Women s Studies International Forum

In Britain, the feminization of the cigarette is a 20th-century phenomenon. Prior to 1900 few women smoked, but during the 1920s and 1930s smoking amongst women increased dramatically. Set in the context of the increased prevalence of smoking among women during the interwar years, and negotiations around the meanings of gender and gender relations in this period, this article examines some of the ways in which popular young women's magazines represented smoking as a gendered practice. An examination of the fiction and illustrations featured in popular magazines, as well as articles and advertisements, reveals that representations of women smoking were employed in the interwar years to convey and develop key gender issues—these were rebellion, modernity, and heterosexual intimacy.

While new economic and social possibilities were opening up for American women in the post World War II period, it was a time in which the only acceptable goals for women were marriage and the family. However, in spite of the fact that so many women conformed to this norm, they were simultaneously blamed for being overbearing with their children. Mothers were especially blamed for overprotecting their sons and creating weak and unmasculine men. It was a period of changing gender configurations and new personality goals. The anxiety and hostility this generated was directed at the mothers who were devoting themselves to their children in the way they were ‘supposed’ to.

This article uses a discursive analysis to explore constructions of unmarried women in three 1950s library career novels. We suggest that, within these texts, spinsters were constructed as oppositional to single women. Through a discussion of the stereotype of the library spinster we illustrate that spinsters were portrayed as old and unattractive, as “Other” to single women who were portrayed as young and heterosexually attractive, or “heterosexy.” We also argue that whilst the stated aims of these career novels were to encourage teenage girls into library work, they also, paradoxically, along with other contemporary discourses, contributed to the impoverishment of some women’s library career prospects. A significant factor in this curtailment was the marriage bar which we define in relation to employment generally and library work specifically. Our arguments are supported by reference to both library history and women’s history.

The abortion issue is defined here as a gender conflict of rights, and the research question is formulated within an interest group framework. Using data from a U.S. national opinion survey the merits of the formulation that opinions on abortion should reflect conflicting gender interests are explored. Although no gender polarization on abortion opinions is found, values regarding gender equality for women and conservatism for men reflect the impact of self-interest. The most powerful predictors of opposition to abortion are different for American women and men: high religiosity (for women) and low education (for men). The implications of these findings for a gender-equalitarian future are discussed. While support for a solution based on increased education is noncontroversial, sacrificing religiosity to gender equality is a more problematic proposition.

In this article, I record the perspectives of four Western Australian women peace activists, each over 70 years old, who have been committed to pacifism since childhood. The article is written out of a desire to make visible women’s struggles, resistances, and active defiances. In particular, the article seeks to alert Australian women to their own histories of political activism, and to trace links between the so-called first and second waves of feminism by providing fresh insight into the political activities of Australian women during the middle decades of this century, a period commonly held to be an interregnum between two distinct waves of feminist activism. Consequently, the article focuses on the women’s own accounts of their lives as peace activists, paying particular attention to the processes of their politicisation and to the nature of their local and international support networks, in an attempt to uncover how they were each able to resist mainstream ideologies in their active pursuit of peace.

South Africa has been in the forefront of countries that articulate gender rights as vital human rights. Therefore, it came as no surprise to many observers that when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began hearings in 1996 to investigate human rights abuses during the apartheid era, women's stories were being neglected, and the country was getting a distorted view of the past. In response to pressure from women's organizations, the TRC held three all-women hearings in which women were encouraged to tell their own stories of human rights violations. This article highlights women's oppression during the period of review (1960–1964), the TRC's handling of gender issues, and an assignment of the TRC's contribution toward the promotion of gender rights.

This article examines the changing nature of gendered paternalist employment relations on South African fruit farms. We suggest that in the past family employment—in which women were dependent on a male partner for employment and housing—helped institutionalise an unequal gender division of labour that was integral to paternalist production. Women constituted a cheap and flexible source of labour. Since the early 1980s, however, traditional paternalist production systems have been disrupted by intensified competition pressure and political reform, including the granting of new labour rights to workers. Many farmers have responded by modifying their production and management regimes. The key question this article examines is the extent to which these new practices are disrupting historically embedded paternalist relations from a gender perspective. We argue that new employment strategies are producing contradictory outcomes for women, opening up new opportunities, but also reproducing traditional forms of gender inequality in employment.

