‘여성주의는 그 자체로 차이의 학문이다’. 남성 중심사회에서 노동, 섹슈얼리티 심지어 경제이슈 까지 다른 목소리를 냈다. 그러나 다른 목소리로서의 여성주의는 모성, 가족, 여성성, 성매매, 재생산기술 등 전반에 걸쳐 다른 목소리를 내는 여성들을 만나야 했다. 이러한 다른 목소리는 여성들의 정치적 연대를 방해하거나 학문으로서의 페미니즘 가능성에 의문을 제기하는 것처럼 보였지만, 시간이 지나며 페미니즘은 차이를 다루는 과정에서 다양한 인식론을 정교하게 발전시켰다. 다른 목소리는 ‘우리 안의 타자’, ‘사이보그’ 혹은 ‘키메라’로 명명되었고, 차이가 생성되는 메커니즘을 정치적 개념으로 설명하는 상호 교차성 이론이 등장하기도 했다. 사람들은 다양한 페미니즘의 공존을 (...) 이야기했지만, 그것이 갖는 의미성을 충분히 이해했는지는 의문이다. 이 연구는 차이의 철학개념들을 가져와 ‘차이’가 갖는 근원적인 의미성을 고찰하여 여성주의 이론을 확장하고자 한다. 니체의 관점주의는 다양한 관점들이 문제 해결을 위한 객관성을 갖는다고 보았고, 들뢰즈는 리좀 개념을 가져와 지식 생산 과정이 동일의 원리가 아니라 차이를 만나 형성된다는 주장을 하였다. 푸코는 계보학을 통해 시대별 차이를 드러내어 우리가 침윤되어 보지 못했던 시대적 에피스테메를 비판할 수 있는 근거를 제시한다. 연구자는 최근 우리나라에서 일어났던 아시아 여성운동의 사례를 가져와서, 어떻게 ‘다른 목소리’가 페미니즘 지식 생산에 기여할 수 있는가를 차이의 철학에 기반해 살펴보았다. 아시아 페미니즘은 서구중심의 페미니즘과 다르다는 점에서 차이의 페미니즘이며, 식민지, 가부장 문화, 빈곤 등 교차적 억압으로 인해 다른 목소리를 낸다는 점에서 차이의 페미니즘이다. 아시아 여성운동의 사례가 우리의 문제를 해결할 수 있는 객관적인 지식을 줄 뿐 아니라, 새로운 생각을 가능케 하는 상상력의 단서가 되고, 우리가 당연하게 받아들이는 가치에 비판적 관점을 줄 수 있다는 주장을 하였다. (shrink)

