Monograph on the historical evolution of women's rights from 1902 to 1978 - describes various campaigns for achieving civil rights for women, rights for political participation, equal opportunities for the woman worker, etc., and considers the contributions made to the emancipation of women by the international alliance of women (interest group), the League of Nations, the UN (role of UN) and other international organizations, the international women's year, etc. ILO mentioned. Bibliography pp. 312 to 314, chronology of major (...) events and photographs. (shrink)

The article describes the obstacles to the emancipation of Roma women in the family and Czech society. The theoretical side deals with the recent changes in gender roles in the Roma family, changes in the position of Roma women and their discrimination as well as the concept of emancipation. The article aims to describe the obstacles a Roma woman must overcome in the course of emancipation. The data are based on qualitative socio-ethnographic research conducted through narrative (...) interviews with 30 women of different ages and classes who identify as Roma and live in three Czech regional capitals. The research sample was compiled using the snowball method. The data collected in the field research were analyzed in Atlas.ti using anchored theory. We identified five main obstacles to the emancipation of Roma woman. They include obstacles emanating from the family and the majority society as well as obstacles caused by the hegemony of masculinity and those emanating from the woman. By gaining an understanding of relations in Roma families, the situation regarding the emancipation of Roma women and the associated barriers may help those who come into daily contact with the Roma minority to take appropriate actions and apply the right interventions. (shrink)

Volume 4 Lysistrata, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman A M Ludovici Originally published in 1927 " Pro-feminine but anti-feminist…" Scotsman " A stimulating book" Sunday Times This volume represents an attack on many modern conventions and practices which, according to the author, the world has tolerated too long in connection with marriage and the relationship between the sexes. 112pp Chronos Or The Future of the Family Eden Paul Originally published in 1930 "Deserves to be read by a (...) large number of people. It is a proof of the revolution in the family and sexual relations which is taking place before our eyes." Nation This volume discusses the effect of sexual reform on family life and education and concludes that the family is in process of decay. The causes of this decay, among which birth control and the sexual and economic emancipation of women are two of the most notable – are traced. 58pp Aphrodite Or The Future of Sexual Relationships Ralph de Pomerai Originally published in 1931 Recognizing that the existing code of sexual morality is in process of rapid disintegration, this volume analyzes modern conditions and outlines the tendency of future development. It traces the origin and development of sex; indicates its biological function, other than reproductive and expounds its psychical and physical value for the individual and its proper place in life. Finally the essential requirements of a new sexual morality are applied to pre-marital, marital, and extra-marital relationships. (shrink)

On her arrival in Travancore in 1819 Mrs Mault, as wife of the new missionary, immediately set about establishing a school for convert girls and a ‘lace industry’ to employ convert women. Her actions reflect that pattern of activism and organization historians of gender and imperialism have identified as the ‘mission of domesticity’ conducted by European and North American Christian missionary women to their non-Christian ‘sisters’ in the colonial empires being established by their respective nation-states throughout the nineteenth century. Mrs (...) Mault was herself among the first generation of missionary women to pioneer this specifically female branch of colonizing endeavour, designed to ‘emancipate’ Indian women in terms of the norms of metropolitan ideologies of femininity and womanhood. Drawing on a case study of the London Missionary Society's activities in South Travancore, South India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that this ‘mission of domesticity’ was not a straightforward transfer of conventions of marriage and motherhood to the colonial context. On the contrary, the project was from the start caught in a complex and contradictory web of agency and discourse which ‘remade’ not only convert women but missionary women as well. Central to this process of refiguring femininity on the imperial fulcrum were changes to the meanings of ‘work’ in relation to both ‘home’ and womanhood, articulated through a religious idiom and framework of action. The consequences of these processes, the article argues, were somewhat contrary. On the one hand, the Indian Christian woman is reconstructed as a wife, mother and worker, while on the other, the missionary women are bifurcated: the missionary wife increasingly viewed as an amateur appendage to her husband, firmly secured in the domestic sphere, while the single woman attains a new status as a professional worker. (shrink)

This richly woven history ranges from the seventeenth century to the present as it masterfully traces the movement of American women out of the home and into the public sphere. Matthews examines the Revolutionary War period, when women exercised political strength through the boycott of household goods and Elizabeth Freeman successfully sued for freedom from enslavement in one of the two cases that ended slavery in Massachusetts. She follows the expansion of the country west, where a developing frontier attracted strong, (...) resourceful women, and into the growing cities, where women entered public life through employment in factories and offices. Matthews illuminates the contributions of such outstanding Civil War women as Mary Ann "Mother" Bickerdyke, who supervised a cattle drive down the banks of the Mississippi so that soldiers would have fresh milk; Clara Barton, whose humanitarian work on behalf of the International Red Cross led her to become the first American woman to serve as official representative of the federal government; and Sojourner Truth, the impassioned black orator who devoted herself to emancipation. And Matthews brings the narrative to the 1970s, detailing the growing presence of women in American politics--from the suffrage marches of the early twentieth century, to the courageous stands women took during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. A fascinating and perceptive look at women throughout our history, The Rise of Public Woman offers an important perspective on the changing public role of women in the United States. (shrink)

entertainment and interest of Liberty’s readers, I intend to express in this article some conservative thoughts on the so called Woman Question. This I will do, not so much because of my desire to present my own views, but because it appears to me a good way of eliciting elaborate statement and clear explanation from those with whom I shall take the issue. The discussion (if such it may be called) of the Woman Question has so far been (...) confined to platitudes and trivial points, while it has been deemed one of the absolute requisites of an advanced, progressive, and liberal thinker to believe in equality of the sexes and to indulge in cheap talk about economic emancipation, equal rights, etc., of the “weaker sex.” Declining to repeat this talk in a parrot like fashion, I ask to be offered some solid arguments in support of the position which I now, with all my willingness, cannot consider well grounded. (shrink)

Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House, situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, I use (...) Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the marginalisation and abjection of strongwilled and assertive women in Dagaaba settings in rural north-western Ghana. This is done by paying attention to a local identity category known as pog gandao—‘a woman who is more than a man’. The pog gandao, or what I gloss as the wilful woman, concept is used by men and women locally to stigmatise hard-working and assertive Dagaaba women. Drawing inspiration from the reappropriation and redeployment of queer abjection (...) for the subversion of homophobia and the violence of compulsory heterosexuality, I demonstrate how such naming or shaming into the position of a pog gandao serves to hamper initiatives by enterprising and talented Dagaaba women. Being labelled as pog gandao, it appears, is even to lose one’s status in normative gender presentation as a woman; it means to transcend into a realm beyond the masculine. But this transcendence is not enviable due to its potential to expose the subject in question to perceived supernatural harm, a serious matter in this cultural context whereby the world of human affairs is understood as thoroughly saturated with supernatural forces that structure daily and ritual comportment. I argue that the shaming interpellation of pog gandao works as the most powerful weapon against wilful women in oppressive male-centric institutions of the Dagaaba. And yet, this stigmatised interpellation also has great emancipating potential, and I conclude by exploring ways to reclaim it for undermining female subordination, and for both empowering women and for feminist politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 35-37 [Access article in PDF] Seeking Emancipation through Engagement:One Nichiren Buddhist's Approach to Practice Bill Aiken SGI-USA I was born and raised Roman Catholic, which meant attending Catholic schools, first in the local parish schools and later at a private academy in suburban Philadelphia. As a child I was serious about my religion. I served as an altar boy and had serious thoughts about (...) becoming a priest.That was until the mid-1960s, when my hormones took over, my voice changed, and I converted to hedonism. I hadn't so much turned against my Catholic upbringing as I was temporarily distracted from it.It was when I went away to college that the religious questions began to resurface. Friends and classmates wanted to know what I believed in, and I really didn't know. The old form of Catholicism, with its stern, patriarchal vision of God, didn't seem to fit anymore. But the mystery remained as a palpable presence, and it seemed to require an answer. Was I an atheist? That seemed so negative. How about an agnostic? Possibly. They seemed to believe in something, even if they didn't know what it was. That seemed about right for the moment.My first encounter with Buddhism came during that freshman year at Penn State University in the fall of 1968. While attending a rather psychedelic party, a friend asked me if I knew anything about Buddhism. Replying that I didn't, I asked what Buddhism had to say for itself. My friend said that it spoke of the oneness and interrelatedness of everything. All I can say is that at that particular moment this made sense to me and started me on what would at first be a pretty casual exploration of Buddhism.But it would be in the bedridden summer of 1970, while recovering from a lifestyle-inflicted illness, that I started to reflect on my life in earnest and began to read as though Buddhism had something to say directly to me. More books by Alan Watts led to D. T. Suzuki, which in turn led to collections of sutras and finally to Phillip Kapleau and the Three Pillars of Zen. This would be my guide for the next year as I struggled to bring focus to my mind and my life.Being the poor and struggling student that I was, I could not afford the cost of a [End Page 35] retreat or sesshin training. So I struggled as well as I could with a combination of self-instruction and whatever I could learn from those who did attend these sessions.I should say at this point that while I may have had a highly developed religious sense, I never wanted to become a religious virtuoso or a renunciate. From the depths of my adolescent angst and confusion, I longed for an awakening, but I had conditions. And chief among them was that I would not be pried apart from my life as I knew it. The quietude of the monastery and hours of prayer or meditation held absolutely no appeal for me. If I were going to attain enlightenment it would have to be in Times Square (before Disney took it over). And so, through my daily stumbling efforts at zazen, I began struggling to bring about this awakening.So this is where I was spiritually when on a late summer day in 1971, a pleasant though somewhat scattered young woman approached me on the streets of downtown Philadelphia, invited me to a Buddhist meeting, and introduced me to the chanting of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. The first meeting I attended was a rather large one on the campus of Columbia University in NewYork. Everyone seemed pleasant enough, but the meeting seemed more like a pep rally than a serious discussion about the profound teachings of the Buddha. When the main speaker finally took the stage, I found it nearly impossible to understand his broken English. So I'm afraid that I don't remember a single word he... (shrink)

