can set up Appropriate Technology Centres for the benefit of contiguous communities.     

Reducing Black Adolescents' Drug Use:

This article focuses on prevention and reduction of drug use among Black adolescents. The family is considered to be a major source in preparing children to handle adolescent stresses such as drug involvement pressures. Primary prevention of drug use begins in early childhood. The family is an underutilized and minimally acknowledged resource in drug abuse prevention efforts. The discussion centers on a review of research findings intimately related to adolescent drug use and Black family issues. An argument is made for a national family policy in support of all American famiiies. Young famiIies are a prime area for the investment or resources. Now and in the future, the American family represents the best primary prevention program available.     

From blues women to b-girls: performing badass femininity

This article introduces the concept of badass femininity, a marginalized femininity captured in the performances of contemporary b-girls (women breakdancers) and blues women of the 1920s. The author uses the work of Hortense Spillers, Maria Lugones, Chela Sandoval, and Angela Davis to argue that non-normative gender performances from the fringes of society are necessary consequence of histories of enslavement, genocide, and exploitation. Badass femininity is a one version of a multiplicity of femininities. It re-signifies qualities typically associated with masculinity through women whose work in dance and music move these gender performances from the margins to center stage.     

sexyshock: networks that matter

Sexyshock emerged out of a huge demonstration in defence of the Italian abortion law in June 2001. It is a laboratory of communication on gender issues, managed by women but directed towards all genders. It is a public space that gives visibility to women's issues as well as being a permanent workshop on sexuality, a network of women involved in pink/queer activism within a communicative laboratory. As such, Sexyshock is a ‘space of contamination’ between transversal projects which exist among different political institutions and subjects all over Italy and Europe. Her challenge lies in ‘playing with’ and ‘deconstructing’ sexual and identity issues through an ‘open-border’ conception of politics.     

Go to Switzerland, young women, if you want to study medicine

During the second half of the nineteenth century women from all over the world went to Swiss universities to study medicine. The first female doctors to practice in most European countries received their medical education in Switzerland. This article examines possible reasons to explain why Switzerland opened its doors to female medical students when universities in other countries rejected women. Cultural, political and economic motivations are suggested.     

From motherhood to sisterhood: Attitudes of australian women MPs to their roles

Women have entered Australian parliaments in increasing numbers over the past decade and now form over 9 per cent of MPs. Whether their presence will make any difference to the public agenda depends largely on how they view their roles and accountabilities. This study, based on survey and other evidence, suggests that Australian women MPs fall largely into three categories. termed here mothers, individualists and sisters. Historically the first women to enter parliaments were the mothers, and today there are still a number of women MPs who see their primary responsibility as defending the home and family. During the 1960s the individualists appeared, who believed that gender should be irrelevant in politics. Today, by far the largest group of women in Australian parliaments are the sisters, with a feminist orientation towards their roles. Their impact on the public agenda, in particular the setting up of mechanisms for monitoring the differential impact of public policy on women and men is summarised. While these women have indeed made a difference, they are still largely excluded from key economic policy-making arenas. This in turn has undermined some of the legislative and policy gains which have been made. The lack of bipartisanship on status of women issues also threatens the long-term future of feminist achievements.     

Histories of now: listening to women in British film

ABSTRACT

The research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000–2015’ investigates contemporary women's film history through two primary routes: the statistical analyses of the numbers of women in six key above-the-line professions (director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor), and interviews with 50 women in those same roles (by August 2018 we had interviewed 58). This paper focuses specifically on the permutations of the interview process for constructing women's film history in the contemporary period. Taking into consideration the theoretical, methodological and political issues at stake in recording oral histories of working women filmmakers, we contemplate the consequences of collecting and writing history that is still in medias res.     

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.     

Schooling women

Paige Porter (ed.), Gender and Education (Deakin University Press) Geelong, 1986. Noelene Kyle, Her Natural Destiny: The Education of Women in New South Wales (University of New South Wales Press) Kensington, 1986.     

Medieval women

Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179: a Visionary Life, (Routledge), London, 1989; Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, Translated by Lydia Cochrane, (Basil Blackwell), Oxford, 1988.     

Vacant wombs: feminist challenges to psychoanalytic theories of childless women

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity.