Housework,Wages and Money

Abstract

According to a range of authors and popular commentators, the post-Fordist socioeconomic order has produced a new category of female labourer, the ‘female principal breadwinner’. This article opens out this category of worker to critical scrutiny. We suggest that while the very idea of the female principal breadwinner is open to all manner of existing lines of feminist critique, beyond this it forces a confrontation with a number of issues vital to feminist analyses of transformations to women's labour—both waged and unwaged—in contemporary financialised post-Fordism. We pursue two issues in particular. First, transformations to the labour of social reproduction—including transformations to the measurement and valuation of domestic labour—and second, the financialisation (and shifting capacities) of wages specifically and money more generally. We suggest that if transformations to women's labour are to be fully grasped and understood feminist theory must renew and rethink its analyses of domestic labour, wages and money.     

museums,poetics and affect

This paper follows the Salt-Wind and subterraneous freshwater flows in Hawaiian poet Brandy Nālani McDougall's collection of poetry The Salt-Wind/Ka Makani Pa‘akai. McDougall illustrates that in order to begin again in the aftermath of American imperialism and environmental destruction, one must return to the salt-water and sub-surface waterings, and the ancestral connections and voices therein who beckon her (and others) home. In this way, her work is situated within contemporary movements within the Pacific, presently coming together in deimperializing efforts to restructure a future for the Pacific that is ‘beyond empires’ (Fujikane, 2012: 191). Selecting two poems in particular from McDougall's collection—‘Hāloanaka’ and ‘On a Routing Slip from the U.S. Postal Service, Pukalani Branch’—I illustrate how they chart the ancestral, cosmological, and historical flows of kinship between Kānaka Maoli and their near and distant earthly and spiritual relations. In particular, the water that passes through the taro plant infuses all manner of kinship, economic, and social relations in Hawai‘i, connecting Kānaka Maoli to their ancestor Hāloa, and to land, sea, and each other, as well as—through the formative oceanic movements of Moana Nui—to other Pacific islanders. A thirst for water—sacred, imaginative, mobile, past, present—underwritten by an assertion of Hawaiian sovereignty, language, and tradition flows just beneath the surface of McDougall's words.     

Zombie Law: Conjugality,Annulment, and the (Married) Living Dead

This article deploys and extends Ulrich Beck’s critique of ‘zombie categories’ (Beck in J Consum Cult 1 (2):261–277, 2001) to consider how conjugal relationships are brought into being before the law. The argument presented here is that sexual performatives relating to marriage—and especially, in this instance, consummation—continue to produce a kind of social-legal magic, even as the social flesh of their enactment is rotting. Rules concerning annulment relating to wedding ceremonies, consent, disclosure, and consummation demonstrate that certain frameworks of conjugality involve a kind of corporeal magic animating the privileged place of heterosexual marriage. Thus, rules and regulations pertaining to weddings continue to produce and protect heterogendered, sexually dimorphous bodies, even though this privileging is—or at least, is becoming—socially obsolete.     

Feminism and feminist movements in the middle east,a preliminary exploration: Turkey,Egypt, Algeria,People's Democratic Republic of Yemen

Feminism, including in particular such notions as women's right to equality and their right to control their own lives, is, with respect to the Middle East's current civilization at any rate, an idea that did not arise indigenously, but that came to the Middle Eastern societies from ‘outside’. To predict and direct the future of that idea, and therefore the future of women in the Middle East—if this is indeed at all possible—an understanding of the development of feminism in the Middle East is crucial, including its transformations transplanted to a Middle Eastern, predominantly Islamic environment, and its different interpretations in the locally different cultures of the Middle East. It swiftly becomes apparent, in considering the history of feminism in the Middle East, that two forces in particular within Middle Eastern societies modify—hampering or aiding—the progress of feminism. First there are attitudes within the particular society, and the culture's and the sub-culture's formulations, formal and informal, regarding women. Second and perhaps as important, are the society's attitudes and relationship to feminism's civilization of origin, the Western world. Since the late nineteenth century, when feminist ideas first began to gain currency in the Middle East, a Middle Eastern society's formal stand on the position of women has often been perhaps the most sensitive index of the society's attitude to the West—its openness to, or its rejection of Western civilization. Thus Turkey's attitude of openness to Western civilization at the beginning of this century (with which this study begins) was epitomized by the abolition of the veil. More recently, the veiling of women in Iran has constituted perhaps the chief index and deliberately chosen symbol of Iran's rejection of Western civilization. The present article is the first of a series in which I will be exploring aspects of feminism in the Middle East.     

