The feminist frontier: on trans and feminism

Against a back-drop of ongoing hostility between sections of feminism towards trans communities, and particularly feminist antagonism towards trans women, this paper explores the relationship between feminism and transgender. Through the use of original case study material, gathered by virtual methods, the paper explores events that have occurred since the millennium that are used to highlight particular epistemological and political tensions between feminism and trans. Central themes running through the case studies include the constitution of ‘woman’, the policing of feminist identities and spaces, and questions of bodily autonomy. In conclusion, the paper stresses the importance of rejecting trans-exclusionary feminism and of foregrounding the links between feminism and transgender as a key social justice project of our time.     

Fighting for Recovery: foremothers and feminism in the 1970s

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the feminist recovery of ‘a history of our own’ during the 1970s proved difficult in ways not fully addressed in generalising narratives (celebratory or regretful) of feminist historical work. The recovery of a nineteenth-century ‘pioneer woman', Mary Hallock Foote, demonstrates the competing interests in play—feminist and anti-feminist, popular and scholarly, public and familial, national and local—as well as the problematic positions of that these cross-cutting debates. The question of recovery, use and even ownership, of Foote and her history retains its ability to spark argument almost fifty years later.     

Tensions in israeli feminism: The mizrahi ashkenazi rift

The idea of women's liberation was imported in the 1970s from the West by liberal feminist activists who immigrated to Israel. The first Israeli feminists adopted all the liberal feminist slogans and ideology together with their advantages and the disadvantages. The implantation of these ideas in the Israel—a country torn ethnically—has produced a conflict from which Mizrahi feminism has evolved. By the 1990s, Mizrahi women who participated in feminist activity, and who found themselves excluded and marginalized by the Ashkenazi women who dominated the Israeli feminist movement began to give expression to their feelings of oppression. This reached a peak in 1995 in Natanya with the First Mizrahi Feminist Annual Conference. This article outlines the historical, social, political and ideological processes in which Mizrahi feminism developed. It shows how slogans such as sisterhood and solidarity, have been used to endorse activities which do not benefit women of all the different ethnic groups in Israel. The article includes a discussion of dilemmas that arise from “tokenism” and the purportedly universalist feminist agenda. The Mizrahi feminist agenda and its ideological framework, as well as its strategic aspects, are also critically reviewed.     

The uneasy alliance of feminism and academia

The authors argue that some integrationists are seriously underestimating the degree to which the university is embedded in the overall social structure, a role which has not developed accidentally, and which is not likely to change without concurrent major changes in other institutions. Although it is understandable why integrationist strategies have developed and why some projects may be useful, it is also important to think about how they may undermine the radical goals of feminist scholarship and our ties to the community.     

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     

Frances Wright: The other woman of early American feminism

This paper focuses on Frances Wright, the first woman to lecture publicly in the U.S. to “promiscuous” audiences, those audiences composed of both sexes united in a public place. Despite her achievement, Wright has been ignored in historical analyses of nineteenth‐century feminist rhetoric, I argue that historians have avoided Wright because she differs radically from those feminists who directly succeed her. As the Other Woman of the women's movement, Wright practiced a rhetoric imbued with the ideals of the Enlightenment and Owenite socialism. She publicly interrogated the cult of domesticity and demanded equal rights for women at a time when gender anxiety was Intense. Wright caused a furor and provided a negative example for later nineteenth‐century feminists, most of whom developed “womanly” strategies of accommodation. I conclude that it is precisely because of her otherness that Wright is important, historically significant because she was marginalized and silenced within the feminist movement.     

Claiming feminism: commentary,autobiography and advice literature for women in the recession

Feminist academics have grown accustomed to the disparagement and misrepresentation of our intellectual endeavours in a climate of antifeminist postfeminism. Yet, in recent years, the position of public feminism has shifted as it is increasingly invoked by celebrities for whom it often functions as a credential of entrepreneurial self-branding. This article identifies and conducts a preliminary analysis of a set of female-authored print texts published in the wake of the ‘Great Recession’ and marked by a distinctly emergent monetisation/corporatisation of feminism. It suggests that these books respond to and further a sense of fraught female aspirationalism in an era of economic contraction and growing signs of neo-patriarchalism.