Studying women farmers who are equal to men in their formal status, this article explores the extent to which women's entry into a male occupation challenges the existing gender system. Our analysis shows that young women farmers represent a change toward a new work role for women in farming. They have become similar to men farmers in many important aspects of farming such as vocational training, technological know-how, and union membership; however, important aspects of the existing gender system are (...) being preserved. Young women farmers still have the main responsibility for domestic work; their income from farming is less important for the household than their husband's; and, compared to men farmers, their farm income is less. There is no indication that young women farmers challenge the masculinist way of farming. (shrink)

Les femmes communistes espagnoles reconstituèrent leur organisation en 1945, dans l’exil français, afin de mobiliser les réfugiées dans la résistance antifranquiste. Les figures d’héroïnes évoquées dans la revue Mujeres Antifascistas Españolas, tiennent une place importante dans la culture politique de ces femmes. Des récits, où réalité et fiction se mêlent, mettent en scène vierges guerrières et mères héroïques. Si l’héroïsation individuelle ou collective (les treize roses de Madrid) confine parfois au mythe, sans remettre en cause le système traditionnel de genre, (...) elle permet d’inscrire ces héroïnes dans l’histoire de l’Espagne et dans la mémoire collective des opposants au régime du général Franco. (shrink)

The relationship between descriptive representation and substantive representation is an issue that has been widely discussed by women’s studies scholars. In general, it is assumed that there exists a positive relationship between the two, but the literature and empirical analysis show that substantive representation also depends on the action of other critical actors, such as gender agencies and the women’s social movement. Comparative research has shown the existence of a common pattern in post-industrial democracies: the development of women-friendly (...) policies depends on the existence of coalitions between these critical actors. However, the analysis usually focuses on the national or regional level, and there is very little analysis at the local level, despite this being a political arena in which these processes can be developed. The aim of this article is to analyse the effect of coalitions of critical actors on the responsiveness to the demands of women’s groups in the case of Spanish municipalities using a representative survey. The objective, therefore, is to apply advances in the women’s substantive representation literature to the local level in Spain. Main results show that responsiveness is higher in municipalities where women’s coalitions exist. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

The present study aims to verify the psychometric properties of the Spanish versions of the Social Roles Questionnaire (SRQ; Baber & Tucker, 2006), Modern Sexism scale (MS) and Old-fashioned Sexism scale (OFS; Swim et al. Swim & Cohen, 1997). Enough support was found to maintain the original factor structure of all instruments in their Spanish version. Differences between men and women in the scores are commented on, mainly because certain sexist attitudes have been overcome with greater success in (...) the current Spanish society, while other issues, such as distribution of power in organizational hierarchies or distribution of tasks in the household, where traditional unequal positions are still maintained. In all cases, it was found that men showed greater support for sexist attitudes. The correlations between the three instruments were as expected in assessing sexist attitudes that tend to relate to each other. Eventually, we found no empirical evidence for the postulated link between sexist attitudes and traditional gender stereotypes. Our results call for the validity and effectiveness of the classic theories of gender psychology, such as gender schema theories (Well, 1981; Markus et al., 1982) and the notion of a gender belief system (Deaux & Kite, 1987; 2001). (shrink)

To what extent organized employers and trade unions support social policies is contested. This article examines the case of work-family policies, which have surged to become a central part of the welfare state. In that expansion, the joint role of employers and unions has largely been disregarded in the comparative political economy literature. The article posits that the shift from Fordist to knowledge economies is the impetus for the social partners’ support for WFPs. If women make up an increasing share (...) of high-skilled employees, employers start favoring WFPs to increase their labor supply. Similarly, unions favor WFPs if women constitute a significant part of their membership base. Yet the extent to which changes in preferences translate into policy depends on the presence of corporatist institutions. These claims are supported with statistical analyses of WFPs in eighteen advanced democracies across five decades and an in-depth case study of Norway. The article thus demonstrates that the trajectory of the new welfare state is decisively affected by the preferences and power of unions and employers. (shrink)