The emancipation of women has become a strong critical discourse in Bengali literature since the 19th century. Only since the second half of the 20th century, however, have female writers markedly stepped out of the shadow of their male colleagues, and the writings on women become more and more often articulated by women themselves. In this article, I focus on particular concepts of femininity in selected texts of two outstanding writers of different generations, a prose writer, and a (...) class='Hi'>woman poet: Mahasweta Debi (b. 1926) and Mallika Sengupta (1960–2011). Analyzing Mahasweta’s female characters, I focus on the issue of the double marginalization of dalit tribal women; we can find here impacts of intersectional discrimination of class, gender and caste. Debi is very radical in her social criticism but is quite reluctant to accept the label of feminism. Mallika, on the other hand, represents a movement among the female writers of her generation that openly declares her support for feminist ideologies, which can be demonstrated on some of the examples referred to here. Another important strand of Mallika’s constructions of femininity are archetypal images — mythological metaphors of femininity (in the Hindu context) which may in some cases be interpreted in accordance with difference feminism, in others as a critique of the essentialized and dichotomous concepts of masculinity and femininity. While Mahasweta’s emancipation drive is more deeply grounded in her field research and journalistic activism in the tribal areas she writes about, Mallika’s has been more strongly linked with the academia and has joined the theoretical feminist discourse. Through a close reading the women’s emancipation discourse of these two protagonists in Bengali literature, we can speak of a shift from a practical, concrete criticism, to a theoretically founded radicalism. (shrink)

The notion of refugees as a viable source of labor to address skill shortages in the destination country’s labor market has rarely been the dominant discourse on refugee entrants. Bella’s1 lived experience as a professional woman who arrived as a Syrian conflict refugee to Australia in 2017 presents an outlier in refugee research and challenges conventional scholarly wisdom and public discourse. A combination of human capital, a purposeful use of networks, supported by her desire for recognition and a deep (...) sense of self-worth allowed her to navigate the formalized and structured Australian business landscape. Accordingly, she was able to overcome the stigma of being a refugee: Less worthy of employment status in a position representative of her overseas skills and qualifications. In drawing on an outlier methodology and critical theory, we develop a more nuanced understanding of the agency of skilled and qualified refugee women drawing attention to lessons for business which typically takes a “one size fits all” approach to labor integration. (shrink)

Problem: The underlying assumption of all feminist theories is that in order to achieve our emancipatory goals we have to resolve the so-called female subjectivity problem first. That is, we have to answer the question of what is (is not) the nature/essence/main feature of being a woman. The debate about where and how we should look for that essence seems to be endless and it still continues in contemporary feminist theories. This stalemate blocks the initial political and social power (...) of the whole feminist movement. It also seems to contradict the idea that philosophy can serve practical purposes, which was a driving force behind feminist theories as such. Solution: While analyzing contemporary feminist theories we can discover that they are dualistic with respect to the cognitive situation. Using tools taken from Josef Mitterer's philosophy and the idea of emancipation developed by Bruno Latour, I want to consider the idea of avoiding stalemate situations in discussions on female subjectivity. I claim that this strategy can be more effective in achieving certain practical goals that are important from a feminist point of view. Benefits: We are able to show that the aim of our theoretical activity is not to agree about what a woman is and what kind of woman we are going to emancipate, but rather to define which problems should be solved in order to improve the situation of women. We just have to learn how to formulate the description from now on of initial matters of concern that is acceptable to all those involved in a given dispute. (shrink)

Having taken note of, and critically analyzed, Professor Maduabuchi Dukor’s epochal work entitled“Theistic Humanism of African philosophy-the great debate on substance and method of philosophy”(2010), I am much encouraged and rationally convinced that he has succeeded in building the core critical and essential foundational pillars of what can safely pass for professional African philosophy, though much remains to be done by way of further research from other scholars. Based upon that conviction and the great prospects that the African philosophy project (...) breakthrough holds for every African philosopher in the global village, I am also motivated to take a closer look at, and carry out a critical exposition of the concept of justice in the context of African cultural values, using the propositions of what he calls the canons of cultural values that are native to African philosophy. These cultural values define African identity and delineateAfrica’s contributions to the advancement of the global ideas of justice, axiology, gender and globalization. The essence and methodology of this article, therefore, will lift the relevant thematic thrusts and arguments made by the erudite Professor of African philosophy to“properly locate African philosophy in the context of globalism, cosmopolitanism, science and what it could contribute to emerging global culture”(Dukor,2010:p.ix). The central point of this critical exposition is that his theistic inspired cultural humanism has enhanced the global understanding of not only justice but feminist rights and the urgent needs for African philosophy to make its contributions towards the emancipation of and empowerment of women both in the continent and globally. The feminist search for justice, according to Dukor, is“the current global pool where the African is needed urgently to intervene”, since“feminism and women liberation has truncated the equilibrium and balance of relations between man and woman. African contribution to this class struggle between man and woman is a neutral one that absorbs the man and woman to their respective natural places in the nature’s womb”. Women’s search for global justice and the struggle to have their human rights recognized as a part of mankind’s gender balancing process would be philosophically enriched by Professor Dukor’s cultural value propositions and canons of justice. (shrink)

This work intends to discuss about the first generation of Romanian womenpainters within the wider context of the condition of woman within the Romanian society during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We will develop the following path: a) the movement of women’s emancipation in Romania – characteristics and phases; b) the Romanian art-world and this movement of women-painters.