In this article, the authors use the example of a schoolteacher and lifelong feminist activist born in Vienna in the late 19th century to discuss questions of biographical writing and the representation of feminist agency. They analyze the ambivalent status of a woman who can neither be conceptualized as a political leader or pioneer nor just as a nameless representative of a social group. In this way, they aim to challenge hidden paradigms in feminist history that make it difficult to represent types of biography that do not fit into conventional models of feminist agency. They propose to look at the archive that is the material background of biographical research as a strategic and symbolic space to discuss questions of memory and the ways in which past and present strategies of narrating and documenting women’s lives are intertwined. They argue that collecting and storing ‘facts’ always has strong imaginary aspects despite the realistic appeal of documents. By discussing two biographical models—the pioneer of women’s education and the political activist—as two possible ways to see the biography of their protagonist, they draw attention to the dependency of any biography on the biographer’s perspectives as well as the contingencies and limitations of any biographical model.

In the mid-1980s, Swedes often regarded the relative absence of assistance for abused women as evidence that it was unnecessary. The Swedish state no longer dismisses the prevalence of abuse. Instead, it rigorously emphasizes the actions it has taken against it. This follow-up study, completed nearly a decade after the first nation-wide survey of battered women, examines the character of Sweden's policy shift by exploring its consequences. The principal question of this project is: What changes, if any, have resulted from the increased expenditures and additional reforms the state has pursued in its recent efforts to prevent violence against women? The results of this survey of battered women in shelters suggest that while police and prosecutors appear to be somewhat more responsive to abused women, social workers have not improved. In general, significant obstacles remain for women in need of assistance and protection from the men who abuse them.

Sexuality continues to be a key issue for those studying the history and evolution of gender relations. It has also attracted many social theorists interested in the construction of social relations more generally.This paper aims to contribute to both areas. It uses the texts of two leading feminist birth controllers at the turn of the century, Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, to examine changing attitudes to female sexuality and to see how attitudes on other issues such as class influenced their views on sexuality.Sanger and Stopes had several agendas, including a desire to improve women's sex lives and their experience of marriage, and a political commitment to Anglo-Saxon, middle-class hegemony. Their membership in this particular social group determined the conceptual system within which they worked and imposed constraints on their analysis of women's roles and needs.

This article reflects on the achievements, involvements, and complexities of feminism's involvement in education change in Australia over the past quarter century. In doing so, it continues a discussion about feminist theory and its relationship to politics and contexts. The article argues that this has been a period in which feminism has made a considerable impact on education, but that these achievements and even the growing wealth of experiences and sophistication of those working for such change have led to a more murky situation. The argument attempts to account for the particular form of Australian feminist work (theorizing as well as other practices) and to identify some of its consequences today.

In spite of the ‘maternal turn’ in feminist theory, at the level of policy and practice feminism has neglected the politics of motherhood. This article explores the ambivalent relationship between the Australian women's movement and mothers' organisations formed to contest the management of childbirth and lactation. It argues that the advent of a ‘politics of difference’ allows greater acceptance of seemingly non-feminist positions on maternity and recognition of the role played by childbirth reformers in effecting social change. It examines Australian feminist attitudes to motherhood before discussing the response to feminism of women's groups which saw themselves as possibly part of a wider women's movement, but ‘different’ from mainstream feminism. A strong familial orientation was often contradicted by the everyday lives of activist women, who gained new skills and self-confidence in a significant challenge to medicalised reproduction.

The Bangladeshi university system has been open to women since its beginnings in 1921. In practice, however, Bangladeshi social norms place many limitations in the way of female students. The increasing politicization of the universities in recent years has led to campuses being dominated by male student cliques allied to whichever party is ruling at the time. This has further worsened the situation of female students, as a recent series of events at Jahangirnagar University, the second university of Dhaka, illustrates. In 1998, a group of male students were involved in several rape incidents on the campus. The University was reluctant to take action, because the offenders had powerful political connections, and the resulting protest campaign led to a widespread discussion in the Bangladeshi media. In this article, I consider these events. I show how Bangladeshi social norms have brought about an effective and worsening “culture of exclusion” for female students and academic staff, and also discuss the attempts by staff (mainly female) and students to counter this situation and to claim the campus as a space in which women are able to take a full role.

