The Conflicting Interests of Women's Organizations and the League of Nations on the Question of Married Women's Nationality in the 1930s

This article investigates the question of legal equality in citizenship and nationality in the inter-war years. The first conference for the codification of international law was hosted by the League of Nations in The Hague in 1930. One of the topics of the conference was married women's nationality, and international women's organizations did everything in their power to persuade the conference that married women deserved to be treated equally to non-married women and to men. Women lobbied the League, but they were ultimately unsuccessful. The study highlights the conflicting aims of a movement struggling for social and political change and the official aims of an international organization. Whereas previous research has focused on the actions of the women's organizations, this article directs its interest towards the interaction between the League of Nations and the women's organizations. In questions regarding women's rights and claims for equality the League of Nations adapted an overly cautious, even conservative, position. However, the article shows that the international discourse provided arguments and documents useful in national struggles. This will be illustrated by the debate on independent nationality in the Swedish feminist press.     

Toxicity in the Details: The History of the Women's Office Worker Movement and Occupational Health in the Late-Capitalist Office

In the early years of the twentieth century Japanese employers, like their counterparts in the various Western countries, experimented with programs of firm-based social welfare and social insurance, often collectively identified as welfare capitalism. This essay examines these programs, focusing on those operated by the national railroad system. It argues that these programs were neither a distinctive emanation of traditional values nor simply a result of mimicry of Western-inspired programs. They were instead an instance of a global effort by employers everywhere to cope with rapidly changing conditions and the challenges of modern economic development. The essay also argues that these Japanese programs, like those in Western countries, influenced and helped to set the parameters of state-based health and welfare systems that emerged in the first half of the century.     

Women's Organizations and Movements in the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Response to Global Economic Crisis in the 1980s

In this paper I explore the emergence of women's organizations and feminist consciousness in the twentieth century in the English-speaking (Commonwealth) Caribbean. The global ideas concerning women's equality from the 1960s onwards clearly informed the initiatives taken by both women and states of the Caribbean. None the less, the paper illustrates, by use of examples, the interlocked nature of women's struggles with the economic, social and political issues which preoccupy the region's population. I examine in greater detail two case studies of women's activism and mobilization around the impact of structural adjustment policies in the two territories of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. By tracing the connections between and among the organizations and initiatives of women in the region, the paper situates the feminist movement in the English-speaking Caribbean as a continuously evolving one, fusing episodic struggles in different territories, engaging women of different classes and groups, and continuously building on past experience.