Taking Stands: A feminist perspective on 'other' women's activism in forestry communities of northern Vancouver Island

The author examines alternative and possibly contradictory positions associated with 'other' women's political activism in forestry and land use debates. The article traces research on women's activism, noting that the main focus has been placed on community management and social mothering as sources of motivation, political perspective and activity. The author suggests that these explanations have been imbued with a predetermination of appropriate action (progressiveness) that effectively renders as radical the activism by some women while ignoring the activism by others. This separation and privileging has arisen, in part, because of a theoretical preoccupation by feminist researchers with illustrating women's marginality and an empirical focus on public actions. When feminist perspectives have been applied to women's participation in environmental debates, there has been a narrowing of visibility of women's motivations, perspectives, and actions. It is argued that feminist conceptions need to go beyond maternal/community explanations and advocate that activism be considered in terms of its embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts. The author suggests that embeddedness overcomes the implicit reverse hierarchy of marginalisation discourses and includes both private and public spaces and actions in conceptions of women's activism. Turning to northern Vancouver Island, the author illustrates how embeddedness helps to render visible and intelligible, the multiplicity, consistencies and contradictions in women's positions and activities in support of conventional forestry. For these reasons, the author believes that embeddedness is useful as a means to generate dialogue across current divisions among women, forms of activism, and notions of appropriate relations with non-human nature.     

Female representation in the higher education of geography in Hungary

This paper charts the changing female representation in the higher education of geography, connecting it with the faltering development of feminist geography in Hungary. The transition from socialism to capitalism has compounded gender inequalities while many of the relevant statistical data display gender blindness. Gender issues fail to form a coherent part of national political debates while women's opportunities in Hungarian higher education and research have only recently been examined. Constraints on issues of equal opportunities within Hungarian geography are discussed.     

Feminism,Pacifism and Political Violence in Europe and China in the Era of the World Wars

This article examines international collaboration between Western and Chinese feminists in the interwar decades. Focusing on the 1927–28 ‘mission to Asia’ sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the article shows that, contrary to what existing historiography would lead us to suspect, neither feminist Orientalism nor colonial nationalism stood as a serious impediment to the formation of a truly international feminist alliance. Instead, European and Chinese women's varying experiences and memories of international conflict, and their varying understandings of the relationship between feminism, pacifism, militarism and political violence, defined the limits of global feminist collaboration in the late 1920s. The WILPF delegates, like many European women in the 1920s, were living in the shadow of the First World War, a conflict they condemned as futile and barbaric; their Chinese ‘sisters’ were living in the midst of a battle to determine the political future of their nation. For both sets of women, the question of women's emancipation was fundamentally entwined with broader national and international struggles. This article incorporates reports, personal letters and diaries of WILPF delegates as well as articles, speeches and letters by Chinese women to offer new insights into one of the earliest efforts to build a truly international women's movement and draw our attention to the centrality of warfare in defining the limits of global feminist collaboration in the twentieth century.     

Engendering citizenship: gendered spaces of democracy in South Africa

The dramatic political upheavals and transformations that have occurred throughout the world during the 1990s have served to refocus international attention on theories of citizenship and democracy. Feminist theorists have explored alternative notions of radical and substantive democracy, suggesting that extending democratization depends upon the creation of metaphorical and material spaces for women's effective participation. Related to this is a growing interest among political and feminist geographers in the scales and spaces of citizenship. Drawing upon these theoretical contexts, this paper explores how transformations in South Africa present opportunities for reworking understandings of democratization and citizenship. The paper places gender and citizenship in South Africa within international feminist debates, and explores the sequence of events through which gender issues came to prominence in South Africa during the transition to democracy. The ways in which political rights are mediated by informal structures, and the effects of this on women, are analysed. The paper concludes by discussing the ways in which the construction and contestation of citizenship in South Africa might inform broader international feminist debates.     

Gendered Structures of Local Politics in Turkey

Indicators offered by available international statistical data and observations of many researchers point out that women's formal political involvement at the local level is stronger than that at the national level for the majority of states. However, gendered political patterns in Turkey have been following a rather different path. One and the most significant contradictory aspect is that women's representation at local elected organs is weaker than the national parliament. This article, first, investigates the reasons for this relatively weak existence in formal local politics. The references of this relativity are both national formal politics of Turkey, and the dominant worldwide model. Secondly, the article tries to establish country‐specific links between formal and informal local politics concerning women's participation. The experience in Turkey has proven that women's local engagement does not necessarily propel decision‐making power and women's empowerment. Women's local mobilization in Turkey has been mostly limited to socio‐cultural and charity activities instead of central decisions on the settlement, and of efforts for establishing women's local political agendas. Moreover, as a very prominent factor concerning the maintenance of asymmetric gendered structures of local politics, women's movement at the national level has been lacking in systematic political interest in the issue until very recently. In this article, these pretensions and future prospects are discussed in terms of the actual global‐national circumstances affecting local politics as well as women's local conditions. To these ends, existing quantitative‐qualitative research, data and analysis, and relevant findings of the author's recent (2000–2003) original research, as well as her observations through participation in recent feminist activism targeting local politics are being evaluated.     