Hijab – covering of a Muslim woman's body – is the most visible Islamic mandate. For a century it has been a major site of ideological struggle between traditionalism and modernity, and a yardstick for measuring the emancipation or repression of Muslim women. In recent decades hijab has become an arena where Islamist and secular feminist rhetoric have clashed. For Islamists, hijab represents their distinct identity and their claim to religious authenticity: it as a divine mandate that protects (...) women and defines their place in society. For secular feminists, hijab represents women's oppression: it is a patriarchal mandate that denies women the right to control their bodies and to choose what to wear. The clash has been particularly strident in Iran, where the state has twice intervened with legislation to an extent that no other Muslim country has experienced. Iran, too, has been a prime site for the emergence of `Islamic feminist' discourses that speak of hijab not as a `duty,' but as a `right,' and as a social rather than a religious mandate, and finds juristic arguments to support this position. This article traces the genealogy of this new juristic position from notions of hijab in classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). It documents how jurisprudential positions and notions of hijab in Iran evolved in response to socio-political factors. It concludes by highlighting wider implications of the new juristic position on hijab for establishing common ground between secular feminist and Islamic discourses. (shrink)

Birthing is a natural phenomenon. However, in the era of modernisation, it has dramatically changed and transformed into a technological affair. Some feminists claim that advances in medicine and assisted reproductive technologies have opened up numerous opportunities and choices for women to free themselves from their destined role of maternity by separating sex from reproduction. But are these technological artefacts always there to emancipate women or just another way to keep them subordinated to serve social needs? Other feminists argue that (...) technology is a controlling tool. It eliminates a woman’s choice and uses her body as a baby-manufacturing machine to perpetuate pervasive social roles and responsibilities. Again, if technology is simply a patriarchal trap, then can technological exclusion be the key to all reproductive issues? It seems not! Technology is the inevitable new reality of the world influenced by socio-cultural practices, values, norms and belief system that has a strong impact on human existence. The present paper is an attempt to critically explore and evaluate the ethical challenges posed by technicization of motherhood from two opposite feminist perspectives. I argue that these ART-centred debates are significant but polarised and insufficient to resolve maternal problems. Thus, we need an egalitarian model of technology that saves women from the threat of technicization, and be able to provide a dignified use of it. The paper discusses the impact of technicization on maternal self in relation to ARTs and proposes suggestions to overcome this problem. (shrink)

Nicholas Capaldi's biography of John Stuart Mill traces the ways in which Mill's many endeavours are related and explores the significance of Mill's contribution to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. He shows how Mill was groomed for his life by both his father James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, the two most prominent philosophical radicals of the early nineteenth century. Yet Mill revolted against this education and developed friendships with both (...) Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who introduced him to Romanticism and political conservatism. A special feature of this biography is the attention devoted to his relationship with Harriet Taylor. No one exerted a greater influence than the woman he was eventually to marry. Nicholas Capaldi reveals just how deep her impact was on Mill's thinking about the emancipation of women. (shrink)

The politics of the us/them or West/East divide forms the backdrop to philosophizing about, for and by women in India. Starting with an awareness that “Western woman” cannot mean the same as “Indian woman,” the philosopher here is easily led to an antiessentialism and explosion of a monolithic idea of woman. With such diffusion comes also a variegation in a monochrome “feminism”; for if subjects are multiple, so also are the blueprints for their emancipation. Resting content (...) with a plurality of feminisms might seem an obvious solution here; but then, it is also natural to wonder whether a simple grammatical pluralization can create space for genuine conceptual diversity, given the entrenched (and Western) associations of the term. (shrink)

From the Symbolist period to the inter-war years, and in works ever more numerous as time went by, literature and medicine, both together and separately, constructed a discourse progressively focused on the enigma of the ‘third sex’. But how perceived? As an aberration, a mere legend, a mirage, a mental defect, a mistake of nature? The ‘third sex’ came to designate the sex of the indistinct, that which has no name, drawing within its sphere the primordial Adam, the angel, the (...) ephebe, the androgyne, the hermaphrodite, the transvestite, the effeminate male, the mannish woman, the pederast, the sodomite, the tribade, the Sapphist, the transsexual, the degenerate. Around 1900, to this unsettling tribe was even added the working woman who, as a result, was thought to have ‘abandoned her true condition’, and who thus had become ‘desexualized’ or ‘asexual’. In his preface to Willy's treatise on the Third Sex (1927), describing the Paris of Sodom and Gomorrah, Louis Estève drew attention to the part played by a now totally forgotten novel of the same name, The Third Sex by Ernst Ludwig von Wolzogen (1902), in the creation, handing down and popularization of this term. But contrary to what this title might suggest, Wolzogen does not focus on homosexuals in his book, but rather on those independent women, without husbands but with jobs, whom he refers to as ‘the neuters’. Neutrality conceived of as the effacement of the masculine and the feminine, perhaps as an effect of modern life? The theme has now come full circle in the corpus of reflection on the third sex, though it seems to have been applied more specifically to emancipated women, and singularly to lesbians. (shrink)