Authors have empirically evidenced that cultural stereotypes influence gender-typed behavior. With the present work, we have added to this literature by demonstrating that gender roles can explain sex differences in risk-taking, a stereotypically masculine domain. Our aim was to replicate previous findings and to analyze what variables affect women making risky decisions in the social domain. A sample composed of 417 Spanish participants, between 17 and 30 years old, answered a set of self-report measures referring to femininity, fear of (...) negative evaluation, and social risk-taking. According to the main results, sex indirectly linked to risk-taking in the social domain, through femininity and fear of negative evaluation. Specifically, women self-reported higher feminine traits, which were associated with increased fear of negative evaluation, which in turn was associated with less risky decisions in the social domain. Thus, we have showed the relationship between gender roles and women’s behaviors in a stereotypically masculine domain. Our findings highlight the necessity of considering a gender-based perspective in the field of risk-taking, showing that not all women make more risky decisions in the social domain. (shrink)

Drawing from a long history of feminist writing grounded in personal reflection and informal dialogue between feminist thinkers, Cobb and Godden-Rasul present an email-based conversation with Jess Lishak, the outgoing Women’s Officer at the University of Manchester Students’ Union. The conversation draws on Cobb and Godden-Rasul’s experience as feminist academics engaged in critical institutional practice through such initiatives as editing the Inherently Human blog, organising the Inspirational Women of Law exhibition, and participating in university working groups on campus-based (...) harassment and violence. In asking Lishak to reflect on her journey to feminism and her experiences of activism, the conversation ranges over such issues as personal influences and experiences, strategies for securing institutional support, encouraging student engagement with feminism, and campaigning tactics. The conversation developed out of a “Campus Feminisms” event in March 2016, which explored the rise of exciting new grassroots single-issue campaigns and political mobilisations by students in higher education, and was organised by Cobb and Godden-Rasul at Newcastle University, UK. Undergraduate and postgraduate students shared their personal struggles and achievements in bringing feminist ideas and campaigns to their university campuses. Lucy Morgan, the Gender Equality Officer at Newcastle University Students’ Union, offered inspiring reflections on her efforts to reinvigorate the ‘F’ word, in the face of simultaneous student apathy and backlash. Many of these campus-based mobilisations have demanded better institutional responses to sexual violence against women. At around the same time, Cobb was beginning a new role as the co-chair of the University of Manchester’s first Task & Finish Group on Sexual Violence and Harassment on Campus. This followed Universities UK’s decision to create a taskforce to consider options for improving institutional responses to student safety. In the process, Cobb crossed paths with Lishak, who had been appointed a member of the UUK Taskforce in light of her path-breaking students’ union work addressing violence against women. Since Lishak was an exemplar of this new feminist wave in higher education, one that was still inadequately understood by feminist academics despite often working side-by-side within the same institutions, the authors embarked on this conversation in order to better understand the relationship between academic and student feminist activism on campus. As Lishak makes clear in her own reflections, there is nothing inevitable about the synergies between these movements, but there is potentially a great deal that could be achieved through their closer engagement. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its (...) feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

Scholarship on gender and the European Union has consistently pointed out that EU gender equality policies have always been embedded in the logic of the market and that the economic framing has had negative impacts on the content and concepts of these policies. This article provides novel insights into this discussion by combining a discursive approach focused on framings with insights of feminist economists and examining how the relationship between gender equality and the economy has been conceptualized in EU (...) policy documents from the 1980s up until the present day. The article identifies the key actors and processes behind the escalation of economic arguments for gender equality and makes visible the economic assumptions that underpin EU gender equality policy. It argues that in recent years the European institutions have intentionally developed and propagated a market-oriented gender equality discourse, the economic case for gender equality, which highlights the macroeconomic benefits of gender equality. The economic case reaffirms the gender-biased assumptions of neoclassical economic theory and legitimizes the EU’s current economic priorities and policies, many of which are detrimental to gender equality. The European Commission represents the argument that gender equality contributes to economic growth as an innovative way to promote gender equality. However, the economic case represents a risk for gender equality advocates, because it may tame the emerging feminist criticism of the EU’s economic policies and governance. (shrink)