Democracy and the rights of women in the thinking of Giuseppe Mazzini

Addressing Italian workers in his Doveri dell’uomo of 1860, Mazzini unequivocally laid out his thoughts on women's rights. The thinker from Genoa, all the more after his encounters with other political philosophers from different national environments such as Britain and France, saw the principle of equality between men and women as fundamental to his project of constructing first the nation, and second a democratic republic. In his ideas regarding emancipation Mazzini, who spent a good 40 years of his life in exile, was one of a small group of European thinkers who in challenging the established customs and prevailing laws not only hoped for the end of women's social and judicial subordination, but also held that changes to the position of women were essential to the realisation of their political projects. Thanks to this respected group of intellectuals, the issue of female emancipation found a place in the nineteenth-century European debate regarding democracy and the formation of national states. The closeness of the positions of these thinkers, and their commitment in practice as well as theory, mean that it can legitimately be argued that in the course of the nineteenth century a current of feminist thinking took shape. This was born of the encounters between and reflections of various intellectuals who met first in France and then in England, and who came to see women's rights not just as a discrete issue for resolution but as fundamental to their projects for the regeneration of nations, or, as in the Italian case, for the construction and rebirth of a nation.     

The Missing Rib: Mobilizing Church Women for Change in Papua New Guinea

This paper examines the particular shape taken by a modern instance of ‘Third World’ feminism. In Papua New Guinea, an emerging nexus between grassroots female activism and Christian churches is helping to liberate and empower some female citizens in a state which in practice has neglected women's interests and gender relations despite early national rhetoric about the importance of women to nation‐building. Tracing the origins of modern women's fellowship groups to the early work of female missionaries with indigenous women, the paper considers the increasing politicization of women's organizations during the last two decades as they expand their ‘traditional’ preoccupation with spiritual, domestic, and welfare matters to embrace wider social, political, and human rights issues. In the course of surveying church women's groupings in Papua New Guinea, the paper looks specifically at the National Council of Women, women's groups in East New Britain Province, the United Church Women's Fellowship, and women's involvements in the developing ecumenical movement. The paper concludes by contrasting the class dimensions of grassroots Christian women's activism to official denial of the existence of class differentiation or exploitation in this purportedly egalitarian Melanesian state.     

Modernity and the Other Woman: Gender and National Identity in the Egyptian Women's Press: 1952–1967

This article looks at depictions of non‐Egyptian women in the Egyptian women's press during the Nasser period, from 1952–1967. A regular and recurring feature of the Egyptian women's press during the 1950s and 1960s, representations of foreign women were products of both global and local struggles. Enabled by a world order increasingly transformed by the political voices of colonial and post‐colonial subjects, such representations were also bound up in Egyptian debates about gender subjectivities, the consequences of state and nation building, and the boundaries of national identity. While they can be read as contributing to the creation of what Chandra Mohanty has called ‘an imagined community of third world oppositional struggles’, they also suggest much about how the liberating, emancipatory possibilities of post‐colonial/anti‐imperialist projects limit their own possibility for realisation.     

Women,Nation and Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea

This paper explores the question of women, decolonisation and nation-building. It argues that the inclusion of women within the nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG) was problematic partly because women had rarely experienced mainstream colonial rule — an experience that elsewhere provided a basis for participation in the post-colonial state. The paper also investigates how women were perceived and represented by male writers at independence. While the Pangu Pati attempted to include women in state-building, these efforts were not adequately supported. PNG's achievement of independence coincided with the globalisation of second-wave feminism, and this was to prove critical for PNG's female citizens in their efforts to be included in the new state, for PNG's membership in the United Nations provided an external push to raise women's participation in the nation. Nevertheless, the government's dependence on international organisations to push the women's agenda also hampered the development of an autonomous women's movement in the country. The paper argues that, for PNG's female citizens, colonisation, independence and decolonisation occurred simultaneously after 1975.     

Better than Orgasm: Sex,Authenticity and Intimacy in the New Women's Movement in Norway

Authenticity and intimacy have become key expectations in contemporary romantic relationships. At the same time, it is taken for granted that sex forms a part of such relationships. This article explores how the relationship between sex, authenticity and intimacy was written about and negotiated in the Norwegian community of lesbian radical feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. The construction of male sexuality as fundamentally and inherently different from female sexuality in the periodicals of the lesbian movement made thinking and writing about women's sexual desire and genital sex difficult. This article further argues that the concept of genital sex potentially conflicted with the notions of authenticity and intimacy pursued by the lesbian radical feminist community. While authenticity and intimacy were constructed as preferable companions to sex in the New Left and in large parts of the women's movement, the Norwegian lesbian radical feminists often constructed authenticity and intimacy in opposition to genital sex.     

