Historicising the Women's Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT

The Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s emerged out of a set of economic and social circumstances where women collected together in disparate groups and contexts to express their dissatisfaction with their role and position in society. Through consciousness-raising and activism women raised their voices, profiles and visibility. This important moment of women's history is revisited in this collection of essays, which look afresh at the diversity of the movement and ways in which we might historicise the feminism of the time.     

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.     

Women's Liberation was a Movement,Not an Organisation

This article argues that understanding any relationship between the Women's Liberation Movement and the state depends upon a recognition of the variety and change through time encompassed by each. It considers, first, some of the key concerns of the Women's Liberation Movement in the years of its initial eruption, then three instances when individual participants in the Women's Liberation Movement engaged with government, and concludes, finally, that the driving force in each instance was ultimately the utopian dream of a level of transformation unimaginable in conjunction with any government that we know.     

Warmth and Unity with All Women? Historicizing Racism in the Australian Women's Movement

In this paper I discuss the four Women and Labour conferences which were held in Australian capital cities over the seven years between 1978 and 1984. I explore the ways in which the history of Australian feminist activism during this period could be written, questioning in particular the claim that the Women and Labour conferences have been central to the history of Australian feminism. I discuss the ways in which a historical sense could be established, using writings about the conferences as historical ‘evidence’, that race and ethnic divisions between women had not been important to the ‘women's movement’ until 1984. In other words, I challenge the construction of this conference as a turning point - not only in the feminist politicization of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions. More broadly, I am interested in how a history would be written if it aimed to get to the ‘truth’ about racism and about the feminist activism of immigrant women. How would the apparent lack of written ‘evidence’ - at least until 1984 - of immigrant women's feminist activism, and of the awareness of Australian feminists about issues of racism, be written into this history? In addition, I suggest that it is important to the writing of feminist history in Australia that published documentation has been mostly produced by anglo women, and is thus partial and mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women. Finally, my intention is to interrogate commonly understood narratives about Australian feminist history, to challenge their seamlessness, and to suggest the importance of recognizing the tension within feminist discourses between difference as benign diversity and difference as disruption.     

浅析欧洲早期青年工人运动的几个问题

欧洲早期的青年运动并非总是反映在反对资产阶级和帝国主义的斗争中,而是首先体现在反对封建势力及其残余的资产阶级民族民主革命斗争中;另一方面,青年工人运动作为无产阶级反对资产阶级斗争的重要组成部分,是随着无产阶级的成熟发展而发展起来的。     

Vulnerability in Domestic Discourses on Trafficking: Lessons from the Indian Experience

In recent years, rather than addressing the needs of sex workers themselves or of trafficked persons, international anti-trafficking law has been mobilised towards an ideological end, namely the abolition of sex work. The vulnerability of ??third world?? female sex workers in particular has provided a potent image for justifying state intervention backed by the full force of the criminal law. Moral legitimacy has been afforded to this by a radical feminist discourse which views sex workers as nothing but hapless victims. Drawing on the work of Martha Fineman and legal realists like Robert Hale, this article redeploys vulnerability in trafficking debates to depart from its narrative of victimhood and to offer a renewed critique of liberal legalism, which has in the trafficking context been characterised by legal strategies of criminalisation and the attendant rescue and rehabilitation of trafficked persons. Specifically, it examines how three Indian social legislations regulating bonded labour, contract labour and inter-state migrant labour, and targeted at the domestic trafficking of men, conceptualise vulnerability in substantially different ways when compared to the 2000 Palermo Protocol on Trafficking (at least as it has been enforced to date). To the extent that these Indian laws construe the vulnerability of labour as systemic, trafficking is understood as a problem of labour migration to be addressed primarily by labour law. As such, this view of vulnerability, I argue, not only helps to de-exceptionalise trafficking as always equivalent to the trafficking of women for sex work, and therefore sex work, but also to substantively address the vulnerability of both male and female workers in other labour markets.     

Rural Poverty and the Green Revolution: The Lessons from Pakistan

This article argues that the Green Revolution in Pakistan has failed to live up to its promise of ending hunger, unemployment and poverty. An analysis of the time series data of the past four decades points to the worsening of inequalities in income and asset distribution, contributing to the poverty of one in every three Pakistanis [World Bank, 2002, 1992]. The article measures the distributional impact of the Green Revolution in three allied areas of tenurial security, rural employment and rural household income, which tended to decline correspondingly, worsening income and asset distribution. Based on this evidence, this article makes a case for equitable land distribution in rural Pakistan, where half of the population is landless [World Bank, 2002].     

任务型教学法对大学英语翻译教学的启示

根据大学生的群体特点及大学英语课堂的独特性,指出任务型教学法适应大学英语翻译教学改革的趋势,并详细阐述任务型教学法在翻译教学中的实施,对于提高学生的实际交际翻译能力有更积极的作用.