This work is a survey of the efforts through which women have changed their place in American society from the nation's founding to the present. Examining the historical struggle for suffrage, legal and property rights, and rights in the work place, the authors show how these experiences have shaped a contemporary movement for economic, political, and social equality that has become increasingly independent and less and less likely to place women's issues second to other national concerns. The authors recount a (...) history of women activists who repeatedly set aside their own issues in favor of others that seemed more pressing--from abolition and preserving the Union, to labor solidarity in the 1920s, and civil rights and the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Male domination of these movements and a lack of support for women's issues have been major factors in creating the contemporary feminist philosophy of going it alone. The book is divided into three topical sections, each of which offers a historical analysis and draws on a variety of sources such as legal statutes and judicial decisions, demographic information, public opinion polls, and biographies and other narrative accounts. It is a richly documented resource for courses and research in women's studies, sociology, politics, and U.S. legal and political history. (shrink)

The author of this article is the first woman Bishop in the Church of South India. Her article outlines the development of women’s ministry in India, from the influence of European missionaries in the nineteenth century, and through the union of traditions which led to the formation of the CSI. Women have traditionally served in auxiliary ministries, as Bible Women or deaconesses. The story is set against the context of deeply traditional cultures. The second half of the article (...) relates the author’s own journey through vocation and call to her present role, in which she experienced firsthand the difficulties that faced women seeking to answer a vocation to ministry. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze the patterns of culture of honor within Spanish families. Each member of 271 Spanish four-member families completed a questionnaire containing scales for the culture of honor and for sociodemographic variables. The results show that intra-family similarities emerge. However, path analyses show that the gender and birth order of the child are relevant in predicting this similarity. In particular, the first-born child converges with their mother to a higher extent than the father regardless of (...) their gender. However, for the second-born child both parents instill their ideas about culture of honor in a gender congruent way. Furthermore, there are higher similarities within younger families, indicating a stronger influence from parents to children. Results are discussed in view of social role and gender social learning theories. (shrink)

The Republic of Azerbaijan has undergone major social, political, and economic transition since declaring independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In this article, the author examines how this transition and the Nagorno-Karabakh War with Armenia have affected women’s caregiving roles and how women’s advocacy associations have emerged and function both as caregivers to Azeri women and as a mechanism for assisting Azeri women to be more effective caregivers to their own families and communities.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century in the Spanish Basque Country, Basque nationalism has served as a unifying movement that encouraged women to participate in women’s associations. Women’s associations offered a metaspace in which public and private spheres overlap, where, women began to reconstruct meanings of nationalism and gender relations in distinct ways. As a result, the particular foci of these associations reflected each individual association’s specific understanding of gender relations and their relations to different interpretations (...) of Basque nationalism. This historical tradition has continued into the twenty-first century as women’s associations that are structured by distinct systems of gender relations provide a number of social services and educational services to promote gender equality. Through the examination of the metaspace of the women’s association Lanbroa, this article explores the ways in which the women’s movement and feminism have influenced the functioning of this association and the ways in which association members contest traditional Basque gender relations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:104 Feminist Studies 44, no. 1. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Estelle Carol The Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective: A Memoir In 1973, the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective worked in an old run-down second-floor office on Belmont Avenue, which we shared with the main offices of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU).1 They call it New Town now, but in 1973, there wasn’t much new (...) about it. We weren’t the only artists in the building though; downstairs was a tattoo parlor. Still, it was better than having the studio located in my apartment on Newport Street, where there were silkscreen tables in the dining room and a bathroom that doubled as a darkroom. My bedroom door opened directly into the dining room and usually reeked of the foul chemicals we used to make the posters. Just one OSHA inspection would have shut us down forever, but it was not until later that we learned about the dangers of long-term exposure. On Newport Street, the apartment was right next to the Ravenswood Branch of the “L,” and it shook like the aftershock of a California earthquake each time a train passed. But we were in the midst of a women’s revolution, and our priorities were clear. 1. The Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective (WGC) was a “workgroup” of the CWLU from the very start. There were about 25 workgroups and other groups within the CWLU. CWLU outreach to recruit new members got a lot of new women into WGC. WGC, Women’s Liberation Rock Band, and Womankind Newspaper were the cultural arms of the CWLU. Cultural outreach to attract new CWLU members and new feminists to the movement in general was critical to the CWLU’s success. In Celebration of Amazons, 194. All posters designed and silkscreened collectively by the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, www.cwluherstory.org. Courtesy of CWLU Herstory Project. All posters are on silkscreen. Turning Through Time, Workwoven, 195. Sisterhood Is Blooming, Springtime Will Never Be the Same, 190. Chicago Women’s Labor History, 194. International Women’s Day (reprinted from a Cuban poster). ABOVE Healthcare Is for People, Not for Profit, 195. OPPOSITE Abortion Is a Personal Decision, Not a Legal Debate, 190. ABOVE Healthcare Is for People, Not for Profit, 195. OPPOSITE Abortion Is a Personal Decision, Not a Legal Debate, 190. OPPOSITE Chicago Maternity Center, 192. ABOVE Lesbian Pride, 192. Mountain-Moving Day, 192. ABOVE Detail from Mountain-Moving Day, 192. OPPOSITE Women Unite, Take Back the Night, 199. Lipstick and Blood (reprinted from a Cuban design). Women Are Not Chicks, 191. Liberation School for Women, 192. Boycott Red Coach Lettuce, 192. Working Women Unite, 195. International Women’s Day, Many Waves But One Ocean, 192. Estelle Carol 121 If you look at Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective posters, you’ll rarely see a person’s name on them, because we decided early on that art had been done all wrong by men. It was based on egotism and the cult of the individual—the great-men-of-art syndrome. So we decided to throw all that out, and art now had to be a collective experience. So every poster that we created had to be done by committee. Every one. We had a system in which any one of the collective could get an idea or a phrase or an image and decide to do a poster. They would ask two or three other members to be their assistants and to help develop the idea. And then in little teams they would physically create the poster in silk screen. It had to be a collective process. There’s no way that one single woman could really do it because we were using very primitive reproduction methods, and we needed at least three people to run the silk screen. The silk screens were all hand printed. No machines. If a poster was more than one color, it had to be hand printed, one color at a time, so it was very, very labor intensive. And... (shrink)