This article studies anti-globalization activities in South Asia, and specifically the Indian subcontinent, and discovers that the common people have begun a new form of civil disobedience in the country, to counter the machinations of multinational corporations. Many of the eminent writers and activists at the forefront of the movement are Indian women, a fact that may come as a surprise to some, but is part and parcel of the movement's basis in sustainable development and resistance to (...) patriarchal hegemony. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist Women and Interfaith Work in the United StatesKate DuganWomen from a wide array of backgrounds and interest areas continue to shape the face of Buddhism in the United States—from women who encountered Buddhism during the women's movement in the 1960s to ordained women founding temples for large immigrant populations; from women carving out a space for Buddhism in colleges and universities to Buddhist women engaged in interfaith (...) dialogue and working in interreligious settings. As Buddhist scholar Rita Gross notes, the experiences of women in Buddhism in the United States are wide and varied.1Increasingly, whether they are ordained Buddhist nuns or are Buddhist activists, women in the United States are engaging with questions of interfaith conversations within this multireligious nation. Around the country, Buddhist nuns dialogue with their Catholic counterparts. In local communities, Buddhist women assume leadership roles in interfaith groups. Behind prison walls, women offer Buddhist meditation instruction. Some women introduce tenets of Buddhism to their communities, while others promote justice with people from various faith traditions. On college campuses, Buddhist women work as chaplains and women Buddhologists integrate Buddhism and interfaith dialogue into their academic interests. This article aims to explore several snapshots of Buddhist women engaged in interfaith dialogue and working as Buddhists in interreligious settings; it is not intended to provide all-inclusive coverage of the many and diverse women in Buddhism in the United States engaged with an increasingly religiously diverse country.2Historical Glance: Buddhist Women and Interfaith Dialogue in the United StatesRita Gross suggests that women in the United States began practicing Buddhism in the 1960s and 1970s because "the basic teachings [of Buddhism] were gender-free and gender-neutral, and many found the practice of meditation... intensely liberating."3 Yet, the history of Buddhism is dominated by patriarchal structures and male-centered liturgical and ordination practices. As Buddhism [End Page 31] grew American roots, women found that "deeper explorations into the traditional texts revealed misogynistic passages as well as a strong overall tendency to favor men over women in matters of study and practice."4 No longer certain that Buddhism was any less fettered by patriarchy than other traditions, uneasiness bubbled within the experiences of Buddhist women.In the early 1980s, Cambridge Buddhist Association member Suzie Bowman noted the similarities among women's experiences of American Buddhism—including struggles of motherhood in a tradition that emphasizes the quiet of meditation halls and an alarming number of stories about abusive male teachers. In 1983, Bowman and the Providence Zen Center hosted a conference called "The Feminine in Buddhism"; seventy women attended. A two-day conference, with 120 participants, followed in 1984. In 1985, they hosted a three-day gathering.5These inspired budding Buddhist Sandy Boucher to take to the road to understand Buddhism in women's lives. She interviewed more than one hundred Buddhist women in their homes, workplaces, sangha. In Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism, Boucher paints portraits of women in Buddhism in the United States in the mid 1980s—immigrant women from Asia who transplanted their Buddhism, white women who discovered Buddhism in tandem with feminism, women of color who encountered a white-dominated Buddhism. In these women's experiences, she suggests, is American Buddhism with "the possibility for the creation of a religion fully inclusive of women's realities."6Against this background, Rita Gross was blazing a trail for Buddhist women in interfaith dialogue. In 1980, an eager Gross attended the first International Buddhist-Christian Dialogue conference. She presented ideas that, twenty years later she says, encompassed "everything to which I have devoted my scholarly attention:... feminism, non-Christian religions, accurate information about world religions, Buddhism, Buddhism and feminism, interreligious interchange, even theology of religion."7 After this first splash, Rita Gross attended the 1984 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter—the only woman in attendance.8 The organizers were eager to have more women participate; so was Gross. After that conference, she made her further involvement contingent upon more women's involvement. Because of this insistence, members did, and continue to, work toward equal gender representation.9 In 1992, Gross explained, from a personal perspective, the potential... (shrink)

This article develops a framework for cross-national comparisons of contemporary women's movements. The article focuses on the international context and cross-national influences, the nature of the state, the absence or presence of other movements, the effects of conservative or liberal political environments, the effects of centralization or dispersion within the movement itself and on feminist involvement in political parties and elections. Because each of these factors shapes a particular movement, the article concludes that there cannot be one correct (...) feminism. (shrink)

Scholars know relatively little about the potential impact of women's movements on gender diversity in the corporate world. We aim to fill this gap in the literature by providing the first empirical analysis of the relationship between women's movements and female representation on boards of directors. Drawing on political process theory, we argue that the strength of a women's movement is positively associated with its ability to increase the number of women on corporate boards. Moreover, we posit that the (...) effect of women's movements on female board representation is moderated by corporate opportunity structures, that is, attributes of firms that make them more or less receptive to social movement activities. Three firm characteristics are particularly relevant in the context of boardroom gender diversity: reputation-seeking behavior, commitment to corporate social responsibility, and political orientation. Using firm-fixed effects models to analyze data on more than 2000 companies from 10 countries over a period of 10 years, we find support for three of our four hypotheses. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (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 aim of the article is to argue the thesis that, 25 years after the fall of communism, with the exception of former Yugoslavia, there has been and still is, a lack of „women’s movements“ in the post-communist countries. The author also proposes some explanations as to why there are dozens of women’s organizations but no women’s movements. In order to support her thesis, Raynova emphasizes the difference between “women’s movements”, “feminist movements” and “social movements”, and (...) shows the weakness of some current definitions. Instead of a definition, she indicates the conditions for a women’s movement, which are: (1.) women’s oppression and discrimination as a prevalent situation, which motivates a movement when that situation is perceived as intolerable; (2.) ideas and concrete strategies on how to proceed in order to change this situation; (3.) some kind of organization or leading personalities, able to coordinate and unite women in a mass movement and to ensure continuity of action until the goals of the movement are achieved; and (4.) large masses of women who are motivated and ready to fight resolutely for changing their situation. The provided analyses show that these conditions have not been always given, but that the persisting problems of women’s problems can be resolved only if women engage more actively in civil society so as to enforce their claims. (shrink)

