Pilgrimage: The necessary journey

Pilgrimage, by Dorothy M. Richardson, is the portrayal of Miriam Henderson's struggle for independence and freedom in a society hostile to female self-reliance. The novel explores the external barriers to her liberation and analyses what it actually means to be a woman. Whilst accepting many of the masculine definitions of feminity Richardson asserts that the traditionally foolish and endearing characteristics of women — their illogicality or lack of abstract reasoning — are actually virtues that make women the deeper and wiser sex. More important, however, is the internalised conflict of Miriam, who as the surrogate son, the woman who contains ‘masculine’ qualities, becomes a symbol of the confusions and tensions of the transitional age in which she lives. And today as much as yesterday Richardson speaks for thousands of women who also feel they fight alone.     

‘Male sexual politics and men's gender practice’

The responses to feminism and women's liberation, which men make when we define ourselves as ‘supportive’ of women's demands, are problematic. There continues to be debate within gender politics around the polarization ‘men's liberation’ and ‘men against sexism’, and critiques made from within various feminist understandings of, in particular, ‘men's liberationist’ preoccupations. The assumptions and contitutuent practices within the discourse of men's sexual politics in general are described and analyzed, rather than such debates reproduced. The assumption of ‘the sexual’ which men bring to our politics, and how our sexual politics is defined through these assumptions, is opened up. In particular, men's sexual politics seems precisely ‘male sexual politics’, in that it is defined through masculinist understanding of the sexual. Men's sexual politics is also male sexual politics, and our assumptions about the political, including the attempt to live from theory to action, are also instrumental in the ‘how’ of men's sexual politics.     

A women's international quarterly over 30 years. Are the arguments to be feminine or feminist?

Women Speaking (first entitled Speaking of Women) was published from 1951 to 1982. Its aim—to encourage women to make their voices heard on public issues—involved discussion of legal, educational and occupational discriminations, evidenced internationally by contributors involved in the struggle to overcome such handicaps in their own countries and through the United Nations Organisation. ‘East’ or ‘West’ the problems are found to be the same, even if immediate priorities differ, and the Journal's stance became radical feminist: ‘…sexism underlies all other ims, and Nationalist, socialist, communist, “Churchist” (Christian or Islamic) movements are at best peripheral and at worst deadly to human progress unless the universal problem of women's oppression is faced’ (editorial July 1980). Patterns of thought which from infancy undermine women's self-confidence stem from belief in a male God; hence a central interest in the struggle for ordination of women to the priesthood. At the outset the editors posited the achievement of peace between nations as the ultimate goal of women's emancipation and their prominence in movements towards this end have been consistently chronicled. The question, however, remains: is it in women's nature, any more than in men's, to seek peace? In the earliest and the last issues may be found the answer ‘Yes’, expressed in almost identical terms. But the last editor argues that in the sum total of interrelated issues we should rather affirm the human need and potentiality in both sexes for cooperative living.     

Dame unise,feminist maiden who fares well with the patriarchy: Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘the prodigal daughter’ and the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction

In her discussion of recent feminist utopias, Joanna Russ notes that the authors have likely read one another and that their ‘works form a remarkably coherent group in their presentation of feminist concerns and the feminist analyses which are central to these concerns’ (Russ, 1981: 71). My essay further explores the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction. It notes the common elements connecting three novels—Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong (1976), Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines (1978), and Elizabeth A. Lynn's The Northern Girl (1980)—and analyses Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘The prodigal daughter’ (1981) in terms of its relationship to these connections. References to Louise Bernikow's Among Women (1980) link these feminist imaginative works to feminist reality, reality which is more closely adhered to by Salmonson than by the authors of the novels. While the novels' feminist protagonists succeed in isolation from the patriarchy, Salmonson's feminist hero, Dame Unise, succeeds because she is able to cooperate with a patriarch. Positive images of patriarchy are absent from the novels; Salmonson's story emphasizes such positive images.     

Conditions for unity and action: A collective vision

This paper is a collaborative effort that describes a theoretical framework for understanding the diversity of women's experiences by focusing on the lives of the four authors. The model developed looks at individual women within the social contexts of academia and community. Factors put forth that influence women's lives are: the history of each woman, the principles she lives by, the issues she recognizes as important, and the action strategies she develops to survive in an oppressive society. As a collaborative project, this paper also reflects a bond of friendship among the writers that has deepened through their collaboration.     

Love and guilt: Normative orientations and their implications for accommodation and resistance among women

In the New Women's Movement we have discovered internal limitations to our liberation efforts. To a great extent these problems are the result of normative orientations of women. Internalized sex-role expectations lead women to reproduce the external conditions which serve to oppress them. Therefore women must begin to reflect critically upon these role models as a prerequisite for strategies for empowerment.However, the central sex-role expectations are contradictory: on the one hand women are socially obligated to behave in a loving and caring manner. The self denial and self-effacement which are demanded of women serve to maintain patriarchic dominance. On the other hand, this feminine social behavior encompasses a counterforce to the dominant values of exchange and competition: therefore it points beyond existing power relationships. Normative orientations of women ensure their accommodation and also their resistance to existing social relations.     

