Kirishima Yōko and the Age of Non-Marriage

The “Age of Non-Marriage” describes major demographic trends evident in Japan since the 1980s: declining rates of marriage, delay in marriage, and rising divorce rates. As familiar stereotypes continue to exert influence over gender roles, many frustrated women opt out of marriage and child-bearing. Award-winning non-fiction writer Kirishima Yōko (1937– ) pioneered new ideas and lifestyles as a successful single mother in the 1960s and 1970s. Now in her sixties, Kirishima continues to encourage readers to free themselves from societal expectations in order to fulfill their potential. Japan is now more and more experiencing change in gender roles for men as well as women.     

No Rosy glasses in Bluesy Ghettos? Job satisfaction of pink and blue collar workers and the comparable worth legislations

ABSTRACT

The majority of studies using contemporary data report that women have a higher job satisfaction than men, and even more so in the occupations with a greater female share. This pattern, paradoxically given the lower pay of female-dominated jobs, is often attributed to women’s voluntary sorting into these occupations. In contrast, historical scholarship emphasizes the societal restrictions which shaped women’s vocational choices and the dissatisfactions with wages which led to the comparable worth movements around the world. During the 1980s, the Canadian comparable worth movement achieved momentum and instigated many legislative changes. By 1989, 6 out of 10 Canadian provinces had laws prescribing ‘equal pay for work of equal value.’ Using nationally representative Canadian data from 1989 to 1991, we examine how these legislations affected job satisfaction in pink and blue collar occupations. We find strong evidence for the higher job satisfaction of pink collar women in jurisdictions with a comparable worth legislation. The findings are discussed within the sociocultural context of the late twentieth century.     

Women’s Organizations of Political Parties: Formal Possibilities,Informal Challenges and Discursive Controversies

Feminist research focusing on gender policy successes in the 1990s and 2000s emphasized the strengths of women’s organizations of political parties in advancing key gender equality issues in Finland. However, both the “feminism” and “politics” of political parties’ women’s organizations, hitherto apparent in Finland and elsewhere in Europe, are now deemed outdated, a paradox that is critically explored in this article. The analysis is based on interview data with women and men politicians and party workers and is structured around the key research question: how are the women’s organizations of political parties discursively constructed by the interviewed politicians and party workers and with what effects? These discursive constructions are studied in relation to: (i) the formal institutional position of the women’s organizations of political parties, (ii) informal institutional position vis-à-vis the mother party, and (iii) discursive controversies surrounding their feminism and politics. The discourse analysis reveals the contradictions and challenges faced by women’s political organizations in contemporary politics.     

‘An Adamless Eden’: counterpublics and women writers' sociability at the fin de siècle through the experiences of Flora Annie Steel

This article focuses on the ‘outsider’ status of late-nineteenth-century women writers by exploring the experiences of Anglo-Indian novelist Flora Annie Steel and her responses to authorial sociability in fin-de-siècle London. Androcentric literary societies are viewed as influential sites which marginalised women writers, containing their incursion into masculine clubland and denying them access to some of the symbolic and practical benefits of professional authorship. Through the lens of Steel's experience, the discussion considers how women writers attempted to transcend exclusion through the establishment of female, literary counterpublics. Such counterpublics fostered a gendered literary consciousness that empowered women and matured in Steel's case into a political prospectus in the service of women's suffrage.     

Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian Woman’ and Female Desire in England 1960–1975

In The Sadeian Woman (1979) Angela Carter suggested that the visions of free female sexuality created by the Marquis de Sade in his violent pornographic novels provided insight into existing female sexualities in her own—British—society. In this article the representation of female sexuality in novels set in contemporary British society, written by women, and published between 1960 and 1975, is examined in relation to Carter's exegesis of the good, virtuous Justine and the meretricious, sexually desirous Juliette, two contrasting characters from Sade's work. The limitations of the three other alternatives present in the novels are described; containment within long-term marriage, good-hearted promiscuity; and the rejection of emotional repression. Then Carter's own solution to women's sexual inequality is placed in the context of feminism in the late 1970s, and the role of the novels in contributing to change is acknowledged.     

Changes in noneconomic political attitudes of Southern and Northern youth, 1970s to 1980s

This paper examines changes that occurred in the political attitudes of Southern and Northern youth from the 1970s to the 1980s. National survey data from the National Opinion Research Center is used. Considering attitudinal changes of people under 30, it appears that trends toward greater political tolerance and greater support for racial and sexual equality will continue in the future. However, this study finds a reversal of the usual trend of greater political tolerance among young people. The United States is increasing in conservatism on the social issues. Aside from the social issues, younger people have not become more conservative with age. Important regional differences in attitude changes are indicated.Recieved Ph.D. from University of Iowa. Research interests include political tolerance and public opinion.     

