Maternalism and Its Discontents

Books reviewed in thgis article: Elizabeth J. Clapp, Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America Estelle B. Freedman, Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition Molly Ladd‐Taylor and Lauri Umansky (eds),‘Bad’ Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth‐Century America     

Resources,Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women's Empowerment

This paper begins from the understanding that women's empowerment is about the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such an ability. A wide gap separates this processual understanding of empowerment from the more instrumentalist forms of advocacy which have required the measurement and quantification of empowerment. The ability to exercise choice incorporates three inter-related dimensions: resources (defined broadly to include not only access, but also future claims, to both material and human and social resources); agency (including processes of decision making, as well as less measurable manifestations of agency such as negotiation, deception and manipulation); and achievements (well-being outcomes). A number of studies of women's empowerment are analysed to make some important methodological points about the measurement of empowerment. The paper argues that these three dimensions of choice are indivisible in determining the meaning of an indicator and hence its validity as a measure of empowerment. The notion of choice is further qualified by referring to the conditions of choice, its content and consequences. These qualifications represent an attempt to incorporate the structural parameters of individual choice in the analysis of women's empowerment.     

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.     

Women's Property,Women's Agency in China's ‘New Enclosure Movement’: Evidence from Zhejiang

Who gets what, why and how, when Chinese villagers' land is enclosed? Focusing specifically on changes in women's property rights and drawing on data from Zhejiang province, this article shows that state, village and household institutions interact to produce significant gender disparities in both the compensation paid to expropriated villagers and the registration of ownership of household assets. Yet it would be incorrect to conclude that, dispossessed, women thereby lack agency. Analysis of women's responses to expropriation suggests that by selectively deploying laws, rules and norms in different settings, women are influencing not only compensation distribution, but also the terms under which the state compensates villagers for their expropriation and the gender relations in which property is embedded.     

Maternalism, race, class and citizenship: aspects of illegitimate motherhood in Nazi Germany

This article juxtaposes three types of illegitimate motherhood that came in the wake of the Second World War in Nazi Germany. The first found institutional support in the Lebensborn project, an elite effort to raise the flagging birth-rates, which at the same time turned a new page in the history of sexuality. The second came before the lower courts in the form of paternity and guardianship suits that had a long precedent, and the third was a social practice that the regime considered a ‘mass crime' among its female citizenry: namely, forbidden unions between German women and prisoners of war. Through these cases the article addresses issues such as morality, sexuality, paternity, citizenship and welfarism. The flesh-and-blood stories have been culled from the Lebensborn Dossiers and Special Court files, as well as cases from the lower courts.     

Colonial Matriarchs: Garveyism,Maternalism, and Belize's Black Cross Nurses, 1920–1952

This article analyses the politics of Belize's Black Cross Nurses in their heyday in order to bring into dialogue the historiography on gender in the transnational Garveyite movement to which the middle‐class Nurses belonged, and the historiography on maternalism. It complicates the claim that Garveyite women were subordinated within the movement and resisted its gender norms, and addresses the lack of attention to maternalist politics among non‐white women in colonised settings, where racial anxieties strengthened middle‐class attachment to bourgeois respectability. By analysing the Nurses's relations with the colonial state, poor urban mothers and middle‐class men, the article concludes that their maternalism served to reproduce class and race hierarchies, and colonial rule, even as it strengthened middle‐class women's political autonomy and legitimacy.     

Ohitorisama,Singlehood and Agency in Japan

Abstract:

Postwar Japanese society has experienced significant demographic shifts. Of particular note are trends in marriage delay, increased divorce, increased rates of lifelong singlehood and an increased proportion of life spent unmarried. In this context, singlehood is increasingly experienced by women, for at least some period in their adult lives. Nonetheless, while greater numbers of Japanese are living as singles for a greater portion of their lives, marriage and childbearing remain key markers of contemporary Japanese womanhood. Living outside marriage – as a single, divorced or widowed person – suggests divergence from the ideal, even if it is just an unavoidable temporary state. This paper explores singlehood as a contested space of ideals and practices, and presents the notion of ohitorisama as one model of contemporary female singlehood.     

Feminism,Gender, and Women's Peace Activism

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, peace and security’, passed in 2000, reflects a recent growth in women's peace activism. Women's resistance to violence is widely believed to be a mobilizing factor in both local and international peace movements. This provokes questions around essentialism and violence of concern to feminists: are men inherently territorial and aggressive, and women naturally nurturing and peaceable? Or is the behaviour of both conditioned by particular local configurations of social relations of power? This contribution reviews these questions in the light of the experiences of women's peace organizations. It concludes that essentializing women's roles as wives, mothers and nurses discourages their inclusion as active decision makers in political arenas, as well as overshadowing the needs of other disadvantaged groups. Rather than seeing war as the violation of women by men, we should recognize that men and women are each differently violated by war.     

Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of Change

This theme issue's call for papers notes that "several prevalent and influential historical practices of the last thirty years have limited agency's significance, . . . seeing the human as the patient of History rather than its agent." The questions implicit in this statement are nowhere more urgent than in those practices collectively known as the "linguistic turn." Yet such questions have been explored sparsely enough in relation to this movement that some adherents can still insist that the ideas they favor do not devalue agency, while many simply ignore the issue and incorporate agency as an integral part of their work. By examining a largely unremarked episode in Michel Foucault's highly influential thought and considering its connections to foundational assumptions of the linguistic turn, we seek to demonstrate in detail why the premises that underlie both structuralism and poststructuralism (the theoretical movements most deeply implicated in the direction the linguistic turn has taken in history) logically require the denial of agency as a causal force and ultimately compel the conclusion that no change can occur in realities as interpreted by humans. We illustrate the intractability of these logical problems by analyzing unsatisfactory defenses from some of the few linguistic-turn historians who have discussed relevant issues, after which we conclude by suggesting that attention to current work in linguistics and cognitive science may help resolve such difficulties.     

Self,Consciousness and Agency in The Egoist

This article re-reads representations of the self and agency in George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) by drawing new connections between the novel and Victorian psychological theory. Critical discussions of The Egoist and psychological themes have rightly stressed the many ways in which, in Meredith’s novel, impersonal forces, biological, physiological and ideological, threaten to obliterate any notion of the self as discrete and autonomous. Yet Meredith maintains a strong ethical investment in individual agency. Comparing metaphors of fluidity, used to describe the self and consciousness in Meredith’s text, with similar images taken from the work of G. H. Lewes and James Sully, I argue that Meredith presents the self’s plasticity as crucial to its individuation and potential autonomy, even while that same plasticity also underlines the self’s vulnerability to social and ideological forces which threaten its independence. Clara’s individuality and agency take on distinctive political significance by challenging oppressive gender norms. Yet the vulnerabilities and bewildering complexities of individual subjective life, expressed in Meredith’s extravagant extensions of psychological metaphors, mean that any one self’s moves towards greater freedom must be fraught with uncertainty. The final part of the essay draws new connections between the psychological imagery that I have been exploring and Meredith’s engagement with human evolution. Clara’s individuation and capacity for autonomous action give the lie to Willoughby’s pseudo-Darwinian schematisation of her identity, yet the relationship between self and evolution remains a serious and complex issue in the novel.     

Agency and Archaeology: Past, Present, and Future Directions

In light of the growing social scientific interest in agency theory, this paper sets out to examine and critically evaluate recent approaches to agency within archaeology. To this end, the paper briefly outlines the foundational theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens before turning to discuss the central themes and issues that emerge from some of the more influential contemporary approaches to agency within archaeology. Drawing from these differing approaches, this paper seeks to establish conceptual clarity in archaeological thinking about agency through a discussion of the importance of distinguishing between intentions, consequences, meanings, and motives when seeking to understand the situated subjectivities of historical actors.     

Environmental Action,Gender Equity and Women's Participation

For poor households, and especially for the women who own little private land, forests and village commons have always been critical sources of basic necessities in rural India. However, the availability of these resources has been declining rapidly, due both to degradation and to shifts in property rights away from community control and management to State and individual control and management. More recently, though, we are seeing small but notable reversals in these processes toward a re-establishment of greater community control over forests and village commons. Numerous forest management groups have emerged, initiated variously by the State, by village communities, or by non-governmental organizations. However, unlike the old systems of communal property management which recognized the usufruct rights of all villagers, the new ones represent a more formalized system of rights based on membership. In other words, under the new initiatives, membership is replacing citizenship as the defining criterion for establishing rights in the commons. This raises critical questions about participation and equity, especially gender equity. Are the benefits and costs of the emergent institutional arrangements being shared equally by women and men? Or are they creating a system of property rights in communal land which, like existing rights in privatized land, are strongly male centred? What is women's participation in these initiatives? What constrains or facilitates their participation and exercise of agency? This article provides pointers. It also demonstrates the relevance of the feminist environmentalist perspective, as opposed to the ecofeminist perspective, in understanding gendered responses to the environmental crisis. 1 Abbreviations used in this article: FPC=Forest Protection Committee (under JFM); JFM=Joint Forest Management; NGO=Non-Governmental Organization; VCs=Village Commons; VP=Van Panchayat (forest council).
     

Welfare Theory,Public Goods,and Public Facility Location

The paper discusses a number of issues that are important to the development of a useful normative “welfare theory” of the public space economy. Attention is specifically focused on theoretical welfare economic models of public goods provided at facilities to which consumers must travel for consumption. The recent analysis of Bigman and ReVelle [2] is subjected to critical scrutiny and found wanting. An alternative, more complex but still very simple, analysis is provided.     

Income Inequality,Welfare and Poverty in Ukraine

Ukraine is now faced with economic crisis on an unprecedented scale. The country is on the brink of hyperinflation. The government has to follow rigorous demand management policies which entail lowering the standard of living of the population. To design policies which protect the poorest and most vulnerable groups in the society, it is important to understand the nature of poverty and income inequality. This study attempts to do exactly this for Ukraine for the first time. The paper demonstrates that the standard of living in Ukraine has been falling at an alarming rate. The government welfare programmes are ineffective in protecting the poorest and most vulnerable groups in the society. This article provides an empirical basis to design appropriate policies, but a lot more work needs to be done.