Hostages of destiny: gender issues in today's Poland

In an e-mail of June 2002, some women on Gender Link noticed that in Polish there is an expression, ‘husband of trust’, used to describe a person in the workplace appointed to represent workers’ interests. This role is more often than not given to women, and yet they are called ‘husbands of trust’. ‘Isn't that strange,’ they said. ‘Isn't it time to change this?’. It is. The change in gender role identities has started with questioning the language. It has started with asking who has produced and is reproducing the language, and for whom. The journey has not stopped there. From looking at language it has continued through social stereotypes, work, labour, money and the division of power, and reached the law and legal system itself. In Poland, the path has been rather circuitous and uneasy for we are, more than many other countries, bound by Catholic tradition mingled with apparent freedom. We had the ethos of Solidarity, and Lech Wa??sa. Wa??sa had a badge of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus on his jacket, which somehow helped label all Polish women, even those still very young, a ‘Mother Pole’. To resist that identity one needed to look beneath the image and be brave enough to call oneself just a woman. This article will try to analyse that process.     

Talking about gender equality: Swedish women's discourses on the home front

Housework is a useful arena for a study of the manufacturing of everyday femininity and masculinity. This article focuses on discourses and practices concerning housework and its equal or unequal distribution between husband and wife. It analyses how gender equality ideologies are met with or assimilated into everyday speech and understandings among Swedish women. Interview accounts from two women of different ages and class positions are analysed in detail, using a discursive approach of analysis. Their ways of relating to available discourses on gender equality and femininity are contrasted, and related to the feminist project of fifty‐fifty sharing of housework and traditional discourses of separate spheres for women and men.     

Narratives of progress: cooking and gender equality among Swedish men

Feminist food studies have repeatedly identified a dichotomy of ‘masculine’ self-oriented cooking as leisure and ‘feminine’ other and care-oriented foodwork (meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up after meals). However, recent research suggests that there is a great deal of variety and contradiction in men’s accounts of their cooking practices. For example, men may find cooking a tedious and stressful responsibility and foodwork a fatherly duty. This article draws on interviews with 31 Swedish men from 22 to 88 years of age, and explores stories about cooking and foodwork as part of their everyday lives and their life transitions and how these relate to broader notions of food and gender equality. The data illuminating the men’s stories can be synthesised into two narratives of progress: a narrative of progress in gender equality in Sweden, where men’s participation in household labour has become taken for granted, and a narrative of culinary progress among Swedish men in general and among some of the interviewed men themselves. We agree with previous scholars who have argued for a reconsideration of the simplistic picture of men’s cooking as only being for the self and for leisure. We further show how the men express foodwork as a self-evident responsibility, regardless of whether the men find it fun or not, and that a desirable masculinity is represented by a man whose cooking skills have progressed beyond the survival level and who is more gender equal than what are perceived to be less-progressive men from previous generations and foreign cultural backgrounds.     

Book Review: When gender equality becomes men's rights: An analysis of EC law

In a society that is becoming more and more dependent on science and technology, there is an increasing need for alternative ways of understanding our existence, so that we can construct societies and ways of living that are sustainable. This article focuses on technoscientific challenges in feminism, by identifying how the meanings of concepts and categories change over time and vary according to different contexts and periods. How are we to succeed in modifying the prevailing discourses of science and views of knowledge and the processes through which technoscience shapes and is shaped, in order to achieve more permanent changes? Do feminist positions make sense in challenges of dominated discourses of technoscience and in transformative research projects?     

Considering the role of men in gender agenda setting: conceptual and policy issues

The international gender equality agenda evolved into one of mainstreaming a gender perspective into all policies and programmes. Within this process, the role of men gained increasing attention in the debates on gender equality. This resulted in the inclusion of ‘men's role’ as one of the themes of the agenda of the Commission on the Status of Women for the year 2004. While this is another step forward in the global efforts for achieving equality between women and men, its potential risks should not be overlooked. Therefore, it is necessary to revisit the concept of gender and carefully assess and monitor how the role of men is included in the agenda. This article starts with the premise that gender inequalities are the product of historically determined gender order in which the differentially assigned male female attributes are unequally structured in layers of privileged and subordinate positions of masculinities and femininities. The concept of patriarchy is brought back into the analysis to capture the interlinkages between the various status hierarchies that lead to shifts in hegemonic forms of masculinity that reproduces itself under diverse and changing conditions. Thus, while the article attempts to account for the generic and universal characteristics of gender inequality, at the same time, it draws attention to its specific socio-cultural manifestations. Finally, policy guidelines are offered for the consideration of the role of men in gender agenda setting. Accordingly, it is suggested that men's initiatives for alternative masculinities are acknowledged and that the questions regarding which men, in what kinds of alliances and for which end are reflected upon in formulating policies.     

Beyond nature versus nurture: Process and biology in the development of gender

The origins of gender, like the origins of human nature, are sometimes said to lie in biological determination, sometimes in social construction. Feminist theory began with criticising biological determinism and its portrayal of women, and inevitably emphasised the social construction of gender. However, seeing gender or human nature as wholly or mainly socially constructed seems to deny the biological processes which comprise our physical experiences of ourselves, and it is this omission which has recently led some writers (both feminist and antifeminist) to lay stress on the significance of biology in human behaviour and its development.These two opposing views of the origin of behaviour are still dominant, despite various attempts to emphasise how biology and social context might interact to produce, say, gender differences: this continued dominance of the nature/nurture duality has considerable political relevance to feminism, and has contributed to the rise of the New Right ideology concerning, for example, the natural role of women and the family.In this paper, we stress the relevance of the nature/nurture duality for this political shift, and attempt to formulate a way out of the impasse. Attempts have sometimes been made to avoid the duality by emphasising the interaction of nature and nurture. However, in most academic writing, the “interaction” proposed fails to avoid the dichotomy completely, and relies on a view of individual development as unfolding towards a goal or plan. The latter is how gender development is typically portrayed, emerging from an unfolding of biological potential (giving rise to “sex” differences), and subsequently from socialisation.It is important for feminism to emphasise the alternative view of biological development, which lays stress on developmental process, of which “biology” is but a part, rather than viewing individuals as maturing or unfolding towards some “goal.” By this change of emphasis, feminist theory may begin to avoid the double pitfall of biological determinism on the one hand; and of constructing “gender” in a world devoid of human bodies, and biological processes, on the other.     

The equality principle and the sexual division of labour

Australia has one of the highest degrees of sex segregation in the workforce of any advanced OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) country (OECD, 1980).¹ Predominantly female occupations are characterised by poor conditions and low pay (Power, 1975; Kramar, 1983; Working Women's Charter, 1984). Despite the currency of the rhetoric of sexual equality, however, such phenomena, which are characteristic of the sexual division of labour, have been successfully immunised against formal challenge.Although sex-segregated occupations are not expressly excluded from Australian anti-discrimination legislation, the complaint-based model does contain insuperable hurdles for most women in respect to both substance and procedure. Affirmative action measures, as presently conceived, are also unable to deal with this manifestation of structural discrimination.The fact that seemingly egalitarian measures are designed to effect minimal change is further illustrated when we look to wage-setting. Although the concept of equal pay for work of equal value has been accepted in Australia, it has had little practical effect on predominantly female occupations in the male-dominated arbitration arena.As the ideology of patriarchy operates in multifarious ways to prevent focus on the fundamental inequalities in women's working conditions, law reform, perforce, demonstrates its limited capacity for change. However, rather than jettison anti-discrimination and equal pay measures altogether, such mechanisms can be used to publicise the issues and to encourage women to assert themselves collectively.