Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.     

Gabrielle Lévy and the Roussy-Lévy syndrome

In 1934, Gabrielle Lévy died at the age of 48. She became well known for an article she published on a hereditary polyneuropathy in cooperation with Gustav Roussy, resulting in the eponym Roussy-Lévy syndrome. Not much is known about this extraordinary neurologist/neuropathologist. Her family declared that she died from the disease she was studying. She was a pupil of Pierre Marie, with whom she worked at the Salpêtrière in Paris and wrote on war neurology. In cooperation with Marie, she published a number of articles on postencephalitic syndromes, which also became the subject of her 1922 thesis. Three years later, she became associate physician at the Paul-Brousse Hospital in Paris, where the study of brain tumors became one of the subjects of her scientific work. Remarkably, Lévy was first author in a few of her many articles, although Roussy confirmed that she often initiated the study and even wrote the main part. In this article her career is considered in the context of the struggle of women physicians to improve their position during the early-twentieth century. She probably died from a brain tumor or a postencephalitic syndrome.     

Moving stories: precarious work and multiple migrations

According to the United Nations over 3% of the global population or 232 million people currently live outside their country of birth. Their significance as a growing proportion of the labour force in many European countries is widely known. It is also evident that women – many of them young – are increasingly represented among economic migrants and asylum seekers. However, the longer term contribution of women, as migrants and as workers, is less well recorded. Here, I explore the connections between migration and employment, through the lens of oral histories undertaken with women who moved to the UK. Their life stories illustrate the growing diversity among female migrants as well as the changing nature of women’s employment. My key focus is, however, not on the work these women migrants undertook in the UK, but on precarious forms of waged work engaged in during the migration journey itself. I also reflect on oral history as a method and the problems of writing difference for feminist scholars working with and on women migrants.     

Peace negotiations in the political marketplace: the implications of women's exclusion in the Sudan-South Sudan peace process

This article investigates the implications of women’s exclusion for the nature and durability of peace processes, and whether factors that undermine peace consolidation post-settlement might be prevented through more inclusive peacemaking. It examines the Sudan-South Sudan peace process that produced the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the roles women played in peacemaking and their exclusion from official negotiations, and the sources of insecurity post-CPA. South Sudan’s peace process shows that the exclusion of women can be understood as a canary in a coal mine: a highly visible marker of the broader exclusivity of such processes, and the complex dynamics of elite capture in war and peace processes. Women’s exclusion was the product of the region’s political marketplace, in which power and authority is secured by elites through violence and bargaining, to the exclusion of other groups. By understanding exclusion as a deliberate strategic tactic that extends from war into peacetime, I argue that the exclusion of women is not the reason why peace processes fail in and of itself, but rather the product of elite ownership of peace processes and the structure of many peace processes that facilitates and rewards such ownership, with serious consequences for the sustainability of peace post-settlement.     

Seductive Alienation: The American Way of Life Rearticulated in Occupied Japan

This article explores how the notion of American domesticity promoted by US occupation forces in postwar Japan was decoded and rearticulated by non-elite Japanese women, a social group that has been largely overlooked in studies of the global promotion of the American way of life during the early Cold War years. Specifically examined here is the case of Takehisa Chieko, an actress and the wife of an American officer, who enjoyed high visibility in popular women’s magazines as the embodiment of the idealised postwar American lifestyle. A reading of Takehisa’s magazine writings, interviews, and photographs suggests, however, that she was far from a passive recipient and transmitter of this cultural message. As such, a close unpacking of her rearticulation of the idea of American domesticity toward the particular socio-cultural fabric of postwar Japan reveals the particular nature of this supposedly universal American model. In demonstrating the various dilemmas that stemmed from confronting both the seductive and alienating features of the American way as promoted in occupied Japan, this study illuminates a point of rupture in the larger US global promotion of American domesticity as a means toward cultural hegemony and political containment in the early Cold War period.     

