Beyond the Millennium: Black Women's Writing

Nasta's piece forms part of an oral contribution to the plenary session of the conference in which a variety of speakers discussed the many questions that the conference had raised. It focuses specifically on the location and history of black women's writing in Britain and attempts to address issues that have dominated critical and theoretical discussion for some years. The question as to how far we have moved on in our reading and assessment of these literatures is discussed; also the fact that perhaps debates we now see as being contemporary were also current in the experiences of earlier representations of Britain from a black or Asian perspective. Nasta makes some tentative suggestions in terms of how we might move forward.     

实证主义、诠释主义与批判主义

本文介绍了西方三种流行的社会学理论 ,分析了这三种社会学理论的主要代表人物、主要观点、主要研究方法 ,对三种社会学理论的优劣进行了比较 ,并对三种社会学理论走向相互融合的前景进行了展望     

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.     

The Women's Movement and Government

Some scholars have suggested that institutionalisation and professionalisation of women's movement organisations leads to ‘feminist fading’. This article examines whether such propositions hold true for the Australian women's movement. It maps changes in the women's movement that had emerged by the 1990s, including increased diversity and increased national and international networking as well as increased institutionalisation. It finds that loss of political influence has less to do with institutionalisation than with a changed discursive environment that constructed the welfare state and women's reliance on it as a problem. Nonetheless, women's movement institutions have continued to sustain feminist values and engage in differently organised but effective campaigns. A case study of the women's health movement in Victoria shows how it succeeded in having abortion removed from the criminal code in 2008. Repertoire had changed since the 1970s but the goal remained the same.     

The mothers' international: The Women's Co-operative Guild and feminist pacifism

The Women's Co-operative Guild (now the Co-operative Women's Guild), founded in 1983 as an auxilliary of the English Consumer Co-operative Movement, became a strong feminist representative of married working-class women. Its ‘social’ feminism stressed women's maternal, domestic role, deriving from it a series of values seen as lacking in male-dominated public life. Politics was to be transformed by means of women's active involvement, including but extending past their acquisition and use of the vote. The ‘female’ values were nurturant and cooperative; internationally, they focussed on international organization and peace. The Consumer Co-operative Movement provided a reformist ideology supportive of women's activism and pacifism, but the Movement itself as an organization was increasingly hostile to the Guild's feminism both within and outside the Movement. Although relatively uninfluential, the Guild thus embodies a tradition of feminist pacifism that is active and increasingly influential today.     

Engendering Economic Policy: The Women's Budget Group

In these days, when feminist theory has been replaced by gender theory and activism by the practice of deconstruction, it is refreshing to find a group of women academics and voluntary sector campaigners coming together to engage with day-to-day issues of economic and social policy. Such is the London-based Women's Budget Group (WBG), which has set itself the task of creating a dialogue with treasury officials and ministers. Many of the issues have not changed much since 1974, when the Women's Liberation National Conference adopted the 'fifth demand' - legal and financial independence for women - and the London Women's Liberation Campaign for Legal and Financial Independence (commonly known as the 'fifth demand group') started working on the tax, benefit and pensions policies that treated husband and wife as a breadwinner-dependent couple with no need of separate incomes. The style may have changed: the fifth demand group used to alternate its more business-like meetings with consciousness-raising sessions, and go away together for weekends and days out in the country, whereas the WBG does much of its communicating by e-mail. The fifth demand group never even contemplated employing anyone or applying for funding or recognition; the WBG has administrative backup from the Women's National Commission, which is autonomous but located within the Cabinet Office, and at present has funding from the Barrow Cadbury Trust to employ a part-time project manager. The fifth demand group met in the living rooms and kitchens of suburban flats and collective houses; the WBG holds its meetings in the corridors of power in Whitehall, thanks to the Women's National Commission. The fifth demand campaign was an eclectic mixture of the presentation of arguments to the ruling establishment and more populist agitation. It gave evidence to parliamentary select committees, to official inquiries and to the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth; it produced an accessible and forcefully argued pamphlet and discussion pack--'The Demand for Independence'--that circulated widely among feminist groups (no longer available, but see London Women's Liberation 1979); it launched the YBA Wife campaign that attracted a flurry of media attention and an enormous post-bag in 1977. The WBG, on the other hand, has the ear of government; it has regular meetings with treasury officials and some nowadays with treasury ministers; it produces a detailed critique of the annual pre-budget report and a response to each year'sbudget; periodically it holds public meetings that attract back-bench and front-bench MPs, social affairs journalists, social policy experts and people active in related campaigns (most notably the one reported in Robinson 1998). In the intervening decades, much of what the fifth demand group campaigned for has been achieved. Husbands and wives are now taxed separately and the married man's tax allowance has been abolished. Married women can no longer opt to make more limited national insurance contributions in return for more limited rights to benefits. People who are married or cohabiting still cannot claim means-tested benefits separately from their partner; but at least either one of them can now be the claimant, rather than just the man. So the assumption that women are dependent housewives has been gradually eroded, but is far from being destroyed.