Heterosexual Love in the British Women's Liberation Movement: reflections from the Sisterhood and After archive

The question of how to be a heterosexual feminist has long vexed women's liberationists. This article is interested in how a set of British activist women in the 1970s dealt with the challenges of heterosexual love. The article's source for this is the Sisterhood and After archive, the relatively untouched tranche of interviews with leading activists in the women's liberation movement (WLM), compiled between 2010 and 2013 and held at the British Library. Through these intimate and often enigmatic sources, the author sets out to explore the space between the theory of loving men and its practice among a handful of women liberationists. In doing so the author emphasises the importance of a supra-political space, the private, in the composition of these narratives. In addition, the socialist complexion to the British women’s movement is considered in the context of the wider political moment of the 1970s.     

Left Activism,Succour and Selfhood: the epistolary friendship of two revolutionary mothers in 1970s Britain

At the height of mass activity on the Left, the ascendancy of the women's liberation movement (WLM), and the beginnings of real social and personal change for men and women, the 1970s are increasingly seen as the decade when sixties permissiveness began to be truly felt in Britain. This article draws upon a personal archive of correspondence from this turbulent decade, between two revolutionary women, Di Parkin and Annie Howells. It argues that the women's letters form an important contribution to new understandings about the construction of the post-war gendered self. The letters represent an interchange of motherhood, domesticity, far-left politics, and close female friendship. The article will show how the women's epistolary friendship offers intimate insight into female self-fashioning at a breakthrough social and political moment in 1970s Britain. As they reflected on some of the key political and social themes of the decade—class, labour, race and gender relations, as well as international politics—Di and Annie sought to negotiate themselves in relation to shifting discourses and social patterns. Writing as relational female subjects and individuals, the women's letters became simultaneously a private and shared space in which to compose themselves as women, revolutionaries and feminists, and autonomous sexual subjects. As a result, this article will show, the epistolary lives of these two radical women inform valuable understanding about some of the complex ways in which post-war individuals used available cultural and political resources to find meaning in their lives.     

First be a woman? rural development,social change and women farmers’ lives in Thessaly-Greece

This research is prompted by a desire to portray how Thessalian women farmers’ lives have been and are still affected by agrarian, economic, political and social transformations that took place in Greece from 1950 onwards. Using a cueing technique, we collected 2034 autobiographical memories from 74 women farmers. In general, the story our data tell indicates that the progress regarding woman’s position within family and society was slow and erratic, whereas it is still underway, since gender role appropriateness remains a robust construction. The analysis proved that the first signs of change appeared in the 1970s, when the migration from Thessaly to Europe brought about some unprecedented ideas on woman’s social and domestic roles. Other factors, such as the modernization of agriculture in 1980s and the consequent economic flourishing, along with the aura conveyed by the new (female) members of farming communities, and the opening of rural societies in 1990s and 2000s, facilitated this change.     

Omelettes and broken eggs: Politics in the fictional works of Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir's fictional works of the 1940s and 1950s reflect the author's personal struggle to weigh her lifelong commitment to her writing against her growing conviction about the need to participate in political action in order to bring about a socialist society free of class distinction and privelege. Her female protagonists mirror both her reluctance to devote the necessary hours to the meetings and committee assignments which are an integral part of the political process and her experience of the euphoria of group action during and immediately after World War II. In moving chronologically through Beauvoir's novels and play, the reader finds a progressive disillusionment with the effectiveness of political activism which in no way diminishes the author's expressed determination to opt for the U.S.S.R. over the U.S.A., for socialism over capitalism. Just as her autobiography devotes many pages to explanations of Jean-Paul Sartre's political activities and the rationale behind them, the women in her fiction generally relate to the political arena by listening and reacting to decisions made by men. Several of them, however, go beyond the role assigned to them by the male protagonists to achieve a political identity of their own.     