博物馆女性题材展览的类型与意义

女性题材的展览主要分为女性博物馆的基本陈列和专题展览、综合类博物馆的常设展览和临时展览,旨在以"物"为媒介来展示女性的生存状态和精神追求,与公众一起讨论有关女性的话题,甚至包括一些敏感的、有争议的现象或问题。博物馆以女性为题材,组织展览和教育活动,关注、探讨并传播女性文化,一方面反映出博物馆关注并回应女性广泛参与社会生活并贡献于社会变革与发展的现实,发挥博物馆作为时代潮流倡导者和引领者的作用;另一方面,女性观众数量增多,参观需求多元化且女性广泛参与博物馆事务,对博物馆展览理念也产生一定的影响。然而,博物馆的女性主题展览也存在数量少、展览和诠释活动中对女性价值和意义挖掘不够等问题,需要在理念和实践上进一步改变。     

Embodying Islam and laïcité: young French Muslim women at work

In this article, I consider how the racialisation of Muslim identities in the French context affects the education and employment trajectories of six young French Muslim women with post-secondary education, living and working in Paris. I call attention to the pernicious effects of the intersection of three sets of governing discourses: laïcité, post-feminism and neoliberalism. These discourses obscure the way state-endorsed racialisation intersects with class and gender relations to erect barriers to Muslim women's employment opportunities. I examine the complex discursive and performative work Muslim women engage in, to inhabit, reproduce, reject or contest various interpretations of pious feminine Muslim and of French secular republican subjecthood. Work sites become important places where both pious and laïque subjectivities are often simultaneously produced and negotiated through performance and corporeality. In this way, the women's narratives challenge the discursive construction of the incompatibility of pious and secular subjectivities. Participants disrupted their racialisation as oppressed women who embody Muslimness by emphasising their individual and conscious choice to practise their religion. Yet, in doing so, and in the light of the challenges finding work for those wearing the headscarf, they were inadvertently rendered the agents of the discriminatory treatment that disadvantaged them in the labour market. The rational, free-choosing, neoliberal ‘self’ that they construct must then take individual responsibility for the negative consequences on their lives of broader collective racialising discourses.     

To be a true Muslim: online discussions on the headscarf among Moroccan-Dutch women

The headscarf (hijab) and its relation to Muslim identity and gender relations within Islam is a major topic of contention for Muslim women living in Western Europe. One aspect of this is that they have to present an acceptable religious identity vis-à-vis other Muslims. The present study uses membership categorization analysis to examine the membership categories and category-bound attributes used in Internet forum discussions on the headscarf among Moroccan-Dutch women. The analysis shows how the category of ‘true’ Muslim is linked to wearing the headscarf out of religious submission. Women who did not wear the headscarf produced accounts that emphasized personal conviction and religious engagement as additional defining attributes of a ‘true’ Muslim, or emphasized other activities or predicates as being critical for a Muslim female identity. With these accounts, these women negotiated the normative religious context on which categorization practices with fellow believers are based.     

‘They have to abide by our laws … and stuff’: ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism

The long established distinction between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism is useful heuristically to understand different dimensions of nationalism and perhaps track a movement from ethnic forms to civic allegiances, though some have challenged its empirical veracity and others question the normative implications of such a distinction. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the two are elided in everyday discourses about migrants in Australia. We argue suspicion of cultural difference, identified more than three decades ago as the new racism, has given way to talk of the need for migrants to ‘follow the law’. This serves rhetorically to reinforce the notion that migrants, often implied to overlap with the category ‘Muslims’, are insisting on breaking the law and/or changing it and are therefore culturally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy. We argue that since ethnic nationalism, like racism, is out of favour normatively, ethnic nationalist arguments are now superficially concealed beneath the acceptable language of civic nationalism. The manner in which this occurs is mapped discursively using data from a corpus of twenty seven focus groups conducted around Australia.