Go to Switzerland, young women, if you want to study medicine

During the second half of the nineteenth century women from all over the world went to Swiss universities to study medicine. The first female doctors to practice in most European countries received their medical education in Switzerland. This article examines possible reasons to explain why Switzerland opened its doors to female medical students when universities in other countries rejected women. Cultural, political and economic motivations are suggested.     

Governance and youth unemployment in Africa

ABSTRACT

The objective of this study is to identify governance indicators that can reduce youth unemployment in Africa. Thereby, the authors incorporated governance indicators into the growth model. The dynamic panel estimation of the model, based on data from the World Bank, the IMF and UNCTAD for the period 2002–2016 found that some governance indicators such as control of corruption and political stability have a negative influence on youth unemployment in Africa. Moreover, political stability does not reduce youth unemployment in highly corrupt countries which are rich in natural resources. Similarly, other governance indicators such as government effectiveness, regulatory quality, the rule of law, voice and accountability are not yet producing the expected effects in African countries. As a result, political authorities must improve governance indicators, including the control of corruption and political stability.     

Uneven paths: women and welfare in Italy and Spain

Taking the Spanish case as a departure point, this paper explores a variety of causes for the slowdown in female employment growth in Italy over recent years. The paper analyses the peculiarities of the Italian labour market, with a higher propensity to inactivity than in other countries, as well as the generally low educational levels among the Italian population and the pervasive presence of the black economy. It goes on to examine institutional and political features, such as the organisation of social policies, the political weakness of feminism, the role of the Catholic Church, family networks and the North–South duality (which is particularly extreme with regard to gender equality). The features studied relate to each other in a logic which could account for the divergent paths of the social position of women in Italy and Spain. The article is based in Labour Force and Multiscopo surveys, as well as on interviews with Italian social policy experts.     

Liberal family law in the making: Nordic and European harmonisation

This paper discusses the past and contemporary legal harmonisation exercises of family law in the Nordic countries and Europe. The critique is that the harmonised ‹European family law’ only entrenches the status quo and reiterates traditional family patterns, the male norm, heteronormativity, and a public/private divide represented in the neutral guise of a liberal rights discourse. Furthermore, the critics point out that the political economy of legal harmonisation is, to a large extent, ignored. In the Nordic countries, egalitarianism and broad political deliberation characterised much of the previous legal harmonisation, whereas rights discourse in its liberal sense is a novelty, more or less triggered by the European integration. This paper discusses the gendered implications of the emerging rights discourse in the Nordic countries and the linkages between family law, the labour market and social welfare. The paper argues that the harmonisation exercise cannot be regarded as one consisting only of legal norms and reasoning, but rather it should be discussed from the perspective of a political and epistemological challenge to the prevailing ‹truths’ about marriage, family and sexuality.     

A victor's history: a comparative analysis of the labour historiography of Indonesia's New Order

Some observers have identified a common pattern in developing countries whereby unions are transformed from a political force valued for their contribution to the struggle for independence to a state-sponsored ‘tool of development’. A less well-explored question concerns the harnessing of labour historiography to justify such transitions. As this article shows, Suharto's New Order (1966–98) undertook a conscious and purposeful rewriting of Indonesian labour history in support of a single vehicle of labour representation organized around a narrative of the dangers of political unionism and designed to control and harness the industrial workforce in the name of economic development.     

Appealing to the Female Vote: Dutch political parties and the approach of women voters in general election campaigns,c.1922–1980

This article explores the effects of female enfranchisement on the nature of political identity formation in Dutch election campaigns between 1922 and the early 1980s. It argues that women voters played a key role in the imagination of the Netherlands as a ‘pillarised society’ in which political constituencies were represented as stable and based on ‘objective’ characteristics like class and religion. The continuous representation of women as politically ignorant and indifferent served to maintain a self-identity that made women susceptible to ‘be educated’ and ‘learn to understand’ their political identity. The second feminist wave did much to upturn dominant representations, but older discourses proved persistent. The call to take women more seriously as members of the demos, again resulted in a separate treatment of women in political propaganda, with organisations like MVM and the parties' (rebranded) women's clubs, as well as commercial women's magazines now playing a key role in their ‘political education’.     