In this article the authors would like to present a history of the Turkish feminist movement. The roots of the feminist movement go back to the last decades of Ottoman Empire in Turkey when westernisation had started to take place. During the firts decade of the Republic many steps were taken to enable women to get involved in public, political and professional life and to encourage more equality in family matters. Women’s emancipation became a significant symbol of modernity. Kemalist (...) reforms attemted to create a new woman who could take place in public sphere with the men. During the 1970’s the movement of women almost disappeared in nationalist and socialist movements. After the military intervention in 1980 new female actors started to present new demands and change the nature of feminist movement in Turkey. (shrink)

In “Post-Liberation Feminism,” Ladelle McWhorter raises the question of what practices will be helpful to further feminist goals if we are no longer in a state of domination, but are still oppressed. McWhorter finds resources in Michel Foucault's concept of “practices of freedom” to begin to answer this question. I build upon McWhorter's insight while recalling Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: namely, that sexual love, as conceived in hoodoo and the blues, became a terrain upon which newly emancipated (...) blacks worked out what their newfound freedom meant. In this essay, I consider what practices of freedom would look like within a life-giving nexus of hoodoo, blues, and sexual love. Not only does the image of the hoodoo woman, prevalent within the blues, emerge through an interaction of race, class, region, gender, sexuality, and spiritualty, but analyzing sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling will help us track how sexual love was transformed into a practice of freedom. I will argue that sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling reveals an important dimension of emancipatory work that both defies categorization as resistance and is crucial to the development of capacities for resistance. (shrink)

In “Post‐Liberation Feminism,” Ladelle McWhorter raises the question of what practices will be helpful to further feminist goals if we are no longer in a state of domination, but are still oppressed. McWhorter finds resources in Michel Foucault's concept of “practices of freedom” to begin to answer this question. I build upon McWhorter's insight while recalling Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: namely, that sexual love, as conceived in hoodoo and the blues, became a terrain upon which newly emancipated (...) blacks worked out what their newfound freedom meant. In this essay, I consider what practices of freedom would look like within a life‐giving nexus of hoodoo, blues, and sexual love. Not only does the image of the hoodoo woman, prevalent within the blues, emerge through an interaction of race, class, region, gender, sexuality, and spiritualty, but analyzing sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling will help us track how sexual love was transformed into a practice of freedom. I will argue that sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling reveals an important dimension of emancipatory work that both defies categorization as resistance and is crucial to the development of capacities for resistance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“We all love with the same part of the body, don’t we?”Iuliia Voznesenskaia’s Zhenskii Dekameron, New Women’s Prose, and French Feminist TheoryYelena Furman (bio)Starting out as a poet who eventually turned to fiction, Iuliia Voznesenskaia was also one of the main figures of the Soviet feminist movement, a fact that makes her biography both unusual and courageous. In the 1970s, Voznesenskaia’s involvement with the dissident movement in Leningrad resulted (...) in several arrests, imprisonment, and time in the camps.1 Although she was not initially interested in women’s issues, her incarceration in all-women’s camps and prisons convinced her that “the situation of women in our country demands special attention” (“Zhenskoe dvizhenie v Rossii” [“The Women’s Movement in Russia”] 41). Along with several other women dissidents, she founded the Soviet feminist movement, putting out the samizdat women’s journal Zhenshchina i Rossiia (Woman and Russia), which precipitated immediate reprisals from the KGB. A women’s club, Mariia, and a journal by the same name followed, as did more KGB reprisals. For her feminist activity, Voznesenskaia was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980, settling in West Germany.2In 1985, in West Germany, Voznesenskaia wrote her first and best-known novel, Zhenskii Dekameron (The Women’s Decameron). The novel is set in a Leningrad maternity ward containing ten new mothers from different backgrounds with different life experiences: Larisa, Emma, Natasha, Nelia, Galina, and Valentina are educated and all have careers except Galina, whose occupation, admittedly strange for a feminist novel, seems to be a dissident’s wife; Ol’ga works in a shipyard; Irishka is a secretary; Al’bina is an Aeroflot flight attendant doubling as an escort on the KGB’s payroll; Zina is homeless and has served time in the camps; Valentina is a Party worker, whereas Galina is part of the dissident community. Quarantined together for ten days because of a spreading infection and inspired by Emma’s reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the women begin to tell each other stories to pass the time. As its title makes clear, Voznesenskaia’s novel is heavily indebted to Boccaccio’s, borrowing its structure and many of its themes, such as an emphasis on storytelling and sexual explicitness. The humor and poignancy of the women’s stories make it a highly enjoyable read, and the focus on female sexuality and the author’s play with the narrative set this novel apart from other Soviet writers’ works.3 The novel also features what is surely a unique occurrence in Russian and Soviet literature: an openly feminist character (Larisa), referred to by the authornarrator as “zhenshchinoi vpolne emansipirovannoi, mogushchei ukrasit’ soboi liuboe zapadnoe feministicheskoe obshchestvo” [“a completely emancipated woman, capable [End Page 95] of adorning any Western feminist group”] (13), who is moreover depicted in a wholly positive light.4Yet despite enjoying a modicum of success, including being translated into several languages and staged as a play, Zhenskii Dekameron remains an under-read and underrated work.5 The reasons for its relative obscurity are closely allied with Voznesenskaia’s political activities in the 1980s. Exiled abroad for being politically undesirable to Soviet authorities, she could not have her work published in the Soviet Union; rather, the novel came out in Russian in Israel in 1987 (Curtis 186n2).6 The lack of visibility from which she suffered in her native country changed only in the (post)glasnost’ period: in 1991, the novel was published in Russian in Tallinn, and in 1992, in Moscow.7 Despite being able to be published, however, Zhenskii Dekameron seems not to have made a strong impact on either readers or critics, and there does not appear to be any discussion of it in Soviet/ Russian literary journals.The novel likewise suffers from a lack of familiarity in the West. The interest Voznesenskaia generated among Western European and American feminists in the early 1980s was for her feminist activism in the Soviet Union, which preceded her novel writing. Zhenskii Dekameron seems to have made a modest impact on readers; scholars, too, discuss it only occasionally. The most comprehensive treatment of the work to date has been Jerzy Kolodziej... (shrink)

