‘Magdalens and moral imbeciles’: Women's homes in nineteenth-century New Zealand

The potential for women's charitable work in nineteenth-century New Zealand was restricted by colonial women's initial isolation from each other and involvement in domestic life, and also by early government assumption of responsibility for welfare. Rescue work provided one of the few outlets for women's voluntary charity, and reflected the sanction given to women's role as a moral, civilising force in colonial society. It illustrates women's role in the development of social work, the limitations of this role in nineteenth-century New Zealand, and modifications to it in the space of three decades. The arguments used to justify women's involvement in rescuing ‘fallen’ members of their own sex were similar to those used in the later nineteenth-century, when women activists sought wider involvement in public life. It is argued that a power based upon moral influence was narrow in scope and ultimately restrictive in the New Zealand context.     

Depoliticising the personal : A feminist slogan in feminist therapy

One of the great insights of second wave feminism was the recognition that “the personal is political.” Many feminist psychologists (both practitioners and researchers) claim a strong commitment to this slogan and attempt to implement it through their theory and practice. This article explores four interpretations of “the personal is political” in feminist psychological writing. It is argued that far from achieving radical feminist goals, psychological interpretations serve: (1) to personalise the political, translating social, economic, and ecological concerns into individual psychological matters; (2) to foster revolution “from within” at the expense of political change in the outside world; (3) that insofar as it aims uncritically to “validate women's experience,” it ignores the social and political factors which shape experience; and (4) that the concept of “empowerment” depends upon a radical split between the “personal” and the “political”. In sum, it is concluded that femenist acknowledgement that the personal really is political means rejecting psychology.     

feminist ‘selves’ and feminism's ‘others’: feminist representations of Jamaat-e-Islami women in Pakistan

In Pakistan, as in many other societies, politico-religious movements or so-called Islamist fundamentalist movements are becoming an important site for women's activism as well as the harnessing of such activism to promote agendas that seem to undermine women's autonomy. This has become a concern for a growing feminist literature which from a variety of political and theoretical positions seeks to understand and explain the subject-position of Muslim women as politico-religious activists. This paper attempts a deconstructive reading of texts by leading Pakistani feminist scholars as they attempt the difficult process of steering between fundamentalism and Orientalism in their accounts of ‘fundamentalist’ women in the political ideological space of Pakistan.     

from the uterus to the brain: images of hysteria in nineteenth-century Mexico

Scientific interest in hysteria began in Mexico at the end of the 19th-century, as the medical profession expanded. The Mexican doctors studied madness, drawing on what was confidently regarded as a firm basis of epistemological knowledge. Using modern physiology they entered a discussion that had begun some time before in Europe. Encountering hysteria, an illness presumed to be caused by ‘over-civilization’, they searched for a universal definition. The doctors tried to impose a unifying concept onto the diverse symptoms of hysteria, and, although imitating European ideas, the discourse became distinctive in its attempts to relate hysteria to science and modernity so that all three would make sense. My interest in this article is the feminine; not a reconstruction of the relationship that medicine established between hysteria and the feminine, but a search for a space within the discourse that deconstructs identity and stereotypes. The feminine appears when the coherence of medical discourse is ruptured and when, to explain the illness, the doctors stop attempting to define it. This eventually occurs when the medical discourse considers the subject as unidentifiable and deceptive.     

The public and the private in architecture: A feminist critique

Hanna Arendt's discussion of public and private derives more or less intact from Aristotle and forms a principal philosophical basis for mainstream architectural theory exemplified in the writings of Kenneth Frampton. An eminent architectural historian, teacher, and critic, Frampton proposes that the discipline of architecture is in crisis today because of an unprecedented enphasis on ‘the life-bound values of animal laborans,’ and because ‘it is largely divested of culturally valid institutions for its embodiment,’ which institutions, he suggests, find their archetypes in the agora of the ancient polis. The author criticizes Frampton's position from the perspective of feminist philosophy, based on Elshtain and Pitkin, and advocates some reformulation of the traditional hierarchical relationship between the two domains. The last section of the article locates architectural work within this feminist perspective: in programme, precedents, and formal expression. ‘The Ethical Polity’ provides a potential vehicle for architectural exploration predicated on the restructuring of public and private.     

Rumours from the cauldron: Competition among feminist writers

Why have feminists been silent about competition among women? Most of us feel a personal distress and a political confusion when we acknowledge such rivalry. Is competition antithetical to feminism? Competition among women writers is a highly charged topic because literature is a peculiarly public project from a particularly private endeavor. This paper is written to open the issue for discussion within the larger feminist forum.Here I suggest that women cannot win by competing in an androcentric system. To clearly understand competition, we will want to distinguish between competitive feelings and the process or competition, between suffering and virtue, between criticism and conflict and between competition for patriarchal fame and status and an internal competition for artistic excellence. I suggest that many of us get caught in envy or our own fears of ambition or our skewed ideas about literary criticism. In addition, the essay criticizes the notion of art as magic. I discuss writing as labor, suggesting that writers confront publishers about wages and working conditions rather than compete with each other for limited resources.Having examined competitiveness within the androcentric system more clearly, can we find any ways for competition to serve us? Is it possible to go back to the Latin root of compete (to meet, to strive together) and develop a ‘feminist competition’ which allows for both individual and collective progress?