What Was Margaret Thatcher's Legacy for Women?

This article considers the legacy for women of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), Britain's first and to date only woman prime minister. It is suggested that although Thatcher had to struggle against many of the sexist prejudices of her day to achieve her political ambitions, she was no feminist. The hard ladder up which she had climbed was drawn up and not extended to other women. Yet for some women, such as the Spice Girls, she was the pioneer of their ideology of girl power. Overall, it is concluded that Thatcher was a polarising figure whose legacy is one of much divisiveness, in which the divisions between women is only one of many strands.     

Women’s Rights Facing Hypermasculinist Leadership: Implementing the Women,Peace and Security Agenda Under a Populist-Nationalist Regime

Populist-nationalist ideologies pose a threat to women’s rights. This article examines to what extent national institutionalisation of international frameworks promoting women’s rights can weather the misogynistic political climate accompanying the global rise of populist nationalism. The post-2016 situation in the Philippines offers a testing ground for this problem due to the co-existence of President Duterte’s hypermasculinist national leadership with a strong history of institutionalisation of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Drawing from an analysis of WPS policy and institutions in the Philippines between 2009 and 2019 and from field research and interviews with government agencies, local civil society organisations and international partners, this article argues that the WPS agenda will likely survive in the hostile environment. But it also finds that institutionalisation alone does not guarantee successful implementation. While the WPS agenda may ostensibly remain a national priority under populist-nationalist regimes, its progression has been halted.

     

Letting Women in? Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Policies

Gender mainstreaming has over the last ten years become the dominant strategy of integrating gender issues in public policy. This article presents regional policy as a broad and increasingly important policy field to study, and analyses gender mainstreaming in this policy field in the Norwegian and the Swedish contexts. How do problem representations surrounding “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming” produce meanings of gender as well as construct possibilities for change? The article shows that, despite some differences between the two countries, gender mainstreaming in regional policy can to a large extent be read as meaning “women”. Women are in this context given a narrow subject position and are constructed as lacking what it takes to produce sustainable regional growth. The concluding discussion highlights the relations between the implementation of gender mainstreaming and neo‐liberal political trends.     

The Constitution of Afghanistan and Women’s Rights

This article argues that women’s human rights were and are being violated in Afghanistan regardless of who governs the country: Kings, secular rulers, Mujahideen or Taliban, or the incumbent internationally backed government of Karzai. The provisions of the new constitution regarding women’s rights are analysed under three categories: neutral, protective and discriminatory. It is argued that the current constitution is a step in the right direction but, far from protecting women’s rights effectively, it requires substantial revamping. The constitutional commitment to international human rights standards seems to be a hallow slogan as the constitution declares Islam as a state religion which clearly conflicts with women’s human rights standards in certain areas. The Constitution has empowered the Supreme Court to review whether human rights instruments are compatible with Islamic legal norms and, in case of conflict, precedence will be given to Islamic law. Keeping this in view, it is argued that Afghanistan’s ratification of the Women’s Convention without reservations has no real significance unless Islamic law dealing with women’s rights is reformed and reconciled with international women’s rights standards.     

Contemporary Women’s Autofiction as Critique of Postfeminist Discourse

ABSTRACT

While commentaries on the phenomenon of postfeminism have centred on its manifestations in media and popular culture, this article highlights the potential of literature for extending existing debates within postfeminist studies. I argue that the emergence of contemporary women’s autofiction offers the possibility of a literary response to the individualising narrative of a neoliberal and postfeminist sensibility. I advance this contention via an analysis of two texts: Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2012) and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014). Their writing practice is resolutely political because it employs the confessional mode, as indebted to the emancipatory roots of the feminist movement, to reflect on the enduring marginality of female artistic identity. By foregrounding the inherently provisional nature of their being, both texts emphasise that the search for a viable artistic consciousness and experiments in artistic method are as crucial as the final product itself, especially when the definition of woman as artist still remains contested. I thus locate the existence of these texts in a wider social imaginary conducive for feminist organising. In this respect, the rising popularity of contemporary women’s autofiction may offer strategies crucial for remediating an otherwise diminished feminist politics of the present.     

Women’s History and Oral History: developments and debates

Women’s history and oral history grew up together. Each developed from a commitment to reveal and reverse, to challenge and to contest what were perceived to be dominant discourses framed by gender and class. In this article the relationship between these two endeavours is explored. Beginning with the 1960s the influence of feminist approaches to research and representation are given due consideration and acknowledgement. In reviewing changes over the last four decades the dilemma for women of being both subject and object in research is explored. The tension in this dilemma is discussed in relation to developments in relation to subjectivity in the interview, the process of doing oral history, the developments in public history and remembering in late life. The article concludes with an overview of new work in the field and concedes that, whatever issues remain unresolved, oral history continues to interest and attract researchers working in a wide range of disciplines with the promise of yet more theorised and gendered explorations of the past in years to come.     

Norway as an Example in the UK Women’s Suffrage Campaign

This article analyses the character and meanings of references to Norwegian experiences in the UK women’s suffrage campaign. It argues that the references to Norway served two main purposes. Firstly, they served as evidence of all the good things that would happen as a result of women gaining the vote, such as wage equality and social reform. Secondly, they played a significant part in establishing a counter-narrative to the anti-suffragist warnings of all the terrible things that would follow women’s suffrage. The study also discusses the limitations of political exchange and shows how different political contexts came into play in the debates on the validity of the Norwegian example.     

Women and workplace training: Power relations positioning “the other”

This article presents selected details from an empirical study that examined organisational practices in some Australian workplaces in relation to women and training. The background to the study was Australia's Training Reform Agenda of the 1990s, which offered workers the possibility of significant gains in skill and occupational advancement. The particular focus of my study was training opportunities for women working in “ordinary” jobs, lower down in organisational hierarchies. Feminist poststructuralist theory informed an examination of gender power relations within four workplaces, particularly in relation to training. This theoretical perspective offered insight into how a range of discursive practices in the organisations positioned some women as certain kinds of subjects with low work affiliation and no career path and highlighted the impact of this positioning on women's training opportunities.     

Women,Godliness and Personal Appearance in Seventeenth‐Century England 1

This article discusses Lady Jersey's brief sojourn in New South Wales in 1891-92, as the wife of the colonial governor. In the context of colonial anxieties and hopes about the contemporary women's movement, Lady Jersey's aristocratic confidence and imperial authority gave her the appearance of an ‘Advanced Woman’. A published writer and confident public speaker before she arrived in the colony, Lady Jersey took a keen interest in local political affairs, and her demeanour and activity were swiftly satirised in the radical nationalist and frequently misogynist Bulletin. Local feminist groups, perhaps craving some of the legitimate public authority she so readily exercised, sought her patronage and support but were generally doomed to disappointment. The article suggests that Lady Jersey, despite her own conservatism, offered an ambiguous role model for those seeking positive ways in which to imagine female power.     

Western Women Missionaries and their Japanese Female Charges, 1870–1890

In the past ten years much research has been published on the issue of nineteenth‐century Western women (missionaries) and their imperialist attitudes toward the Asian populations they came in contact with when they travelled to, or were sent by the missions to proselytise in China, India or Korea. The author discusses the relationship between Western women missionaries and Japanese girls during the 1870s and 1880s, focusing in particular on the educational work undertaken by women missionaries and on the values they tried to impart to Japanese girls in the girls’ schools they founded. The author shows that women missionaries could not easily discard the patriarchal and imperial notions they had come to believe in. She also argues, however, that the environment they created in Japan helped some girls to voice their hopes for a society in which their understanding of Japanese women’s worth was recognised.