The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality of the European Parliament is one of the key actors within the European Union institutional framework for gender equality policies. In the context of this Committee, women’s interests are continuously being defined by discursive and deliberative processes. Civil society actors are being included into these processes of policy-making through institutional funding and public hearings. Through the inclusion of particular organizations and the selection of experts for hearings, existing meanings are (...) being reproduced and/or challenged. The article argues that battlegrounds have been opened in recent years as dominant discourses are questioned by the inclusion and legitimation of new civil society actors. Both the FEMM Committee, as a feminist stronghold, and the established women’s organizations at the EU level are being challenged. It becomes contested who the gender experts are, and diverse understandings of gender equality and women’s interests are being articulated. (shrink)

IntroductionAccurately predicting the competitive performance of elite athletes is an essential prerequisite for formulating competitive strategies. Women’s all-around speed skating event consists of four individual subevents, and the competition system is complex and challenging to make accurate predictions on their performance.ObjectiveThe present study aims to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of machine learning algorithms for predicting the performance of women’s all-around speed skating event and provide effective training and competition strategies.MethodsThe data, consisting of 16 seasons of world-class (...) class='Hi'>women’s all-around speed skating competition results, used in the present study came from the International Skating Union. According to the competition rules, distinct features are filtered using lasso regression, and a 5,000 m race model and a medal model are built using a fivefold cross-validation method.ResultsThe results showed that the support vector machine model was the most stable among the 5,000 m race and the medal models, with the highest AUC. Furthermore, 3,000 m points are the main characteristic factors that decide whether an athlete can qualify for the final. The 11th lap of the 5,000 m, the second lap of the 500 m, and the fourth lap of the 1,500 m are the main characteristic factors that affect the athlete’s ability to win medals.ConclusionCompared with logistic regression, random forest, K-nearest neighbor, naive Bayes, neural network, support vector machine is a more viable algorithm to establish the performance prediction model of women’s all-around speed skating event; excellent performance in the 3,000 m event can facilitate athletes to advance to the final, and athletes with outstanding performance in the 500 m event are more likely competitive for medals. (shrink)