the gender politics of political violence: women armed activists in ETA

This article aims to contribute to the developing area of feminist scholarship on women and political violence, through a study of women in one of Europe's oldest illegal armed movements, the radical Basque nationalist organization ETA. By tracing the changing patterns of women's participation in ETA over the past four decades, the article highlights the historical factors that help explain the choice of a small number of Basque women to participate directly in political violence, and shows how these factors have differed from those for men. While the gender politics of radical nationalism are intricately linked to cross-cultural associations of militarism with certain forms of masculinity, the article also stresses the importance of understanding women's activism in ETA in the context of the organization's characteristic as an ethnic nationalist movement, as well as the wider historical circumstances of the movement's development, including the modernization of Spanish and Basque society over the past four decades. Although comparisons with women in other armed movements are possible, such historical specificities undermine any attempt to construct a universal theory of women and ‘terrorism’, such as Robin Morgan's ‘couple terrorism’ thesis. Finally, the article examines the changing representations of female ETA activists in the Spanish and Basque media. Although women ETA activists are now regarded as ‘normal’, popular representations continue to link women's armed activism with deviant sexuality and the transgression of their natural destiny as mothers. The different treatment of women is evident as well in claims of sexual torture made by some detainees. The article concludes that although the participation of women in political violence poses disquieting questions for the largely anti-militarist women's movement, case studies of women in armed organizations, as well as their place in the wider practices of conflict, are an important contribution both to feminist debates about violence and to wider studies of political violence.     

Socialism and the American labor movement: Some new reflections

The outbreak of the 15M or indignado movement in Spain in 2011 was the biggest episode of social unrest since the end of the Transition in the 1970s. Its emergence caught the political parties, media, trade unions and the most important community-based organisations and pre-existing social movements off guard. It targeted those who were identified as responsible for the recession and how it was handled – politicians and bankers –, and represented a global criticism of the existing political system and institutional framework. The 15M was not a youth movement, but a general movement criticising the current economic model, though it did have a large youth component in its initial stages. It was plural and diverse, and a wide broad spectrum of criticism and degrees of radicality and political awareness coexisted in the squares and camps. In general terms, the links between the indignados and the labour movement were weak and marked by mutual mistrust. The 15M movement was a milestone in the political trajectory of Spain and opened up a regime crisis that would deepen thereafter.     

Performing the Political Self: a study of identity making and self representation in the autobiographies of India's first generation of parliamentary women

Although India boasts a number of prominent women politicians, there remains little critical scholarship on the agency and contribution of Indian women in politics post independence. Responding to this gap, this article explores how identity and agency is articulated in the autobiographies of three influential women who were part of India's first generation of women in post independence politics: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–1988), Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–1990) and Renuka Ray (1904–1997). Using the framework of intersubjectivity—the notion of the construction of the self through a wider network of social relations and identities—this article analyses how these women performed the political self in their autobiographies by positioning their lives within a larger matrilineal lineage in their narratives. Situating themselves as the inheritors of their mothers' and grandmothers' struggle for social reform and education, who in their own lives take this legacy forward by their entry into political activism and statecraft, they emerge as pioneers in their public careers. Through their encouragement and criticism of their daughters' and granddaughters' generation, they both distinguish their specific generational contribution, but also put forward a challenge to this new generation to return to the Gandhian values and developmental strategies that shaped their political world view.     

Appealing to the Female Vote: Dutch political parties and the approach of women voters in general election campaigns,c.1922–1980

This article explores the effects of female enfranchisement on the nature of political identity formation in Dutch election campaigns between 1922 and the early 1980s. It argues that women voters played a key role in the imagination of the Netherlands as a ‘pillarised society’ in which political constituencies were represented as stable and based on ‘objective’ characteristics like class and religion. The continuous representation of women as politically ignorant and indifferent served to maintain a self-identity that made women susceptible to ‘be educated’ and ‘learn to understand’ their political identity. The second feminist wave did much to upturn dominant representations, but older discourses proved persistent. The call to take women more seriously as members of the demos, again resulted in a separate treatment of women in political propaganda, with organisations like MVM and the parties' (rebranded) women's clubs, as well as commercial women's magazines now playing a key role in their ‘political education’.     

From movement protest to state feminism: The women's liberation movement and unemployment policy in Denmark

The new Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s took a negative attitude towards the state, seeing it as capitalist and patriarchal. Today, this attitude has changed, with many former activists now supporting the “state feminism” that has developed in all the Nordic countries. The case of unemployment policy in Denmark is used to illustrate the changing relations between the radical and leftist feminist movement and the state. In spite of strong resistance in most political parties to any kind of radical feminism, many of the unemployment projects and training courses for women which have flourished since the mid‐1980s have been based on the ideas of the radical feminist movement and have been staffed by women from the movement of the 1970s. The methodologically complicated issue of studying social movement effects is approached here by studying changes in discourse and actions. Four factors are used to explain the changing relation between movement and state.     

