Key women,key issues

Gillian Beer, George Eliot, Angela Leighton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Key Women Writers series (Harvester Press) Sussex, 1986.     

East Timorese women,international networks,and the women’s human rights movement

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between East Timorese women’s activism and the international women’s movement, within the context of East Timor’s struggle for independence from Indonesian military occupation (1975–1999). It examines the experiences and activism of several diaspora East Timorese women in international circles that converged around feminist solidarity and women’s human rights in the 1980s and 1990s. The article argues that these women played an important, yet underappreciated role in East Timor’s struggle for national self-determination.     

Working women in Maine: A note on sources

Corporate restructuring is a central feature neoliberal globalization. Despite the adverse social and psychological consequences of this market driven change, unions have, for the most part, viewed restructuring as an inevitable characteristic of the contemporary economy. This article argues that such market accommodation is the result of a political failure to critically engage the free market model and its social impacts. Analysis of this failure and the possible construction of a justice alternative is grounded in an analysis of union developments in Australia, South Africa and Brazil. In each country, unions were empowered and won critical struggles when they assumed a social movement form shaped by justice-orientated human liberation politics. This choice at a national level needs to be synchronized by a new labour internationalism if this challenge against market logic is to have any prospect of sustaining change.     

Scholarship—the new dimension to equity issues for academic women

Over the last 25 years, Canadian women have made significant inroads to the academy as students, faculty, and administrators. Their contribution is reflected in curriculum that now addresses women and through the development of undergraduate and graduate programs in women's studies. Above all, certain aspects of women's work in the academy have challenged masculinist notions of research methodology and pedagogy. In spite of these gains and contributions, women largely remain in the “A” ranks in academe—assistant, associate, acting. This article argues, and demonstrates through personal accounts, that current definitions of scholarship, widely held in the academy, prevent the advancement of women precisely because some feminist models of research and pedagogy present a challenge to academic hierarchy. Hence, the new equity challenge facing academic women is found in definitions of scholarship used for evaluation in tenure and promotion cases.     

The international conference on research and teaching related to women: Report of the coordinator

Between July and August 4, 1982, 350 women from 71 countries met in Montreal at Concordia University for the first International Conference on Research and Teaching Related to Women. These meetings provided a unique opportunity for educators and investigators to make contact with their colleagues, gain insights from the experience of others and lay the foundation for future exchanges. They also helped to legitimize this new field of activity world-wide.In the course of the encounters suggestions and observations were also made on new methods of teaching, new approaches to research, and on objectives and strategies. It was a first, in that never before had such a large number of practitioners from so many different countries assembled to discuss research and teaching related to women.The following is the coordinator's report, a non-specialist herself in either teaching or research on women, but an internationalist and a feminist who strongly believes in the need for women to communicate, to pool resources, to network at all levels.The Montreal Conference was seen as a further building block on the foundation which had been laid in 1980 in Copenhagen to bring researchers and educators together. It helped to strengthen existing associations and to encourage the establishment of new associations where none existed.     

The new labour women MPs in the 1997 British parliament: issues of recruitment and representation

Abstract

The British General Election of 1997 witnessed the return of 120 women MPs to Parliament, of whom 101 are Labour women MPs. This article, structured in two parts, suggests, first, that the transformation in Women's legislative recruitment in 1997 is best understood as resulting from the Labour Party's policy of all-women shortlists. Drawing on empirical research, it also reveals insights into how this policy was implemented on the ground. The second part of the article offers an analysis of Women's political representation in contemporary British politics. The assumption that Women's numerical representation effects feminised change is explored through a consideration of the attitudes of women representatives. The research suggests that women MPs consider that Women's presence has the potential to transform the parliamentary political agenda and style.     

消费文化与工人阶级

是费文化以中产阶级为基础而形成,无论是产品的广告形象还是产品的设计都以中产阶级为对象.但消费文化一经出现就对工人阶级产生了影响.而消费文化中存在的消费与资本主义生产之间的矛盾,决定了工人阶级在受到消费文化影响的同时,并不具备相应的购买力.工人运动的重心因此转型为维护工人阶级的消费权利,由此带来了一系列的思想转变和制度变革,工人阶级由此成为购买力虽然有限但也具有强烈消费意愿并以消费为生活目的的消费者.     

Women,international law and international institutions: The case of the United Nations

This final article considers the evolution of women's rights concepts and mechanisms within the United Nations. Gaer writes about this subject both as an historian of and a longstanding activist for women's human rights. She provides a critical history of how “women's” rights have been separated from and connected to “human” rights within the UN.     

Chilean women and the UN decade for women

This article analyses two aspects of the reality of Chilean women during the United Nations Decade of Women: political participation and labour force participation. This analysis takes into account some of the proposals of the Regional Plan of Action for the Integration of Women into Latin American Economic and Social Development as well as the consequences of the political, cultural and economic model established by the Chilean military government. The effects of the Decade of Women on Chilean women is not analysed primarily because the specific proposals contained in the Plan of Action are based on the prerequisites of development and participation—which are not applicable to the Chilean case during this period.Notwithstanding the fact that all forms of popular participation have been effectively eliminated, there have emerged women's organizations whose concerns include calling into question the oppression of women on the basis of sex. With respect to labour, women's participation in the labour force has increased. However, this increase is not a response to improved opportunities or a more equalitarian treatment of women workers, but rather as the consequence of elevated unemployment rates especially in lower class families where women have greater access to certain kinds of marginal employment.On a final note, the article also includes a discussion of recent trends in research on women, trends which provide a challenge to the more traditional forms of research.