The split in our thinking between "masculine" and "feminine" is probably as old as language itself. Human beings seem to have a natural tendency to divide things into pairs: good/bad, light/dark, subject/object and so on. It is not surprising, then, that the male/female or masculine/feminine dichotomy is used to classify things other than men and women. Many languages actually classify all nouns as "masculine" or "feminine" (although not very consistently: for example, the Spanish masculine noun pollo means "hen", while (...) the feminine polla is slang for "penis"). This is perfectly natural; it is part of the way categorisation works in language. This does not, however, mean that it is right. It is probably unimportant whether a table or a chair is thought of as masculine or feminine. It may not even be very important these days whether we think of the sun as male and the moon as female (like the ancient Greeks) or vice versa (like most of the German tribes). However, when we start associating abstract concepts like Reason or Nature with men and women, we run into serious difficulties. (shrink)

The split in our thinking between "masculine" and "feminine" is probably as old as language itself. Human beings seem to have a natural tendency to divide things into pairs: good/bad, light/dark, subject/object and so on. It is not surprising, then, that the male/female or masculine/feminine dichotomy is used to classify things other than men and women. Many languages actually classify all nouns as "masculine" or "feminine" (although not very consistently: for example, the Spanish masculine noun pollo means "hen", while (...) the feminine polla is slang for "penis"). This is perfectly natural; it is part of the way categorisation works in language. This does not, however, mean that it is right. It is probably unimportant whether a table or a chair is thought of as masculine or feminine. It may not even be very important these days whether we think of the sun as male and the moon as female (like the ancient Greeks) or vice versa (like most of the German tribes). However, when we start associating abstract concepts like Reason or Nature with men and women, we run into serious difficulties. (shrink)

This essay focuses on recent autobiographies written by Italian women born in the 1920s who engaged in revolutionary politics during and after the Second World War: Luciana Castellina (La scoperta del mondo, 2011), Bianca Guidetti Serra (Bianca la rossa, 2009), Marisa Ombra (La bella politico, 2010), Marisa Rodano (Del mutare dei tempi, 2008) and Rossana Rossanda (La ragazza del secolo scorso, 2005). In these autobiographies, personal narratives of passionate engagement are entangled with the urgency of antifascist resistance, and with the (...) social and political conflicts that traversed Cold War Italy. Women's multiple forms of political engagement within the Italian Communist Party are analysed, as well as the contradictory, ambivalent connection between Western European communist activists and Eastern European socialist regimes. The intersections between antifascist, communist and women's rights politics are also explored, since some of the authors were leaders of the nation-wide left-wing Union of Italian Women. The autobiographies tell the story of an antifascist, left-wing ‘middle wave’ that fought pioneering battles for women's political and social rights, and narrate its complex, conflictual encounter with second-wave feminism in the 1970s. These writings, therefore, allow us to reflect on changes in gendered subjectivities and revolutionary politics across time and generations. (shrink)

We contend in this paper that the trade union role in social policy is expanding due to the debate on women's issues. The Centrale de l'enseignement du Québec is seen as a forerunner of this trend, with its policy positions on questions previously seen as personal. The method of promotion of these interests is also new, with caucusing and networking. The significance of these changes goes beyond unionized women workers and affects all women.

Contrary to the accepted Cold War stereotypes about state socialist mass women’s organizations, we will show that Communist leaders were attentive to the construction of gender roles and used women’s magazines as a forum to discuss openly the changing ideals of masculinity and femininity. Through a discourse analysis of articles in Vlasta and Zhenata Dnes, our article will interrogate the categories of “man” and “woman” and their negotiation during the Communist era on the pages of official state magazines. (...) In the Bulgarian case, we will discuss key articles that explicitly dealt with the importance of fathers and fatherhood, as for the case of Czechoslovakia, we will examine a series of articles and letters in which women’s union leaders and ordinary citizens discuss women’s entry into the workforce that had previously been the purview of men. (shrink)

Kristeva's Teresa My Love concerns the life and thought of a 16th century Spanish mystic, written in the form of a novel. Yet the theme of another kind of foreigner, equally exotic but this time threatening, pops up unexpectedly and disappears several times during the course of the novel. At the very beginning of the story, the 21st century narrator, psychoanalyst Sylvia Leclerque, encounters a young woman in a headscarf, whom Kristeva describes as an IT engineer, who speaks out, (...) explaining that "she and her God were one and that the veil was the immovable sign of this 'union,' which she wished to publicize in order to definitively 'fix it' in herself and in the eyes of others." In this paper I ask what difference Kristeva discerns between these two women, a distinction that apparently makes Teresa's immanence simultaneously a transcendence, but transforms a Muslim woman in a headscarf immediately into an imagined suicide bomber. Despite the problematic aspects of this comparison, we can learn something from them about Kristeva's ideas on mysticism and on art. Both mysticism and art are products of the death drive, but whereas the suicide bomber and the animal directly and purely pursue death Teresa and Adel remain on its outer edge and merely play with mortality. (shrink)