“I have never met the normal woman”: Stella Browne and the politics of womanhood

Abstract

F. W. Stella Browne (1880–1995) and her views on female sexuality have been much discussed of recent years. These discussions have tended to rely on a limited number of her copious (if often hard-to-find) writings, and have also failed to take into account where Stella, as an individual woman, was coming from. In the light of ongoing researches into her life and career, this article locates her writings in her life of activism in a wide variety of causes. It argues that her opinions about women's needs do not conform to a simplistic model of a ‘New’ feminism of difference, and that her relationship to the thought of contemporary male sexologists has been presented in a one-dimensional and misleading way. Her tripartite commitment to feminism, socialism, and individualism is illustrated, drawing on a wide range of her writings and statements between 1912 and 1937. In her crusade to celebrate and liberate the “variety and variability of women” Stella sought constantly to overthrow concepts of a monolithic female nature as well as to reject the Double Moral Standard: ‘normality’ to her was an instrument for the oppression of women. Consideration is also given to the wider influence of her ideas.     

‘A sort of land debatable’: female influence,civic virtue and middle-class identity,c 1830-c 1860[1]

The recent emphasis on the bourgeois public sphere as a predominantly masculine space means that the wider meanings and interpretations of respectable women's presence at public occasions have been ignored or misunderstood. This article addresses the contribution of urban middle-class women to the public construction and expression of middle-class identity in the mid-nineteenth century, and examines the way in which women were written into civic narratives as champions of public virtue. It is argued that the notion of ‘female influence’ allowed women to expand their public roles, and even to participate in potentially subversive political activities. However, it also effectively contained such activities by distancing ‘respectable’ women from the potentially corrupting arena of political controversy.     

Gender,nation and party: an uneasy alliance for Welsh nationalism

This article draws upon new research exploring the relationship between gender and political nationalism in Wales. It is set within the changed political and institutional context of Wales, provided by the establishment in May 1999 of the National Assembly, the first democratic legislature in Wales for nearly 600 years. In studying leading women politicians from Plaid Cymru, it isolates potential tensions between gender and mainstream party political nationalism. It also begins to assess the specific influence of gender to contemporary Welsh nationalist politics. Its conclusions confirm the paradigm of a distinctive female experience of Welsh nationalism and point to a number of specific issues (scarce access to power resources and the myth of party unity) which distinguish women's experience of Welsh nationalism. The article concludes that an ‘uneasy alliance’ exists between gender, nation and party within Welsh nationalism, which is some way from resolution     

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an Anti-Feminist Text: Historical,Psychoanalytical and Postcolonial Perspectives

This article is an attempt to engage with the question ‘Is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a feminist book?’ Arguments from historical, psychoanalytical and postcolonial perspectives are presented and discussed. By summarizing and engaging with both sides of the debate, this article detects the source of the unresolved conflicts surrounding whether Carroll’s novel is a feminist text to be the different sides’ distinctive interpretations of Alice’s social identification. The pro-Alice-as-feminist-icon camp simply identifies her as an active and potentially subversive female role model for women, and thus subsumes Alice under the general category of women by assumption, whereas the iconoclastic camp, including the author of this article, reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an anti-feminist text, purports to differentiate the role of little girls and the role of adult women in the Victorian period. It argues that Alice’s supposedly unconventionally unfeminine characteristics do not necessarily imply Carroll’s enthusiasm for women’s liberation from marginality and domesticity, and instead they reveal his misogynistic fear of adult women and his pessimistic and nostalgic mourning for the loss of girlhood innocence and the inevitable corruption that ensues. The fictional character’s conformist ideologies are also detected in her participation in the oppressive system and mindset of British imperialism, which paradoxically further confines her in the oppressed domain of female inferiority and domesticity.     

Results of a misspent youth: Joan Jett's performance of female masculinity

The article maps Joan Jett's performances from her days with the Runaways in the mid-1970s through her successful solo career in the 1980s to her recent affiliations with the riot grrrls in the 1990s. Unlike some critics, who, while acknowledging Jett's influence on generations of female rock performers, dismiss Jett as an inferior copy of male rock musicians, the author argues that Jett's various performances of female masculinity challenged conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity. The article explores how Jett's interest in punk enabled her to carve a space for herself in a male-dominated genre. It is further contended that as more spaces opened for women in the early 1990s, Jett's performances took a more aggressive stance on traditionally feminist issues and enabled her to use her sexuality as an offensive weapon.