Emerging at the margins of science fiction, the concept of posthuman has become the most potent and pervasive movement of contemporary culture. From science to ethics, from philosophy to art, from politics to communication, posthuman studies transcend analytical-conceptual categories of traditional disciplines. This new anthropology, open to a hetero-referential alterity (bio-techno-IT), requires, on the pathic level, new forms of adaptation and integration. The emancipation of the idea of a presumed human 'essence' brings possibilities as well as risks. This book (...) sets out to show how, beyond epistemological asymmetries and different forms of language, reflection on the posthuman in terms of the complex questions of our time imposes a biotechnopoiesis on multiple levels: from redefining our relationship with the planetary environment to questioning the dimensions of our historical condition. The study thereof revolves around sensorial, perceptual and emotional activity in terms of cognition and neurophysiology. Consciousness is to be regarded not as a workspace demarcated by the brain, but as a unitas multiplex that emerges from co-operation between brain and body. The posthuman defines a new model of existence and leaves an emerging anthropological identity open to dialogue with eteroreferential (otherness) in "bio-techno-informatics." This requires the development of a commensurate adequacy of emotions and affections (the pathic). Man and woman are thus called to 'care' for the posthuman: their passion for the new status of "nomadic subjectivity" will bring with it the ability to engage biotechnopoiesis in multiple ways to the greater good of mankind. [Subject: Psychology, Philosophy]. (shrink)

This paper is a book review of the volume Bărbatul și femeia. Imaginea unei polemici cu privire la echitatea de gen [The man and the woman. The image of a controversy over gender equity], authored by Iulian Apostu and Cristina Petrescu and published by Lumen Publishing House from Iași, Romania, in 2017. The book addresses issues like the psycho-social dynamic of the marital couple, the emancipation of women within the couple, solidarity and conflict between men and women, while (...) placing the debates at the crossroads of modernity and postmodernity, as social paradigms marking the couple’s formation, evolution and separation. (shrink)

Maternity is a biological process that has increasingly changed into an authoritative medicalized phenomenon and requires techno-medical intervention today. Modern medicine perceives women’s procreative functions as pathological that need medical involvement and control. Medical biologists claim that the female body is destined to procreate in which medical sciences can assist them with techniques. But is a woman’s body biologically evolved merely for procreation? Or is it a sexist interpretation of her socially situated self? How can we justify the idea (...) of universality and neutrality of medical sciences in a social context? Arguing against deterministic biology, existential feminists advocate that female body is not merely a biological fact but rather a social situation under which the maternal act has become the essence of being a woman. Social situations influence medicine in a way that they are used as a rhetorical tool to achieve social desires authoritatively. The present paper explores and examines the increasing medicalization of female body and maternity through the lenses of biological determinism and phenomenological existentialism. I argue that medically supported theories of female body are socially interpreted that perpetuate the traditional role of women as mothers instead of emancipating them from their immanence. The paper discusses how the scientific model of medicine is implicitly influenced by socio-cultural forces and, consequently, tries to reduce social phenomena into biological factors to justify women’s inevitable destiny as motherhood. Thus, we need a de-medicalized model of medicine in order to comprehend the true meaning of maternal body and self. (shrink)