Left Activism,Succour and Selfhood: the epistolary friendship of two revolutionary mothers in 1970s Britain

At the height of mass activity on the Left, the ascendancy of the women's liberation movement (WLM), and the beginnings of real social and personal change for men and women, the 1970s are increasingly seen as the decade when sixties permissiveness began to be truly felt in Britain. This article draws upon a personal archive of correspondence from this turbulent decade, between two revolutionary women, Di Parkin and Annie Howells. It argues that the women's letters form an important contribution to new understandings about the construction of the post-war gendered self. The letters represent an interchange of motherhood, domesticity, far-left politics, and close female friendship. The article will show how the women's epistolary friendship offers intimate insight into female self-fashioning at a breakthrough social and political moment in 1970s Britain. As they reflected on some of the key political and social themes of the decade—class, labour, race and gender relations, as well as international politics—Di and Annie sought to negotiate themselves in relation to shifting discourses and social patterns. Writing as relational female subjects and individuals, the women's letters became simultaneously a private and shared space in which to compose themselves as women, revolutionaries and feminists, and autonomous sexual subjects. As a result, this article will show, the epistolary lives of these two radical women inform valuable understanding about some of the complex ways in which post-war individuals used available cultural and political resources to find meaning in their lives.     

社会运动工会主义的形成和发展 ——非洲工会的发展历程及其在劳动雇佣管制中的作用

在“一带一路”倡议中，非洲国家不可或缺。非洲国家工会的发展可以分为 3 个阶段，即殖民 时期、独立运动后初期及政治民主化转型时期。非洲工会发展与政治斗争密不可分，这也决定了其社会运动工 会主义的“激进”特性。现在非洲工会力量普遍薄弱，一方面是由于经济自由化导致了正式经济中的大量失业 和工会成员人数的急剧下降，另一方面是因为许多非洲国家政府对劳动法的改革，在承认工会合法地位的同时 又极大限制了工会行动。虽然非洲工会在劳动雇佣管制中的作用有限，但是当发生严重侵犯工人权利的行为时， 非洲工会仍然会通过组织工人罢工、静坐等形式来进行反抗。研究建议，对于在非投资的中资企业来说，要更 加关注东道国的工会运行情况，充分尊重员工的权利，加强与工会的沟通，提升员工的归属感。     

The implications of critical studies on men

The Finnish women's magazine Anna published several political portrait interviews of three female politicians (Pirkko Työläjärvi, Vappu Taipale, and Paula Lehtomäki) during the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 2000s, respectively. This article uses feminist semiotics to answer the question of how the significations assigned to the bodies of women politicians have defined their subject position in relation to the state. During the 1970s, Anna sought to counter the historical notion that female bodies are in conflict with political work by demonstrating that Työläjärvi was able to perform her duties adequately. During the 1980s, Anna reflected the gynocentric argument that certain “natural” female characteristics made women more suitable for particular areas of politics, such as social and environmental policy. During the early 2000s, Anna demonstrated that Lehtomäki was equal to her fellow men by idealizing a form of beauty that met the demands of the voyeuristic male gaze, upper-middle-class status, and youthfulness. During this period, the societal structures of gender inequality were not addressed. These representations stem from wider societal changes. During the 1970s, the state pursued growth-oriented economic policies, which required the wider participation of women in public life. During the 1980s, the growing political participation of women took place alongside the appearance of the gynocentric perspective, which facilitated the co-operation of women across party boundaries. At the start of the new millennium, economic globalization and neo-liberal policies have demanded national unity, which has been partly achieved by presenting a façade of gender and class equality.     