Poland,poetry, and gender

Although women figure prominently in contemporary Polish poetry, literary criticism has not treated them as a collective phenomenon. This is due to the great diversity of poetic voices, to the lack of a strong feminist tradition in Poland, but also to the unwillingness of some women poets to be labelled as authors of “women's poetry.” The term has for a long time been burdened with dismissive and pejorative meanings. Recent attempts to define women's poetry by a number of Polish and British critics have proved unsuccessful, since the characteristics of women's poetry — the interest in everyday detail as opposed to generalization, the intermingling of the private and the political — can be applied to much postwar Polish poetry, irrespective of gender.     

Touring a once pious nation: gender,medievalism, tourism,and Catholic nation-building in early twentieth-century France

ABSTRACT

In 1900, the first of the Guide national et catholique du voyageur en France appeared. Published by the Assumptionist Order alongside the Exposition Universelle, the guidebook suggested sites for Catholic travellers visiting Paris that year. Additional volumes on other regions of France soon followed. Known for their national pilgrimages to Lourdes, the Assumptionists departed here from their usual publications by presenting a religious travel experience based on curiosity more than faith, yet motivated by nostalgia for a medieval, pious France; a nation anchored in its regional traditions. Central to the guidebooks were female religious personalities—saint, visionaries, and miracle workers—who reflected this idealized vision of the nation. Using the lens of gender, this article explores the Guide's use of female religious figures and Marian apparitions in the construction of a Catholic nation to be explored, reaffirmed, and travelled at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

Destroyed by Love: nation,memory, and humanity in South Asia

Remembered experiences of violence, humiliation, and loss suffered in the 1971 war of Bangladesh offer a site for writing a new contemporary history in South Asia. Love, not for humanity but for nation, in survivors' memories was the site of violence in the war. The state's history-writing project cultivated hate against neighbors deemed enemies and encouraged violence against them. More than four decades later, the awareness of intersubjective relationships leads survivors—victims and perpetrators—to search for meaning beyond their national labels. The quest leads to the renewal of insāniyat, a South Asian concept of humanity, which survivors suggest is the site of human freedom from violence.     

Pills,potions, and purgatives: women and abortion methods in Ireland, 1900–1950

This article examines women's efforts to induce miscarriage in Ireland (the Irish Free State, Éire, and the Republic) from 1900 to 1950. It demonstrates that, when possible, Irish women avoided surgical procedures, preferring instead to consume pills, potions, and purgatives to cause abortion. Irish women viewed emmenagogues and abortifacients as more natural than surgery and in keeping with women's traditions; these substances, they understood, had been used for centuries to restore menstruation and return the female body to normalcy and health. Overall, it was control—control over the methods of abortion and control over what they put into their own bodies, as well as autonomy when it came to managing their own reproductive health—that mattered most to Irish women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Irish women's abortion efforts expose their resolve to manage their reproductive lives and thus remind us how they sometimes rejected the dictates of the conservative twentieth-century state-Church consensus, bypassing legislation and negotiating religious cultural norms.     

Women and power in Ireland: Problems,progress, practice

A major problem confronting Irish feminists centres on how the transition from a first phase of consciousness-raising and more or less separatist analysis and action to a second phase of broad-based mobilisation for policy-change is to be achieved, without losing sight of, or faith in, the long-term goal of a radical transformation of sexual power relations. As part of the necessary reappraisal of our present position, fundamental to the development of new strategies, this paper describes the extent to which women in Ireland are chronically and grossly underrepresented in power élites, and analyses some of the barriers which have precluded—and in large measure continue to preclude—women's equal participation in the decision and policy-making processes. More optimistically, the conclusion briefly indicates the challenge to traditional forms of political organisation represented by the emergence of alternative forms of political activism, initiated and developed by women over the past several years.     