The Impact of Microfinance on Decision‐Making Agency: Evidence from South India

Evaluations of the effects of microfinance programmes on women's empowerment generate mixed results. While some are supportive of microfinance's ability to induce a process of economic, social and political empowerment, others are more sceptical and even point to a deterioration of women's overall well‐being. Against this background, development scholars and practitioners have sought to distil some of the ingredients that might increase the likelihood of empowerment or at least reduce adverse effects. This article formally tests the impact of some of the suggested changes in programme features on one particular dimension of empowerment: decision‐making agency. Using household survey data from South India, the author explores the importance of the borrower's gender and the lending technology for intra‐household decision‐making processes. It is shown that direct bank–borrower credit delivery does not challenge the existing decision‐making patterns, regardless of whether men or women receive the credit. These findings change when credit is combined with financial and social group intermediation. Women's group membership seriously shifts overall decision‐making patterns from norm‐guided behaviour and male decision‐making to more joint and female decision‐making. Longer‐term group membership and more intensive training and group meetings strengthen these patterns.     

Not a Priority: Infertile Women and the Symbolic Politics of IVF in 1980s Britain

This article considers the early debates over state funding for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment following the birth of Louise Brown in 1978 as a lens through which to re-evaluate attitudes towards womanhood, maternity and sexuality in 1980s Britain. The state's reluctance to devote resources to IVF reflected, in no small part, the financial imperatives on an overstretched National Health Service. Beyond financial considerations, the question of IVF funding sparked deeply gendered debates over the politics and social significance of motherhood and mothering, and the state's role in family planning and maternal and child welfare. In short, debates over IVF operated as a form of symbolic politics. Stakeholders – including patients’ advocates, women's associations, feminist activists and religious leaders – drew a clear link between the female body and the body politic and sought to articulate a policy towards both IVF treatment and infertile women more broadly that reflected their understanding of women's place within modern British society. Despite holding widely divergent views about gender, sexuality and motherhood, women's and religious groups found common ground in opposing state funding of IVF. This coalition facilitated the state's decision not to prioritise funding for IVF even as neighbouring countries, including Germany and France, embraced the procedure to help combat demographic decline.     

The Women's Emancipation Union and Radical‐Feminist Politics in Britain, 1891–99

This paper considers the ideals and activism of the fin de siècle feminist organisation, the Women's Emancipation Union (WEU). Active between 1891 and 1899, the WEU held a prophetic vision of the future and an appraisal of women's subjection more comprehensive than any contemporary feminist group. Members were the first to link the possession by women of their bodily autonomy directly to the acquisition of the parliamentary vote, and thus redefined the terms upon which citizenship was constructed. One member raised the matter of armed insurrection in support of the women's franchise, an issue which would have serious implications for the future of suffragist campaigns. The political roots of WEU members lay chiefly within the utopian‐socialist and Radical‐liberal traditions, but it was an organisation which resisted party‐political allegiance to become anchored in the Progressive movement. Adopting what has been defined as the ‘muckraking’ tradition associated with Progressive authorship, the WEU suffragists constructed a rhetoric of resistance to women's subjection from social, sexual, economic and political standpoints. Many points they raised, including for a woman's right to consent to maternity to be enshrined in law, were to become the bedrock of the philosophy of the militant suffragette movement.     

Songs of Sisterhood: Feminist Political Practice between Empire and Internationalism 1910–20

This article seeks to understand how feminist thought and practice in the early twentieth century intersected with emergent movements against British imperialism. By tracing relations between Indian, Irish and British feminists, it delineates the diverse ways in which women, across imperial spaces, adopted emergent languages of internationalism and female fraternity to further their political ambitions. This article moves beyond the geographical boundaries of colony and metropole to uncover a much wider circulation of ideas, practices and solidarities amongst feminist networks in the early twentieth century. Collectively, the stories presented in this article convey multiple feminist political imaginaries in an era defined at once by imperial crisis and the rise of internationalism. They show that women's choices of political association in the autumn of empire were determined by their ideological affinity, political practice and social class rather than their country of origin or ethnic identity alone.     