“Use words. Not your body”: The hunger that has no name

This essay examines the competing readings of food refusal that emerged from a student hunger strike held at Columbia University in fall 2007. The invisibility of the act of food refusal forces hunger strikers to adopt performance strategies that make their (non)action visible as protest. To make the politics of their food refusal legible, advocates for the hunger strike promoted their actions as part of a 40 year tradition of student protest. However, that same invisibility allowed the protest's detractors to deride the hunger strikers as anorexic. At the center of the protest and the commentary about it was a wasting female body that confused for spectators the line between the political and the pathological. Attention to this body raises questions of how community is created and disciplined through performative acts, how easily female protest is evacuated of political meaning and the uneasy role of whiteness in popular attention to anorexia.     

Means-Tested Public Assistance Programs and Adolescent Political Socialization

In recent years, scholars have pointed to the politically demobilizing effects of means-tested assistance programs on recipients. In this study, we bridge the insights from policy feedback literature and adolescent political socialization research to examine how receiving means-tested programs shapes parent influence on adolescent political participation. We argue that there are differences in pathways to political participation through parent political socialization and youth internal efficacy beliefs for adolescents from households that do or do not receive means-tested assistance. Using data from a nationally representative sample of 536 Black, Latino, and White adolescents (50.8% female), we find that adolescents from means-tested assistance households report less parent political socialization and political participation. For all youth, parent political socialization predicts adolescent political participation. Internal political efficacy is a stronger predictor of political participation for youth from a non-means-tested assistance household than it is for youth from a household receiving means-tested assistance. These findings provide some evidence of differential paths to youth political participation via exposure to means-tested programs.     

The geopolitics of Brazilian soybeans

Soybean plays a major role in the development of Brazilian agribusiness, and in turn in Brazilian geopolitical power as well. It is a pillar of Brazil's insertion into a ‘new multi-polar world order’ as basis for much Brazilian land ownership in neighboring countries, for the extension of political influence in Africa, and it is especially important for balancing trade with Brazil's new primary commercial partner, China. Yet the US dollar and North Atlantic transnational companies still control global soybean markets and production technologies. In a context marked by booming but volatile commodity prices, food crises, riots and revolutions in food-importing countries, a global rush for farmland, and severe droughts and climate change, the soybean agribusiness in Brazil takes on new and crucial geopolitical significance. I trace the geopolitical role it has served in consolidating the ‘green revolution’ in Brazil, and raise questions about the intersection between agroindustrial markets and currencies: could agricultural commodities serve geopolitical functions (and thus contestation) similar to those ‘petro-dollars’ have served since the 1970s? These considerations show how the political ecology of soybean shapes and is shaped by inter-regional and global-scale processes, and reveals new directions for research on the emerging geopolitical landscape of our century.     

Jane Eyre's Daughters: the feminist missions of Mary Carpenter and Josephine Butler in India

The nineteenth-century literature served as a theatrical space wherein culture and politics merged to constitute women's subjectivity. Charlotte Brontë's literary imagination of the heroine's ‘mission’ in Jane Eyre heralded Mary Carpenter's reform of Indian women's education and Josephine Butler's campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in India. This article explores the way in which the writings of both feminists betray imperial/anti-imperial and domestic/political aspects of their activities, as Brontë represents such complex issues through the deliberate articulation of the protagonist's subject-position, seeking the configuration of the female political network which stemmed from Jane's individual engagement with nineteenth-century gender politics.     

An Interview with Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was the first Algerian woman writer to publish a novel in the Arabic language. Her work is therefore very significant in the context of Arab women's writing and feminism. Her novels express a unique understanding of social and political events, and convey the impact of these events on individuals by combining love stories with political and social history, fused together in present time. The interview examines Ahlam Mosteghanemi's novels and the impact of colonization and post-colonization on Mosteghanemi, her writing, Algeria and the Algerian people. Mosteghanemi's decision to write in Arabic and the themes of her novels are directly informed by the Algerian war of independence and as such can be seen both as a statement of independence from the Eurocentric homogenization of language and discourse, and as a feminist political statement. The interview seeks to deconstruct the widespread image of feminist literature as a genre that attempts to explore the female experience through an unnuanced binary focus on the opposition between the male and female within a patriarchal society. The interview pays particular attention to the rich symbolism of Mosteghanemi's novels. Even in the English translation there is a strong sense of the historical and geographical reality of Algeria, an ancient country repeatedly invaded by colonizing forces, and struggling again in the modern world to establish an independent identity. The interview looks at some of the significant themes raised by Mosteghanemi in her novels. In addition to this, the interview pays particular attention to the issue of translation in Mosteghanemi's novels and to her attitudes towards her readership.     