Female education,literacy and the politics of sentimental fiction

Proposition One: Despite continuing controversy over the actual numbers, it can safely be asserted that women's sign literacy rates improved dramatically over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in America and that the level of women's ‘literateness’—educational levels and amount of reading—rose significantly. To use the most extreme figures (posited by Kenneth Lockridge and others), sign literacy for white women in New England rose from approximately fifty per cent of that of white males in 1780 to a figure roughly equal to that of men (and over 90 per cent total) by 1850.Proposition Two: Over the same period of time, the birth rate for white women fell from one of the highest rates ever measured, 7.04 live births per married woman in 1800, to 5.42 in 1850 and then to 3.56 in 1900. This is the most precipitous decline in birthrate recorded in western history until our own era. It occured without the development of any new technology for controlling reproduction.Proposition Three: At the same time, the novel became the single dominant literary form in America, with sales of novels far outstripping population growth among the literate. And the sentimental novel—a form addressed specifically to women, about women, and frequently by women—became the most popular form of the novel.Hypothesis: The sentimental novel in America was the single most inspiring form of education for women as well as the most effective means of birth control ever invented.     

The peasantry in the feudal mode of production: Towards an economic model

Over the last thirty years a substantial body of historical writing has evolved which deals in one way or another with the nature and tendencies of feudal economy. From the shorter conjuncture‐studies published in Annales, the regional monographs sponsored in France, the monographic estate‐studies popular in England, to the more concentrated historical synopses based on them, this literature¹ covers a vast field, geographically and chronologically—sufficiently broad, in fact, to stimulate the recent tendency of historical writing to explore the character of feudal economy at a deeper level of abstraction. Kula's study [1970] stands today as the major forerunner of this tendency. Based largely on Kula's book, this short essay sketches a framework within which it becomes possible to explore more concretely the connections between commodity‐economy and feudal production, and the specific historical relationships between the enterprises of feudal production and the peasantry.²     

Ignorance,Injustice and the Politics of Knowledge

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, feminist epistemology has developed into a vibrant area of inquiry which challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions of traditional, mainstream theories of knowledge to work towards developing theories and practices that close a persistent gap between theories of knowledge and knowledge that matters to people in real situations. Here I will examine some of the more startling recent developments in feminist epistemology, where—perhaps improbably—epistemologies of ignorance and questions about epistemic injustice have made significant contributions to feminist knowledge projects. Together and separately, they expose the extent to which knowing is a political activity, while maintaining that it can avow its political involvement without dissolving into facile assertions that ‘might is right’.     

The critic as feminist: Reflections on women's poetry,feminism, and the art of criticism

And the sigh of that child

Is white as an orchid …

As the white hush between two se ntences.

—from “Jean Rhys” by Derek Wolcott

     

Family law,family law politics and family politics

The analysis of state institutions where the state is geared towards the patriarchal family shows that it aims—in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, at least—at abandoning women to a civic freedom where they lack protection and real rights. Women are ‘emancipated’ in the true sense of the word by the liberalisation of divorce laws, which is accompanied by drastically reducing maintenance claims of divorced women.This development which—at first glance—seems to be in men's interests only, at the same time assists in the development of conditions where women, historically placed in the position of object, can gain the position of subject and lead a fight for equal changes in a society that guarantees to them (though only on paper) legal equality. These conditions will make women fight to gain effective equality.Every effort is made through family politics and the application of patriarchal family ideology to force women to retire rather than fight. However, all these legal and ideological efforts will finally be in vain, because a family ideology that pretends protection and security, while the law systematically cuts down this protection, cannot be sufficiently strong to fool the female half of the population.     

Review of Marilyn French,Shakespeare's division of experience †

SHAKESPEARE'S DIVISION OF EXPERIENCE by Marilyn French. (Summit Books — Simon and Schuster, 1981). 376pp., $15.95.     