The Burning of Sampati Kuer: Sati and the Politics of Imperialism,Nationalism and Revivalism in 1920s India

Sati, the immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband's funeral pyre, is a rare, but highly controversial practice. It has inspired a surfeit of scholarly studies in the last twenty years, most of which concentrate on one of two main historical sati ‘episodes’: that of early‐colonial Bengal, culminating with the British prohibition of 1829, and that of late twentieth‐century Rajasthan, epitomised by the immolation of Roop Kanwar in 1987. Comparatively little detailed historical analysis exists on sati cases between these two events, however, a lacuna this paper seeks to address by exploring British and Indian discourses on sati as they existed in late‐colonial India. The paper argues that sati remained a site of ideological and actual confrontation in the early twentieth century, with important implications for ongoing debates about Hindu religion, identity and nation. It focuses on the intersection between various colonial debates and contemporaneous Indian social and political concerns during the controversy surrounding the immolation of Sampati Kuer in Barh, Bihar, in 1927, emphasising resonances with postcolonial interpretations of sati and the dissonance of early nineteenth‐century tropes when reproduced in the Patna High Court in 1928. Thus, while Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have suggested that ‘ad hoc’ attempts to piece together a ‘modern’ narrative of widow immolation began in the 1950s, this paper will suggest that various contemporary discursive formations on sati can be observed in late‐colonial India, when discussions of sati became entwined with Indian nationalism and Hindu identity politics and evoked the first organised female response to sati from an emergent women's movement that saw it as an ideological, as well as physical, violation of women.     

Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare

This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women's healthcare. Some derive from first‐wave feminism's search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second‐wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre‐modern and modern times in terms of women's medical practices, saw the pre‐modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women's healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to effect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product – something that is not static but continually re‐created and sometimes contested – we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non‐western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them.     

An Army of Educators: Gender,Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961

The conventional scholarly narrative of gender in post‐revolutionary Cuba is that the revolutionary government prevented the emergence of an expressly feminist movement by addressing women's basic needs and simultaneously eliminating autonomous space for female organising. Recent scholarship has increasingly considered women's participation in revolutions in order to understand women's roles in post‐revolutionary societies. Looking beyond armed insurrection for instances of female participation in revolution, this article considers women's roles in the Cuban Literacy Campaign. An analysis of the testimonies of female former volunteer teachers and of the official rhetoric and content of the campaign suggests that the broader narrative of cooption, while certainly accurate overall, threatens to obscure instances in which women did challenge traditional gender norms in meaningful ways. This paper argues that the Cuban Literacy Campaign and the participation of women in that campaign significantly impacted Cuban patriarchal culture at a crucial moment of consolidation for the revolutionary regime. In other words, though the male‐led revolution did not give women the space to organise against patriarchy, by actively participating in the revolution, women did help change the nature of Cuban patriarchy.     

Agency,Periodisation and Change in the Gender and Women's History of Colonial India

The paper begins with a critique of the ‘imperialism‐nationalism’ paradigm and its concomitant privileging of the period 1885–1947, which has dominated the writing of modern Indian history. It is argued here that the fixation with the ‘birth‐of‐the‐nation’ theme has led to the neglect of women's agency; that it has resulted in many inconsistencies, dilemmas and unresolved issues regarding a range of topics within Indian gender‐relations; and that this periodisation inhibits the reclamation of terms such as ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. The second half of the essay proposes that women's agency can be recovered via a new chronology and a new template for understanding agency within which scholars will be enabled to retrieve the conscious voices of Indian women and record change in gender relations.     

Epilogue

This epilogue reflects on five questions raised by the papers in this collection. First, I ask ‘what are women's groups’. Second, I consider the centrality of Christianity in women's groups in colonial and contemporary epochs and review debates about how women's agency has been seen in becoming a Christian and in the perduring reality of Christian commitment. Third, I ponder the expansion of agendas from ‘welfare to empowerment’ and the proposition that even groups with conservative agendas can empower women. Fourth, I review the relation between self‐help and help from others and the associated issue of divergent local and global agendas. Fifth, I consider the differences between women grounded in age, rank, and class, highlighted by several authors. I caution against seeing such differences as irredeemable, irrevocable divisions. In conclusion, I pose the sensitive question of the relation between Western feminist scholars and the diversity of Melanesian women and espouse Teresia Teaiwa's value of Oceanic fluidarity rather than solidarity in coalitions of women.     

‘A rancour and a passion would be introduced into politics’: Perceptions of the Woman MP in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain*

On 21 November 1918, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act was passed, which enabled women over the age of 21 to stand for parliamentary election. Unlike women's suffrage, there was no sustained campaign to allow women to sit in parliament. However, this does not mean that the issue was ignored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This article traces perceptions of the woman MP in the pre-1918 period and offers the first detailed exploration of the topic. It argues that although discussions on the matter were not widespread like women's suffrage, there is value in examining these lesser-known debates. This article studies the parliamentary candidacy of Helen Taylor in the 1885 General Election, in addition to how male politicians, the press, suffrage, and anti-suffrage organisations engaged with the idea of women sitting in parliament. Women's supposedly emotional nature played an integral role in how contemporaries approached the subject of women MPs. Indeed, women's emotions, and more specifically their passionate temperament, were often used to discredit their political capabilities and portray women as emotionally, intellectually and physically inferior to men.