Negro labor in the western cattle industry, 1866–1900

The trade union movement in sub-Saharan Africa during the struggle against colonial rule in the 1950s has long commanded the attention of historians. Numerous books and articles have detailed the growing strength and critical role of trade unions in France's vast West African colonial federation, l'Afrique occidentale française (AOF). Far less is known about the fate of these trade unions in the nine newly independent countries that emerged from the demise of AOF. In the 15 years following independence, most autonomous trade unions in French-speaking West Africa were either marginalised or integrated into the political structures of ruling parties. With the exception of Burkina Faso, single national trade union federations controlled by ruling political parties existed everywhere in francophone West Africa by 1975. Whether capitalist, military or socialist, all political elites sought to create a trade unionism that would serve as a transmission belt for party control over the workforce, a type of unionism that was referred to as ‘participation responsable’. This article details the experience of Dahomey (now Benin), where independent trade unions struggled against responsible participation and continued to play a pivotal political role until 1975, when the state socialist regime of Mathieu Kérékou finally succeeded in imposing state-controlled trade unionism.     

Maternity and Modernity: Soviet women teachers and the contradictions of Stalinism

This article explores how Soviet political identities were shaped by maternal concerns and how mothers’ practices were shaped by the professional obligations of teaching in the Stalinist 1930s. Exploring an occupation that became more female as it became more modern, a professional identity that denied or constrained female sexuality, a calling devoted to children that left little time for motherhood, and a social role that assigned the task of socialization to women who did not enjoy full civic rights, this study examines the ways that Stalinist mother teachers assumed a distinct identity through their practices at school and in the family. Identifying specific moments where these questions became public focuses attention on maternity and modernity in ways that illustrate how fully Stalinist repression penetrated into society and how the Soviet people perceived, accepted, challenged, or otherwise mediated the contradictory nature of these political forces.     

Gender,nation and party: an uneasy alliance for Welsh nationalism

This article draws upon new research exploring the relationship between gender and political nationalism in Wales. It is set within the changed political and institutional context of Wales, provided by the establishment in May 1999 of the National Assembly, the first democratic legislature in Wales for nearly 600 years. In studying leading women politicians from Plaid Cymru, it isolates potential tensions between gender and mainstream party political nationalism. It also begins to assess the specific influence of gender to contemporary Welsh nationalist politics. Its conclusions confirm the paradigm of a distinctive female experience of Welsh nationalism and point to a number of specific issues (scarce access to power resources and the myth of party unity) which distinguish women's experience of Welsh nationalism. The article concludes that an ‘uneasy alliance’ exists between gender, nation and party within Welsh nationalism, which is some way from resolution     

“以德治国”必先“以德治官”

“以德治国”必先“以德治官”,这是新世纪全球竞争对构筑民族“精神力”的客观要求;是开发传统德治资源、借鉴中外历史实践经验,推进社会主义道德建设的必然选择;是新形势下领导干部道德建设的政治性、先进性、示范性等本质特性的要求。“以德治官”,新时期领导干部道德建设,必须将认知与践行相结合,将德治与法治相统一。     

From Goddess Spirituality to Irigaray's Angel: The Politics of the Divine

This article argues that the act of conceptualizing a female divine, whether by socalled low-brow Goddess Spiritualists or high-brow French philosophers, rather than being a mere spiritual exercise, has enormous political significance for feminisms. In particular, I demonstrate that Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental, by refiguring a god which is both male and female, transcendent and immanent, theorizes a potential dissolution of the binary logic which forms the basis of western philosophy. The second half of the article looks at the complex role of the angel in Irigaray's theory of the divine in order to demonstrate that, as a result of having misinterpreted the angel's position, critics have failed to recognize the significance and relevance of Irigaray's sensible transcendental for feminist politics.