Women's Power To Be Loud: The Authority of the Discourse and Authority of the Text in Mary Dorcey's Irish Lesbian Poetic Manifesto "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" The following article aims to examine Mary Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear," included in the 1991 volume Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers. Apart from being a well-known and critically acclaimed Irish poet and fiction writer, the author of the poem has been, from its beginnings, (...) actively involved in lesbian rights movement. Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" is to be construed from a perspective of lesbian and feminist discourse, as well as a cultural, sociological and political context in which it was created. While analyzing the poem, the emphasis is being paid to the intertwining of various ideological and subversive assumptions, their competing for importance and asserting authority over one another, in line with, and sometimes, against the grain of the textual framework. In other words, Dorcey's poem introduces a multilayered framework that draws heavily on various sources: the popular culture idiom, religious discourse, the text even employs, in some parts, crime and legal jargon, but, above all, it relies upon sensuous lesbian experience where desire and respect for the other woman opens the emancipating space allowing for redefining of one's personal and textual location. As a result of such a multifarious interaction, unrepresented and unacknowledged Irish women's standpoints may come to the surface and become articulated, disrupting their enforced muteness that the controlling heteronormative discourse has attempted to ensure. In Dorcey's poem, the operating metaphor of women's silence, conceived of, at first, as the need to conceal one's sexual identity in fear of social ostracism and contempt of the "neighbours," is further equated with the noiseless, solitary and violent death of the anonymous woman, the finding of whose body was reported on the news. In both cases, the unwanted Irish women's voices of either agony, during the unregistered by anybody misogynist bloodshed that took place inside the flat, or the forbidden sounds of lesbian sexual excitement, need to be censored and stifled, not to disrupt an idealized image of the well-established family and heteronormative patterns. In the light of the aforementioned parallel, empowered by the shared bodily and emotional closeness with her female lover, and already bitterly aware that silence in discourse is synonymous with textual, or even, actual death, the speaker in "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" comes to claim her own agency and makes her voice heard by others and taken into account. (shrink)

Closely based on the dramatist’s personal experience, Christina Reid’s The Belle of the Belfast City offers a commentary on the life of the Protestant working class in the capital of Northern Ireland in the 1980s from a woman’s perspective. It shows the way eroticism is successfully used by the female characters as a source of emancipation as well as a means not only to secure their strong position in the private domain of the household, but also to challenge (...) the patriarchal structures that prevail in the Irish public sphere. The analysis of the play proposed in this essay focuses on the contrast between the presentation of its male and female characters. I will demonstrate that, while the former group desperately cling to the idea of preserving the social status quo, the latter display a more progressive outlook on the social and sexual politics of the country. In particular, I will investigate how the tensions between the representatives of the two sexes reveal themselves in the corporal sphere. I will argue that, as opposed to the erotically-inhibited and physically-inarticulate male characters, the female dramatis personae take advantage of being more connected to their bodies and use their physicality in an erotic fashion to subvert the rules of the patriarchal system and its strict moral code that limits their social roles to those of respectful mothers, obedient sisters or virtuous wives. (shrink)

This paper examines the other side of Enlightenment which privileges the authority and autonomy of reason for human progress and emancipation. It contends that Enlightenment marginalizes and denigrates the categories of (1) body, (2) woman, (3) nature, and (4) non-West which happen to be four central landmarks of postmodern thought.

This article asserts that European and North American feminisms are colonial discursive elaborations that defined what it was to be a woman and a feminist. The categories of gender and patriarchy established both what the subordination of women was as well as the possibilities for their emancipation. They're colonial discourses in the sense that they have construed women of the third world, or of the global South, as “other.” The specific case examined in this article questions the Euro-US-centric (...) feminist construction of women and Afro-descendant feminists. In resignifying the categories of analysis proposed by feminism, such as gender and patriarchy, Afro-descendant feminists assert themselves as diverse Black women who build proposals subverting the social order that oppresses them, without needing to resort to feminism's central categories. Women belonging to ethnic communities elaborate a new type of feminism constructed in relation to the community's collective actions in vindicating their rights. Finally, Black or Afro-Colombian women, based on the legacy of their maroon or runaway slave ancestors, construct feminism otherwise, challenging universalist claims by Eurocentric and Andean-centric feminism, transforming and enriching it. (shrink)

Supplements to German newspapers in Lodz in the interwar period promoted an extremely modern type of woman, in line with the latest world trends. German magazines „Die Welt im Bilde. Sonntagsbeilage zur Neuen Lodzer Zeitung” and „Illustrierte Wochenblatt. Beilage zur Neuen Lodzer Zeitung” registered changes in lifestyle and propagated them among Lodz readers. The fashion promoted by Lodz accessories and lifestyle did not differ in any way from the latest European and world models. It was an expression of striving (...) for modernity, for changing the way of thinking not only about women, but about the whole society. Introducing modern ideas into magazines resulted in the dissolution of old and obsolete forms. (shrink)

Eroticism seems to be the essence of individuation and the freedom that brings Otherness into being. For this reason eroticism had to be disguised and softened by a mechanism of control within the society of any monolithic communist power. There- fore, one of the images that were altered was that of the woman. This was done under the pretext of a project of emancipation, initiated by the Communist party, which made claims in women’s name but utilized women’s organizations (...) for socialist-communist propaganda. The article analyzes this manipulative politics and it’s effects on the social imagery: it created the image of a New woman - the aggressive woman with the profile of a communist warrior and a masculine body in a carnival-like movement that was biased, restrictive, and gender-blind. (shrink)

