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.     

Book Review: Work,children and gender equality

The motivating concern behind this article is that women, in the diversity of their ages, life situations, cultural traditions of gender and actual sexual connections to men, are still marginalized by prevailing approaches to HIV and AIDS. Safe sexual practices for women, within social contexts and actual sexual relations with men, are not being approached in ways that engage women's (or their male partners') active involvement. Conventional heterosexual distinctions between women's and men's sexuality disables prevention processes. Categories and perspectives which prevail in ''interpreting'' the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, inhibitions and assumptions framing sexual safety information, and cultural narratives of gendered love/desire/sex, converge into two highly problematic outcomes: a dissociation of heterosexually-defined men who have sex with women from central responsibility for HIV prevention, and marginalization of women who have sex with men from concern about women's sexual safety.     

Book Review: Magic,body and social order

Specifically designed for single‐family use, the type‐planned house of the 1940s was a new form of dwelling. As a social system and in the domestic practice upheld by them, these houses differed from previous housing models in Finland. In rural and urban areas, these architecturally conventional and characterless houses were built using ready‐made type drawings, and according to a fixed set of housing principles. The prevalent view of the proper organization of everyday life reached its most tangible monument in the architecture of these houses; they were “model houses for model families”. Instead of a purely aesthetical perspective, this study analyses the housing ideology and the notions of family and gender implanted in their architecture. Crucial is the concept of dwelling: dwelling is analysed as a cultural signifying system, in which‐spatial arrangement produces and maintains a certain ideology, conventions of behaviour, and notions of family and gender. Accordingly, it controls and orders people's lives, and also structures gender identities at a certain level. In creating a new differentiation of space, the type‐planned house also differentiated the genders.     

Book Review: Narratives on gender,generations and ethnicity

ABSTRACT. Though the study of men and masculinities has always been part of Women's Studies, recent Finnish studies on men have often developed without explicit attention to gender relations. In a Nordic context, Finnish studies on men have been relatively neglected. In this article we provide a concise review of Finnish research on men, including special reference to men's relations to home and work, men's violences, and the social exclusion of men. We present a synthetic account of the recent development of these studies and a critique of the field, and suggest some ways forward in future studies.     

Social work,the family and women's equality in post-war Australia

Social work as a profession supported the conservative norms of the post-war era in Australia regarding family life and women's roles, which emphasised the family responsibilities of women rather than their ongoing struggle for equality in public life and employment. The suggested reasons for the conservatism of social work include its emergence as a female caring profession, its struggle for credibility, the content of its training curriculum, the socio-economic characteristics of its members, the kinds of family-related employment in which they were engaged, and particularly the influence of the successful male minority within its membership. Women social workers were more loyal to the values and perceived interests of their profession than to the equality of their sex.     

Book Review: Gendered mobility

In the decades after 1945, Danish governments approved a series of family policy reforms which came to constitute the core elements of what is considered the women-friendly welfare state. In order to understand these developments, this article explores the rise of women's political influence, looking specifically at women's agency outside the parliamentary sphere. This article analyses how a network of influential women combined critical resources such as knowledge of families' concerns and inside information from commissions and boards with agenda-setting strategies promoting family policy reforms, even though women constituted a minority in parliament and had no permanent women's state institution. Hence, modern Danish family policy was not a state project granted to women but to a great extent the result of a network of exceptional women setting a new agenda.     

Book Review

Andrea Dworkin. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. New York: Basic Books, 2002.