This article traces the beginnings and growth of the author's research into 18th and 19th century obstetric discourse in an effort to develop a perspective on the male theories about the female body inherent in current obstetric and gynecological practice. The author first discusses previous work within feminism to theorise about women and childbirth and the search for an authentic female practice of birth. She then focuses on the issue of power, and using examples from the texts of men midwives and obstetricians, argues that the obstetric discourses reveal the power of obstetric science to control the way women labour and give birth.

This article attempts to challenge the Euro-American feminist representation of Chinese women as victims of the socialist system. The critique of this representation is grounded by an examination of the intersection between Mao’s gender ideology and rural/Beishadao village women’s experiences. Through a comparative study of two generations of Beishadao women’s lives, our attention is brought to a set of social changes in rural China that took place between the 1950s and 1990s. These changes strongly suggest that women who grew up under Mao’s regime have achieved significant power, although patriarchal privilege does not thoroughly disappear in their lives. These mixed consequences are influenced by contradictions generated by socialist gender ideas. Recognition of differences between two generations of women’s lives thus raises a feminist inquiry about the agents for social change.

This article examines the mode of understanding and experiences of family relationships of Chinese migrant women in Britain. In contrast to much existing research work on the patterns and experiences of postwar settlement of unskilled Chinese male labourers in Britain, the focus here is on the life stories of 41 Chinese women with different migration trajectories and varying economic and cultural capital. Their oral testimonies reveal Chinese women's diverse expectations and experiences of migrant family relationships and their different strategies to achieve self-fulfillment both within and outside the confines of the migrant family. For some women, migration brings opportunities for a fulfilling and independent lifestyle. They are successful in negotiating their way around and sometimes out of their initial familial and social position. For others, they bear the disproportionate cost and labour of familial strategies of advancement and remain vulnerable to the most constraining aspects of diasporic existence.

Historically, women have played crucial roles in the care of sick family members, and this pattern continues today. Women's involvement in folk medicine is particularly noteworthy, yet there has been very little study of this topic. Discussions of folk medicine frequently overlook and/or downplay women's contributions. Only recently have researchers focused on women and examined the complexity and extensiveness of female healers' knowledge and practices. Studies of three areas in the United States where folk medicine has flourished—the Ozarks, Appalachia, and the South—provide valuable insights about the major roles women have played as midwives, herbalists and spiritual healers. Intergenerational networking by women, especially within kin groups, has proven to be the most important mechanism for transmission of folk healing knowledge and beliefs in these locales. Information from studies in the U.S. highlights both the limitations and the horizons existing in the exploration of women's roles as keepers and carriers of folk medicine traditions.

Since the advent of modern contraceptive techniques, sexuality and reproduction have been divided more than at any other time in human history. At first, this was seen as a liberating process for women, particularly for heterosexual women. Now, new reproductive technology has separated sexuality and the procreative process even further: a child can now be created without recourse to sexual intercourse. This too has been presented as a liberation for women. However, within this process men are gaining control of an experience uniquely female. The result of allowing this technological process to go unchecked could be the elimination of women and the development of artificial wombs.

Children and parents' daily lives are rarely highlighted in coverage of drug wars. Using 16 interviews with parents in the Mexican border city of Juárez in 2010, we examine how drug violence impacts families with a focus on intersections of gender and social class. Related to mobility (the first emergent theme), fathers had increased mobility as compared to mothers, which caused different stresses. Material hardships heightened mothers' isolation within the home, and mothers more often had to enforce children's mobility restrictions, which children resisted. Related to employment (the second emergent theme), fathers took on dangerous jobs to provide for the family while mothers had fewer options for informal employment due to violence. In sum, men and women faced different challenges, which were intensified due to class-based material disadvantages. Conformity with traditional gender expectations for behavior was common for men and women, illustrating the normalization of gender inequality within this context.