This article compares the social movement mobilization that led to reforms in police and judicial handling of battering in the United States to the movement ideology, organization, and tactics that resulted in analogous policy reform in the processing of dowry burnings and beatings in India. Using field notes and secondary sources from both countries, the article examines how both movements redefined violence against women in families as a public issue, then looks at how movement demands affected policy (...) reform in each country. The analysis questions the current conceptualization of social movement success. Social movements theory assumes that entry into the polity of liberal, democratic states constitutes success in the sense of social change. Yet the cases analyzed suggest that assumptions about the gender neutrality of state response to movements prevents researchers from critically examining the outcomes of social movement mobilization. Moreover, institutionalization of women's movement demands and organization may diminish the capacity of such movements to control the social construction of domestic violence against women by providing protection without empowerment. (shrink)

This paper attempts to describe the present situation in the women's movement in Serbia and Montenegro and to tackle questions about its future, on the basis of a sociological study of newly formed women's groups. In the past, the women's movement in these societies has surged several times, only to be completely annulled, and its proponents falling to oblivion. Now, for the first time ever, the seeds of the movement originating from the long gone period of the (...) socialist regime in Yugoslavia have survived the turmoil of disintegration and wars, and are germinating as women's groups and networks spring up alongside are being formed. The crucial task for the future will be strengthening this fragile and diffused network structure and laying down solid foundations for a movement with proper institutional mechanisms on a nation/state level. This investigation examined the prerequisites for this: firstly by examining the visibility and distinguishing features of women's groups and their activities in their current local environment; and secondly, by assessing activists’ clear acceptance of feminist (and their groups’) self-determination, which confront existing social attitudes towards feminist identities. In both respects, considerable advances towards a broader and clearer recognition of the aims and essence of women's groups’ activities are identified, in spite of the ever-present traditional and ideological resistance to this type of women's engagement. (shrink)

Since the advent of the women's movement, women have made unprecedented gains in almost every field, from politics to the professions. Paradoxically, doctors and mental health professionals have also seen a staggering increase in the numbers of young women suffering from an epidemic of depression, eating disorders, and other physical and psychological problems. In The Cost of Competence, authors Brett Silverstein and Deborah Perlick argue that rather than simply labeling individual women as, say, anorexic or depressed, it is time (...) to look harder at the widespread prejudices within our society and child-rearing practices that lead thousands of young women to equate thinness with competence and success, and femininity with failure. They argue that continuing to treat depression, anxiety, anorexia and bulimia as separate disorders in young women can, in many cases, be a misguided approach since they are really part of a single syndrome. Furthermore, their fascinating research into the lives of forty prominent women from Elizabeth I to Eleanor Roosevelt show that these symptoms have been disrupting the lives of bright, ambitious women not for decades, but for centuries. Drawing on all the latest findings, rare historical research, cross-cultural comparisons, and their own study of over 2,000 contemporary women attending high schools and colleges, the authors present powerful new evidence to support the existence of a syndrome they call anxious somatic depression. Their investigation shows that the first symptoms usually surface in adolescence, most often in young women who aspire to excel academically and professionally. Many of the affected women grew up feeling that their parents valued sons over daughters. They identified intellectually with their successful fathers, not with their traditional homemaker mothers. Disordered eating is one way of rejecting the feminine bodies they perceive as barriers to achievement and recognition. Silverstein and Perlick uncover medical descriptions matching their diagnosis in Hippocratic texts from the fourth century B.C., in anthropological studies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in case studies of many noted psychologists and psychiatrists, including the "hysteric" patients Freud used to develop his theories on psychoanalysis. They have also discovered that statistics on disordered eating, depression, and a host of other symptoms soared in eras in which women's opportunities grew--particularly the 1920s, when record numbers of women entered college and the workforce, the boyish silhouette of the flapper became the feminine ideal, and anorexia became epidemic, and again from the 1970s to the present day. The authors show that identifying this devastating syndrome is a first step toward its prevention and cure. The Cost of Competence presents an urgent message to parents, educators, policymakers, and the medical community on the crucial importance of providing young women with equal opportunity, and equal respect. (shrink)