Compulsory heterosexuality and psych/atrophy: Some thoughts on lesbian feminist theory

The patriarchal features of psychiatric practice have received scant attention by feminists today. This paper presents a critique of psychiatry and places this critique within lesbian feminist theory. Drawing on Mary Daly's ideas as elaborated in her ‘ovular’ work Gyn/Ecology (1979), the methodology I use is an unearthing of feminist meanings and an exposition of feminist practices which are necessary to understand the role of Psych/Atrophy vis à vis lesbianism today. I argue that for lesbians, as for all women, self-healing is a feminist process which exists in opposition to psychiatry's functioning as the primary male, social injunction to heal souls. With a view to challenging this psychiatric conception of healing souls, we are able to create five specific strategies which direct Lesbian energy to a more creative view of ourselves as women. Discarding the sexual label (1); resisting ‘reversal’ (2); erasing the Victim Role (3); working towards social change and not individual solutions (4) and delivering themselves through the ‘Amazonian Asylum’ (5), lesbians will help to work for lesbian liberation. These strategies will help them/us not only to create new images of themselves/ourselves as women, but also to challenge the heterosexist structure of society upon which psychiatric practice is based.     

The impact of the women's decade on women of Sri Lanka

The International Women's Year awakened many to the position of women in Sri Lanka. The mass media flooded with discussions on women's issues; meetings and seminars were held. Women's organisations gained new strength with the grants placed at their disposal by foreign voluntary organisations for development projects for women. Women's seminars and conferences abroad increased significantly and more Sri Lankan women attended them. However, this is only a beginning: Sri Lankan women's organisations are composed largely of middle-class women—feminist groups must strive to reach all women in Sri Lanka.     

Indian women and the new movement

During the last few years there has been a resurgence of women's groups in India. Whereas, in previous years, women's struggles took place within a framework of the broader independence movement, women now are addressing issues of rape, dowry and marriage and property laws directly. This paper argues that women's organizations in India have received considerable support over these issues because they affect an urban middle-class elite and leave the status quo relatively untouched. Women's organizations should turn their attention to more fundamental issues of women's oppression within the context of hunger, poverty and work-issues which, hitherto, have been neglected.     

Women who do and women who don't,join the women's movement

Twenty-four women from five countries were asked to discuss their attitudes towards the women's movement. Half of this group were feminists and half were antifeminists. They ranged in background over class, race, age and sexual preference, and their comments formed the body of the book Women Who Do and Women Who Don't, Join the Women's Movement. This paper begins by discussing the women's movement as a social movement, its origins and the major issues involved in its struggle. The antifeminist ‘backlash’ is then analysed and its platforms clarified. The contributors' comments are summarised, bringing the issues alive, creating a diverse patterns of women's interpretations of ‘being female’. The issues of contention such as men, motherhood and the family are discussed, and the bases of the differences between feminists and antifeminists are analysed. Surprisingly, similarities between the two groups also emerge, particularly in terms of their experience of ‘self’. I conclude the paper by discussing why these splits among women occur, why one woman becomes a feminist while another is an antifeminist, and what this means for the future of women and of feminism.     

The support function and social change—A feminist case history

The first part of this article describes the history of a Belgian anglophone organisation—W ♀ E (Women's Organisation for Equality)—from the perspective of its role in the process of social change and women's liberation. It then analyses the reasons for W ♀ E's longevity and effectiveness as a feminist support group and as a bridge for women emerging into feminism. Finally the paper suggests how W ♀ E might continue its effectiveness as a support group, but at a new level, taking into account the fact that though women are continuing to need support as they wake up, there is now a large group of awakened women who have been struggling as feminists for a long time.     

Orwell's despair,Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia

George Orwell's 1984 bears a striking resemblance to a little-known anti-fascist dystopia, Swastika Night, that was published twelve years earlier. While the similarities between the two books are in some cases remarkable, of even greater interest is the different treatment of political domination and gender ideology in the two novels. Orwell's critique of power worship is inherently limited by his inability to perceive that preoccupations with power and domination are specifically associated with the male gender role. By contrast, Katherine Burdekin, a feminist writer who published Swastika Night using the pseudonym ‘Murray Constantine’, focuses her critique on the ‘cult of masculinity’ and the fascist dictatorship to which it can lead. Her novel is set 700 years in the future, after Hitlerism has been established in Europe as the official creed, and with it a ‘Reduction of Women’ to an animal level. This essay analyses the relationship between gender and power as understood by these two writers, one world-famous, the other forgotten.     