Clomiphene citrate is a drug that has been given to women for conventional fertility treatment for over 20 years. It is also now being administered—often in connection with other hormone-like drugs—to an increasing number of women in IVF programmes-(many of whom are fertile), in order to stimulate egg cell growth. Clomiphene citrate is handed out as if it were a “safe drug.” This paper analyses some of the medical and scientific literature on the drug including its effect on the women themselves and the children born after such treatment. It also incorporates our research with women who have used the drug. What surfaces is a disturbing array of health hazards ranging from depression, nausea, and weight gain, to burst ovaries, adhesions, and the promotion of cancer leading to death in some women, worrying rates of birth anomalies in the children and severe chromosomal aberrations in egg cell development. Of great concern is the evidence that the drug may stay in a woman's body for at least six weeks. Since clomiphene citrate has a chemical structure similar to DES there may be as yet unknown long-term adverse effects similar to those from DES. Given the fact that all these “side-effects” have stirred considerable debate in the medical and scientific literature, we are shocked to learn that (a) the women taking the drug are not informed of its possible detrimental effects; and (b) that researchers continue to state, contrary to scientific evidence, that the drug has no side effects. We posit that the potential risks from the drug are too great to administer it to any women and demand the development of a different science that places values on women's lives instead of using them as “living test-sites.”

The New Woman, the figure of feminist rebellion who emerged in 1880s and 1890s in English fiction and social commentary, became the focus of a good deal of anxious polemic. In the context of the massive wave of expansionism during these years of the Second British Empire, the New Woman—and feminism, as it appeared to undermine woman’s reproductive “duty”—came to be seen as a sign of imperial decline. It was in response to this view that suffragism undertook to transform the New Woman into the feminist image of the woman as “mother of the race.” In the white settler colonies, this image held a particular iconic value, since both the imperial mother and the “virgin” territories of the New World were configured as the last hope for the Empire. This article traces the analogy of New Woman and New World, and discusses how Anglo-colonial fictions of woman suffrage re-presented the question of white women’s role in the progress of nation and Empire.

Since the late 1990s, Zimbabwe has been enmeshed in a major economic and political crises that has seriously eroded the status of women in that country. Despite these problems, however, two women's organizations have emerged that offer some hope for poor and low-income women in that country, namely the Zimbabwe Women's Resource Center and Network and the Musasa Project Trust. These groups have attempted to address the strategic and human rights needs of grassroots women in Zimbabwe, particularly through disseminating information about the status of women, providing training about gender issues and working against domestic violence. These organizations, coupled with the UN's Fourth International Conference on Women and the NGO Forum on Women held in China in 1995, have promoted the empowerment of grassroots women in Zimbabwe. In this regard, they demonstrate the increasing strength of civil society and the future possibilities for women's enhanced contributions to their communities and to national development.

In the post-Communist time and space of Romania, it seems that the values of gender rights are lagging behind other concepts such as democracy, human rights, civil society, and political institution building. A general survey of the gender problematic in post-Communist Romania, the article focuses on the present gender politics within pre-Communist traditionalist and national-Communist legacies, and post-Communist neo-conservatism and nationalism grafted onto a background of globalization. In what terms can one talk about feminism in Romania today? Are gender politics and patriarchy universal experiences? Such questions will be addressed in an effort to understand the value of Western feminist theories and experiences in the Romanian post-Communist context, as well as local perceptions of gender politics. Overall, the article brings to light the main problems that post-Communism posits for the gendering of Romania, within an East–West feminist dialogue.

A major effect of globalization has been the opening up of the Indian economy for international trade. Economic reforms under the “New Structural Adjustment Programme” (1991) include the deregularisation of the economy to allow free market forces to operate unfettered. With increasing global economic competition, employment conditions have declined and government spending on social and welfare services has decreased. This article demonstrates the impact upon women, and how policy makers take for granted that the burden of social services can be “costlessly” transferred from the “productive” economy to the “non-productive” economy, that is, to women within the household. Women's multiple role in production and reproduction is negated by the absence of gender analysis in economic policy making. It is, therefore, necessary for feminists to identify the forces that continue to deconstruct and reconstruct patriarchy, and to investigate the interrelationships between public and private spheres, and social and economic capital.

This essay outlines some of the ways in which contemporary developmental biology has been shaped by the exigencies of particular social movements and ideologies. The work is divided into three parts. Part One explores how the removal of the developing organism from its environmental context and the placement of the nucleus rather than the integrated cell at the head of a developmental control hierarchy has powerfully advanced our abilities to create chimeric organisms, to use genetic engineering for better and for worse and even to create mammalian clones. Part Two outlines a relationship between a central tenet of developmental and evolutionary theory, the continuity of the germ line, and the eugenics movement active during the first quarter of this century. Part Three discusses how assumptions about gender which are deeply embedded in our language have affected theories of male and female development.