Marcia and erikson: The relationships among ego identity status,neuroticism, dogmatism,and purpose in life

Implicit in James Marcia's writings and in the many studies that have employed his measure of ego identity is the assumption that his four ego identity statuses are developmentally ordered along a continuum from “being identity diffused” to “achieving” an ego identity. In order to assess the validity of this assumption, hypotheses were generated and tested concerning the relationship between the above ordering and Erikson's writings regarding the role played in the process of identity formation by the following three variables: neuroticism, dogmatism, and a sense of purpose in life. If one assumes that Erikson's perspective is valid, then the results of this study fail to support Marcia's continuum assumption. While some of the identity statuses appear to classify persons in a manner consistent with Erikson's writings, not one instance of the postulated ordering of Marcia's four statuses is observed. It is concluded that Marcia's measure is not an adequate operationalization of Erikson's perspective on identity formation.     

Gender,body, and feminine performance: Edna St.Vincent Millay's impact on Anne Sexton

This paper will discuss Edna Millay's influence on Anne Sexton, with particular reference to issues such as gender politics, femininity, performativity, and the female body. Through close comparative readings of some of the two women's most representative poems, I analyze, firstly, how Millay's outspokenness and daring self-presentation as a woman writer facilitated Sexton's handling of material that was previously considered unacceptable for poetry and, secondly, how Sexton expanded the scope of women's writing in a manner that paid tribute to the earlier poet's innovation. My paper maintains that Millay's repeated attempts to explore gender and interrogate the concept of ‘authentic’ femininity anticipated Sexton's overtly feminist works. Ultimately, I am arguing that, despite the literary climate of the 1960s (which urged the rejection of poets like Millay) and despite her own ambiguous feelings for the earlier poet, Sexton eventually recovered Millay as an important literary predecessor for her generation, consistently imitated her artistic posturing, performance strategies, and self-presentation, and finally acknowledged her unique contribution to women's writing.     

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.     

Periodicals by,for, and about women in Britain

Periodicals in general are an underrated resource for researchers, and this is especially true of women's periodicals. For present purposes these can be divided into three categories: commercial, organisational, and feminist. Commercial women's magazines first emerged at the turn of the eighteenth century, and have been increasingly concerned with the domestication of women and with fashionable dress. They have come to be almost entirely controlled by advertising interests. Organisational periodicals frequently demonstrate a tension between the organisation and the women within it, which tends to be resolved to the women's disadvantage. Feminist periodicals first began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century, since when they have undergone various vicissitudes, but at present they appear to be flourishing as never before. The Fawcett Library has been stocking as many women's periodicals as it can, but runs into difficulties of space and categories. Although satisfactory lists of women's periodicals have been appearing, the important task of article-indexing has scarcely begun.     

Beginning an ‘Extraordinary Opportunity’: Eleanor Roosevelt,Molly Dewson,and the expansion of women's boundaries in the Democratic Party, 1924–1934

This article contributes to recent reinterpretations of women's participation in the United States' political system in the 1920s and 1930s by arguing that the years 1924 through 1934 demonstrated an expansion of female boundaries in the Democratic Party. Eleanor Roosevelt became the first agent in this process through her involvement in both the New York State Democratic Party and in social justice feminism. Her protégée, Molly Dewson, continued the expansion as the first full-time director of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, also helping to re-establish social justice feminism's national prominence.     

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.     

Women's Voices in Swedish Towns and Cities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: municipal franchise,polling, eligibility and strategies for universal suffrage

This article examines women's polling and eligibility in the municipal elections in Swedish cities and towns in the decades round the 1900 turn of the century. The aim is to present the patterns of suffrage, voting behaviours and representation that emerge from statistics produced by the women's movement and to discuss how these relate to the women's movement's strategies for women's political citizenship and national suffrage. The results are furthermore analysed in comparison with eighteenth-century conditions, when legally competent women who paid taxes could vote in some elections.     

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.     

Women's right to work: The interplay of state,market and women's agency

This article addresses questions central to the conception of women's citizenship: Do women have the same right to wage work as men have? That is, do women have the same access to and chances to keep jobs as men? Is women's right to employment perceived as an individual right, disconnected from men's traditional prerogative to hold jobs as breadwinners? Women's right to work is conceptualized as a complex structural and ideological construct, shaped by the interplay of the labour market, welfare state and women's agency. The empirical analysis takes one of the Scandinavian welfare states, Norway, as its main case. The study concludes that women's individual right to work was significantly strengthened from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.     

Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.     

Skilled hands,strong spirits: a century of building trade history,by Grace Palladino

When a hired thug hurled acid in the face of the prominent newspaper columnist, Victor Riesel, in 1956, the attack left him permanently blind. The incident appeared to dramatically vindicate Riesel's repeated warnings about the dangerous power of labor racketeers and it helped spur the creation of the largest ever congressional investigation into union corruption, the McClellan Committee hearings (1957–1959). This article raises important questions about the accepted version of why this attack occurred and what it meant. It uses recently released documents from the FBI as well as records from the McClellan Committee's staff. The article also suggests that several governmental bodies, including the FBI and the US Attorney's Office, played a role in furthering the public's misunderstanding of this episode. In so doing it offers a new understanding about how the issue of union corruption came to assume an important place on the nation's political agenda in this era.     