Foetal politics and the birth of an industry

In early Western society, women were considered to have a minor role in the reproductive process. Their social status was, correspondingly, secondary. Since the eighteenth century, women's contribution to procreation has been widely accepted, yet their social status remains. Women's importance in the reproduction of the species has not guaranteed them social prestige and the argument of this paper is that women's social standing is being further assaulted by the legal and economic consequences of innovations in birth technology. Two well-publicized innovations, Artificial Insemination by Donor, and In-Vitro Fertilization (or ‘test-tube babies’) have provoked legal, political and economic considerations which focus upon the possibilities of extensive bioengineering. The significance of this for women is that birth technology is not being fashioned after the interests of its clients but, instead, is becoming a new mercantile frontier in which women's needs may well be eclipsed by commercial and political ambitions.     

Peasant mobilization and anti‐colonial struggle in Vietnam: The rent reduction campaign of 1953

While Vietnam seems to present an unusually successful case of coordination of national liberation struggle and peasant revolution, the relationship between these two aspects of the movement has been very complex, and the national and class struggles have had contradictory as well as complementary aspects. Following a summary of two poles of a debate on the topic within the Vietnamese communist movement in the 1930s and 40s, the article analyses in detail the relationship between the independence struggle and social revolution during 1953, the year in which the Communist Party systematically introduced mass mobilization for class struggle for the first time during the national liberation war.     

The silencing of Simone de Beauvoir guess what's missing from the second sex

Inadequate, inaccurate English translations of works by feminist scholars can slow the advancement of international research in women's studies. We must begin to subject translations to the same critical attention we have focused on those sexist authoring and publishing practices that have defined women's interests as tangential to scholarly research.Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, one of the most widely known, classic essays on women's experience and a cornerstone of contemporary feminist theory, is available in only one English translation from the French. In that 1952 translation by a professor of zoology, Howard M. Parshley, over 10 per cent of the material in the original French edition has been deleted, including fully one-half of a chapter and the names of seventy-eight women in history. These unindicated deletions seriously undermine the integrity of Beauvoir's analysis of such important topics as the American and European nineteenth-century suffrage movements, and the development of socialist feminism in France.Compounding the confusion created by the deletions, are mistranslations of key philosophical terms. The phrase, ‘for-itself’, for example, which identifies a distinctive concept from Sartrean existentialism, has been rendered into English as its technical opposite, ‘in-itself’. These mistranslations obscure the philosophical context of Beauvoir's work and give the mistaken impression to the English reader that Beauvoir is a sloppy writer, and thinker.     

The different worlds of women and men: Attitudes toward pornography and responses to not a love story—A film about pornography

Men and women viewing the anti-pornography documentary Not a Love Story were surveyed about their opinions and attitudes toward pornography and toward the film. Women were found to be significantly more negative toward pornography than men, and experienced greater attitude and belief changes from the film. In addition, men's and women's attitudes toward pornography were found to differ in their factor structure; the authors infer that acceptance or rejection of pornography has different significance for men and women. Background variables such as current marriage, sex of children, and amount of pornography previously seen affected men's attitudes more than women's. The authors conclude that gender-free, ‘humanist’ standards according to which pornography could be evaluated do not exist, and that approaches to pornography control based on its role in the particular oppression of women are valid.     

A Christian Challenge: Chō Takeda Kiyoko and feminist thought in modern Japan

References to Christian women in the English-language scholarship on the history of Japanese feminism have typically focused on one organisation, the Japan Christian Women's Reform Society. Chō Takeda Kiyoko's 1985 book, Fujin kaihō no dōhyō (Milestones for Women's Liberation), offers a more comprehensive and nuanced image of the contributions of Christian women to the elevation of women's status in pre-World War II Japan, by offering case studies of Christian women. These highlight the widespread influence of Christianity among educated men and women, the broad associational networks of the Christian community, the mutually-reinforcing connections between women's activities in the fields of education and journalism, and the personal struggles of Christian women to create a fairer and more moral society. Takeda portrays the Women's Reform Society as a foundational organisation in the history of feminism, but not the sole avenue through which Christian women worked for women's liberation.     

United or divided? Women ‘inside’ and women ‘outside’ against male lawmakers in Australia

Is it possible, under patriarchy, for women's liberationists and feminists to instigate and control the direction of law reforms, particularly in areas of law directly affecting women's daily lives—such as rape laws?This article covers one instance, in New South Wales, Australia, where women agitated for law reform and played a large part, at least for a time, in formulating a new law on rape. At the end, however, women's liberation women and feminists lost control because women in the bureaucracy sided with men in the bureaucracy, despite their stance of ‘sisterhood’.Will women ‘outside’ inevitably be sold out by women ‘inside’ the bureaucracy? Once inside, does an allegiance to the establishment (the patriarchy) develop which ousts allegiance to women's liberationism? Or is it true that women inside the system ultimately recognise the system is not ‘of them’, or ‘for them’, and therefore when the barricades are up, will align themselves with women outside, rather than with the true insiders, men?