The largest group of migrants in Germany is the Turkish people, many of whom have low skills levels, are Muslim, and are slow to integrate themselves into their host communities. German immigration policy has been significantly revised since the early 1990s, and a new Immigration Act came into force in 2005, containing more inclusive stances on citizenship and integration of migrants. There is a strong rhetoric of acceptance and open doors, within certain parameters, but the gap between the rhetoric and (...) practice is still wide enough to allow many migrants, particularly women, to fall through it. Turkish-Muslim women bear the brunt of the difficulties faced once they have arrived in Germany, and many of them are subject to domestic abuse, joblessness and poverty because of their invisibility to the German state, which is the case largely because German immigration policy does not fully realise a role and place for women migrants. The policy also does not sufficiently account for ethnic and cultural identification, or limitations faced by migrants in that while it speaks to integration, it does not fully enable this process to take place effectively. Even though it has made many advances in recent years towards a more open and inclusive immigration policy, Germany is still a 'reluctant' country of immigration, and this reluctance stops it from making any real strides towards integrating migrants fully into German society at large. The German government needs to take a much firmer stance on the roles of migrant women in its society, and the nature of the ethnic and religious identities of Muslim immigrants, in order to both create and implement immigration policy that truly allows immigrants to become full and contributing members to German social and economic life, and to bring it in line with the European Union's common directives on immigration. (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)

In 1961, at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a new program of the C.P.S.U. was adopted. The adoption of the Third Program of the C.P.S.U. was accompanied by a “nationwide discussion”. People expressed their opinions regarding the draft of the new Program at meetings and lectures and in their letters to various institutions. Naturally, not all the women actively demanded changes; for some there was probably no such thing as “women’s communism”. However, (...) the individual and collective letters attest to the complex of expectations that may be analyzed within the conceptual framework of “women’s communism”. The body of letters to various publications illustrate the most popular measures which, according to the letter writers, should have been implemented during the period of the “full-scale construction of communism” and, therefore, were thought of as intrinsic elements of communism. (shrink)

To what extent does the loosening of the ties between a social democratic party and its sister unions indicate a shift in the party's traditional objectives or bases of support? In this article it is argued that the estrangement between these parties and their unions is not always an indicator or a proof of the abandonment of workers and solidaristic goals by social democratic parties. The evolution of the party-union relationship is not only shaped by the economic and social (...) policies of the party but is also constrained by the organizational context of the trade unions. And when a close relationship exists in a context of competitive unionism and a growing economy, it is highly likely that the pressure and threats that unions direct at their social democratic parties are largely inspired by their need to maintain and enhance their organizational position vis-à-vis their union rivals rather than by a change in the goals and policies of their sister parties themselves. (shrink)

Jean McCrindle is treasurer of Women Against Pit Closures. In November 1985 Sheila Rowbotham interviewed her on the process through which women became involved in the strike, the impact of this on miners and the trade union officials, and the specific problems of a movement in support of a mainly men's strike which also expresses the autonomous needs of the women. Jean McCrindle reflects on the socialist-feminist politics she brought into her support of the miners’ strike, the interaction, sometimes (...) highly suspicious, sometimes enthusiastic, between the women in the coalfields and feminism, and the implications of the experience for socialism. (shrink)

This article focuses on service provision for women who are involuntarily referred under the UK Mental Health Act (1983) into medium and high security care in England and Wales. We explore how physical and procedural security in such settings is prioritized over relational care (see also Fallon Report, Department of Health, 1999a and NHS Executive, 2000 – Tilt Report). We are not arguing against the importance of protecting the public from the acts of dangerous members of our society. However, we (...) are arguing that many of the women in our secure services are inappropriately placed and receive inappropriate forms of treatment and care. Rather than physical security, it is high relational care, which the women require. Further, we argue that current service provision often re-produces forms of violence and violation which have marked many of women's lives prior to their entry into the secure system. (shrink)