In his classic work The Mind and its Place in Nature published in 1925 at the height of the development of quantum mechanics but several years after the chemists Lewis and Langmuir had already laid the foundations of the modern theory of valence with the introduction of the covalent bond, the analytic philosopher C. D. Broad argued for the emancipation of chemistry from the crass physicalism that led physicists then and later—with support from a rabblement of philosophers who knew (...) as much about chemistry as etymologists—to believe that chemistry reduced to physics. Here Broad’s thesis is recast in terms more familiar to chemists. In the hard sell of particle physics, several prominent figures in chemistry—Hoffmann, Primas, and Pauling—have had their views interpreted to imply that they were sympathetic to greedy reductionism when in fact they were not. Indeed, being chemists without physicists as alter egos, they could not but side with Broad’s contention that chemistry, as a science that deals primarily in emergent phenomena which are beyond the purview of physicalism, owes no acquiescence to particle physics and its ethereal wares. Historically, among the most widely used expediencies in chemistry and materials science are additivity or mixture rules and their cohort transferability, all of which are devised and used under the mantle of naive reductionism. Here it is argued that while the transfer of functional groups between molecules works empirically to an extent, it is strictly outlawed by the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics. Several illustrative examples related to chemistry’s irreducibility to physics are presented and discussed. The failure of naive reductionism exhibited by the deep-inelastic scattering of leptons by A > 2 nuclei is traced to the same flawed reasoning that was the original basis of Moffitt’s ‘atoms in molecules’ hypothesis, the neglect of context, nuclei in the case of high-energy physics and molecules in the case of chemistry. A non-exhaustive list of other contexts from physics, chemistry, and molecular biology evidencing similar departures from the ideal of additivity or reductionism is provided for the perusal of philosophers. Had the call by the mathematician J. T. Schwartz for developments in mathematical linguistics possessed of a less single, less literal, and less simple-minded nature been met, perhaps it might have persuaded scientists to abandon their regressive fixation with unphysical reductionism and to adapt to new methodologies that engender a more nuanced handling of ubiquitous emergent phenomena as they arise in Nature than is the case today. (shrink)

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_ to _The Female Reader_, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft’s great work came out of an earlier (...) and much shorter vindication—A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft’s “other vindication.” It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index. (shrink)

Contextualist accounts of “woman,” including Saul (2012), Diaz-Leon (2016), and Ichikawa (2020), aim to capture the variability of the meaning of the term, and do justice to the rights of trans women. I argue that (i) there is an internal tension between a contextualist stance and the commitment to trans-inclusive language, and that (ii) we should recognize and tackle the broader and deeper theoretical and practical difficulties implicit in the semantic debates, rather than collapsing them all into semantics. Moving (...) on, I sketch three strategies to help us advance feminist philosophical endeavors, including how attending to contextual matters can lead us to further reflect on the meta-contextual, such as our role in shaping contexts and whether the working of language is indicative of a larger oppressive social structure. (shrink)

**** Revision of the second edition of 1983 (cited in BCL3). Now arranged in chronological order, with a new introduction and headnotes. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In the Islamic philosophical tradition, it seems that the image of woman has not been studied very much and the role of woman has hardly ever mentioned. First, we will briefly explain why we chose the concept of imagination. Afterward, from which sources the Islamic philosophical tradition has formed its concepts, and as a result, we would try to talk about where it established philosophy, whether it was theoretical or practical. Finally, we want to finish the subject by (...) giving examples from the fact of women in Islamic philosophical tradition. (shrink)

When we consider the social and political disarray of the moment, we are forced to recognize how hard it is, in periods of crisis, to clarify the changes taking place. So it is an urgent and necessary task to return to Michel de Certeau's work, whose central aim is to clarify the transformations that abruptly emerge during times of crisis, transformations that undermine our most tenacious assumptions. Certeau's project is the work of constant reconnaissance. He expressed his need to elucidate (...) what he would call `generating flashes'. The meaning of that need for inventive distancing can be informed by psychoanalysis. From this perspective, the obligation to clarify the most heterogeneous ruptures appears as the echo of an ancient need to express the desire to be with the Other. But Certeau's attitude provoked incomprehension and irritation, so much so that in order to correctly approach his legacy we must first explain the different reception Certeau's texts receive in French-speaking countries compared with, say, the USA. (shrink)

Amidst the current profusion of research on consciousness, discussions of the historic origins of the topic are frequently overlooked. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the West, the nature of consciousness was barely understood, nor differentiated from its esoteric and religious contexts. By the end of the century, however, novel ideas about the structure of consciousness were proposed by Janet, James, and the Society for Psychical Research. This article proposes that these discoveries were intrinsically linked to popular nineteenth-century (...) explorations of unorthodox religious experiences and trance states. Operating outside mainstream religious, medical, and academic settings, alternative spiritual and medical sub-cultures such as Mesmerism, Mind Cure, Spiritualism, Transcendentalism and Orientalism provoked scientific discourse about consciousness that advanced the field. Examining these developments sheds light on the current renaissance in consciousness research and its relation to popular interest in states of consciousness, meditation and powers of mind. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a ground-breaking work of literature which still resonates in feminism and human rights movements of today.

_The Rights of Woman as Chimera _examines Mary Wollstonecraft's intellectual relationship to Rousseau, Locke, and Aristotle. Although she learned much from each philosopher, her own thought cannot be said to be simply derivative of these thinkers. In considering "the woman question," Wollstonecraft levels important, but friendly, critiques of her male predecessors. She puts forth a conception of the nature of woman, which is informed by and consistent with her larger political philosophy, and this study endeavors to outline (...) this conception of the nature of woman. (shrink)