"A Trade Union Oriented War on the Slums": Harold Gibbons,Ernest Calloway,and the St Louis Teamsters in the 1960s*

Michael Ross was international affairs director for the American Congress of Industrial Organizations from 1945 to 1955 and for the merged American Federation of Labour—Congress of Industrial Organizations from 1958 until his death in 1963. As such, he played a prominent role in the bitter anti-communist international trade union politics of the day. Ross, however, had been a communist in his younger years. Making use of Ross's own writings and an extensive secondary literature on the politics of the period, this article seeks to describe and explain his ideological journey. It argues that, while there were significant shifts in Ross's politics, there were also underlying consistencies. Specifically, it is contended that Ross retained a consistent commitment apparent throughout his career—as advocate of Soviet communism, New Deal bureaucrat, and trade union official—to working-class interests advanced by technocratic planning. It notes, however, that the radicalism and ambition of this politics were diluted both by the successes and constraints of Ross's career advancement and, more substantively, by a political context hostile to planning ideals in the US after 1945.     

The Gothic,the Death Drive and Angela Carter

Abstract

This essay situates Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) in a 1970s era in which a feminist reclaiming of various things—the streets, the night, as well as fairy tales—is the order of the day. It examines the complex nature of Carter's status, in this context, as a controversial writer. Is Carter a writer who contests or colludes with the forms of reality presented in and by her fiction? This question may be seen as framing the main debate about Carter as a ‘problematic’ or ‘polarizing’ figure. The different sides of this argument are assessed in this essay. From reading ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an exemplary reworking of the Gothic, and itself one of Carter's fictions of the death drive, the essay reaches a clear conclusion of its own regarding the vexed contest/collude dimension of Carter's storytelling.     

A Longitudinal Path Analysis of Peer Victimization, Threat Appraisals to the Self, and Aggression, Anxiety, and Depression Among Urban African American Adolescents

Threat appraisals—individuals’ perceptions of how stressful situations may threaten their well-being—are an important but understudied mechanism that could explain links between peer victimization and adjustment. The goal of the present study was to examine relationships between physical and relational victimization by peers, threats to the self, and aggression, anxiety, and depression to better understand the cognitive evaluations that make youth vulnerable to negative adjustment. The sample comprised two cohorts of African American adolescents (N = 326; 54 % female; M = 12.1; SD = 1.6) and their maternal caregivers, who participated in three waves of a longitudinal study. Path models revealed significant direct effects from Time 1 relational victimization, but not physical victimization, to Time 2 threat appraisals (i.e., negative self-evaluations and negative evaluations by others), controlling for Time 1 threat appraisals. Significant direct effects were found from Time 2 threats of negative evaluations by others to Time 3 youth-reported aggression, controlling for Time 1 and Time 2 aggression. Significant direct effects also were found from Time 2 threats of negative self-evaluations to T3 youth-reported depression, controlling for Time 1 and Time 2 depression. Overall, findings highlight the need to consider the role of threats to the self in pathways from peer victimization to adjustment and the implications these appraisals have for youth prevention and intervention efforts.     

Bullies, Gangs, Drugs, and School: Understanding the Overlap and the Role of Ethnicity and Urbanicity

Recent media attention has increased interest in behavioral, mental health, and academic correlates of involvement in bullying. Yet, there has not been much interest in investigating the co-occurrence of other health-risk behaviors, such as gang membership, weapon carrying, and substance use. The potential influence of contextual factors, such as youth ethnicity, urbanicity, and school characteristics, also has been overlooked in previous research. The current study examined different subtypes of involvement in bullying—as primarily a victim, as primarily a bully, as both a victim and bully, and no involvement—and the association with significant health-risk behaviors, including engaging in violence and substance use, as well as academic problems. The analyses use self-report data from 16,302 adolescents (50.3 % female, 62.2 % Caucasian, 37.8 % African American) enrolled in 52 high schools. A series of three-level HLM analyses revealed that bullies and bully/victims were generally at greatest of risk of being involved in violence, engaging in multiple types of substance use, and having academic problems. These findings extend prior research by emphasizing a potential link between involvement in bullying and multiple health-risk behaviors, particularly among urban and African American high school youth.