Dorset,Kincardine and peasant crisis: A comment on David Craig

David Craig's paper ‘Novels of Peasant Crisis’ is to be warmly welcomed. But Craig provides no adequate analysis of the peasant crises underlying the novels which he considers. This paper considers one of Craig's novels; Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song. Craig's explanation of this book in terms of depopulation and the destruction of the Kincardine peasantry from outside is seen to be inadequate. Sunset Song is about the crumbling of a peasant mode of production through the working out of internal contradictions within that mode of production. As an introduction to this discussion of Sunset Song Craig's dismissal of the utility of Thomas Hardy's work for the analysis of rural class relations is argued to be distinctly premature.     

Borders,Conflict Zones,and Memory: scholarly engagements with Luisa Passerini

A substantive historiographical as well as introductory essay to this issue in honour of Passerini's important scholarship, the article highlights such themes as subjectivity and intersubjectivity; transformations in oral history and memory studies prompted by attention to such issues as the role of myth, collaboration, autobiography, and the imaginary. It documents Passerini's early reception among feminist and labour historians; the collaborations researching trauma and memory under totalitarianism; her Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, and work on love and on redefining Europe in more inclusive ways. It also situates the application of Passerini's insights by an international and multidisciplinary line-up of scholars working on diverse projects.     

Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election: right-wing feminism,the Great War and the ideology of consumption

This article examines the roots of Christabel Pankhurst's Women's Party in the Women's Social and Political Union's adoption of right-wing feminism during the Great War. It explores the blending of radical-right and imperialist ideology with a feminist agenda that combined a demand for women's rights with an anti-Bolshevik economic policy based on the power of female consumers. This blending of feminism and nationalism won Christabel the ‘coupon’ endorsement of the Lloyd George coalition and became the ideological platform for her parliamentary campaign in the Smethwick election. Although Christabel lost the election by 775 votes, it is contended that the Women's Party platform offers clues to the attraction of right-wing ideology to some notable figures in the women's movement.     

Gender troubles,Redux

Thirty years ago, women's history written from a feminist standpoint was the revolutionary force, challenging androcentric thought and definitions of experience. Today, gender has become the more threatening moniker to those who would maintain patriarchal power and suppress knowledge. While not new, recent attacks on ‘gender ideology’ by conservative, often labeled right-wing governments, threaten the continuation of degree programs, as in Hungary, and pose manifold dangers to scholars world-wide. In the context of women's and LGBTQ movements, twenty-first century globalization, and political and economic changes, those who cling to the gender binary simplify the subject of women's history.     

Monarchical Manoeuvres: Gender,Nation and the Boundary Problem in Post-War Swedish Constitutional Development

In the years following the end of the cold war in 1989, Western feminist scholars and activists expressed disappointment in the failure of the newly democratic Eastern and Central European countries to sustain mainstream women's rights movements and achieve a marked increase in women's participation within the new political parties and political life in general. The authors, historians of Hungarian women's movements with a broad East-West perspective, offer a novel explanation for this phenomenon. Following an outline of the main stages of Hungarian women's movements and women's political participation, they focus on two instances in twentieth-century Hungarian history that resulted in a rapid transition from anti-democratic regimes to liberal, parliamentary systems: the 1918 bourgeois democratic revolution and the 1990 re-introduction of free parliamentary elections. Examining these two turning points in recent Hungarian history, separated by 70 years, as case studies of women's activism, the authors propose a new, critical re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres, offering a timely if co-incidental comment on the recent debate in the Journal of Women's History.² Research for this article had been completed by the time of the publication of the Spring 2003 issue of the Journal of Women's History, 15 (1), devoted to "Rethinking Public and Private".     

Marketing edwardian feminism: Dora Marsden,votes for women and the freewoman

Although Dora Marsden had resigned from the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and repudiated the principles of the women's suffrage movement by the time she founded The Freewoman in 1911, she recognised the marketing potential of her suffragette persona. Thus, despite envisioning her journal as a post-suffragist ‘little magazine’, she used her status as a famed WSPU organiser prior to The Freewoman's publication to garner suffragette subscribers and advertisements for women's goods and services. After The Freewoman's debut, Marsden lost most of her original advertisers and subscribers, many of whom accused the editor of having misled them as to the nature of her journal. The author argues that Marsden's rejection of the journalistic model provided by the mainstream suffrage press and willingness to allow The Freewoman to slide into bankruptcy signalled a strategic bid for the ‘cultural capital’ that accrues to writers who forego mass readerships in order to gain avant-garde reputations     

Center Stage: Humiliation,Being Found Out,and the Myth of Supercompetence

Youth workers operate within a professional climate in which competence is perceived to be linked to a worker's ability to respond quickly and effectively to whatever situations clients may present. Many youth workers perceive their own inability to respond in moments of stuckness as indicative of their own failing and lack of professional skill. They often view their colleagues as more equipped and competent than themselves and fear having their own struggles exposed. This chapter describes the third of five themes associated with youth workers' experiences of not-knowing what to do: humiliation and the fear of being found out. In addition to presenting the dominant theme, this chapter discusses the two variations on the theme, as described by youth worker participants: (a) The worst public humiliation and (b) They'll know I'm a fraud. Implicit in both variations is the weight of youth workers' attempts to measure up to the field's myth of supercompetence in their practice.     

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.