The historical analysis of the complex and often contradictory views of Florence Nightingale regarding the rights of women is explored in this paper. Feminism and nursing are often viewed as contradictory and antithetical. The relationship between the two is examined through the link between Florence Nightingale and her contemporary, Barbara Leigh‐Smith Bodichon. Leigh‐Smith was founder and primary financier of The English Women's Journal that provided a public platform for the major feminist writings of the period. Its offices in Langham Place (...) formed the administrative centre of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. Bodichon and her colleagues were often referred to as the ‘Langham Place Group’. Unexplored prior to this study was the fact that Leigh‐Smith and Nightingale were first cousins. Utilizing techniques of internal and external criticism, primary and secondary sources were surveyed relating to Nightingale and Leigh‐Smith. The views of both women on the subjects of the rights of women, women's suffrage, the employment status of women, and the societal place of women are compared and contrasted. The legacy of both Leigh‐Smith and Nightingale to twentieth century feminism, the status of women, and the profession of nursing is then elaborated. The exploration of the views of both Nightingale and Leigh‐Smith is important to gain a clearer understanding of the existing relationship between nursing and feminism. In keeping with the aims of feminist inquiry, women's experiences, specifically those of Nightingale and Leigh‐Smith, are the major ‘objects’ of investigation. The concluding interpretation provides a synthesis that is emancipatory as well as knowledge generative. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy is now an established subdiscipline, but it began as an effort to transform the profession. Academics and activists worked together to make the new courses, and feminist theory was tested in the streets. As time passed, the "second wave" receded, but core elements of feminist theory were preserved in the academy. How can feminist philosophers today continue the early efforts of changing profession and the society, hand in hand with women outside the academy.

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; (...) and reproductive rights. (shrink)

Feminists have celebrated success in gendering security discourse and practice since the end of the Cold War. Scholars have adapted theories of contentious politics to analyze how transnational feminist networks achieved this. I argue that such theories would be enhanced by richer conceptualizations of how transnational feminist networks produce and disseminate new forms of global governmental knowledge and expertise. This article engages social movement theory with theories of global governmentality. Governmentality analysis typically focuses upon governmental power rather than political (...) contention or the collective agency of political outsiders. However, I argue that governmentality analysis contributes to an account of feminist influence on the fields of development and security within global politics. The governmentality lens views politics as a struggle over truth and expertise. Since experts have authority to speak the truth on a given issue, governmentality analysis seeks to uncover the social basis of expertise. Such analysis of expertise can illuminate important aspects of the power of movements. The power of transnational women’s movements lies in production and dissemination of knowledge about women within global knowledge networks. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 278-282 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations. Edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 326. This collection of essays on women in Buddhism largely succeeds in fulfilling Tsomo's goal of documenting "Buddhist women's actual involvement" in the Buddhist tradition (p. 1). Her introduction provides a very (...) informative and well-supported description of the history and current status of Buddhist women around the world, focusing on Asia but including the West as well. In the introduction and in her essays on women in the Tibetan and Himalayan region and in Buddhist and Christian traditions, she provides a feminist critique of gender discrimination in the Buddhist tradition as well as prescriptions for transforming the existing tradition in ways that would make it more egalitarian. These include "consciously validating women's accomplishments," reinterpreting religious texts with gender sensitive lenses, and the ordination of women (pp. 256-257). The essays in the volume as a whole carry forward Tsomo's examination of both sides of the equation of women and Buddhism--that is, how the Buddhist tradition has treated women overall as well as how women have responded to and are working to alter Buddhism, what Tsomo characterizes as "the ongoing process of women transforming and being transformed by, the tradition" (p. 1). The essays highlight a number of dichotomies in the experiences of Buddhist women, the primary one being that of gender disparities in the status and experience of women. Several essays in the collection detail the hardships that Buddhist women encounter because of gender inequalities that persist to the present day, even in Western cultures. Tsomo's essay comparing the experiences of Buddhist and Christian women in particular illustrates that in most areas, gender-based inequalities are more pronounced in Buddhist contexts than in Christian ones. Tsomo observes that [End Page 278] both traditions have fallen short of their egalitarian ideals, expressed within Christianity as the imago dei (creation in the image of God) and in Buddhism as tathagathagarbha (the seed or essence of Enlightenment present in all sentient beings). While noting that both traditions in general permit women to participate in religious practices on an equal basis with men, that neither legally mandates an inferior status for women, and that the highest stage of religious attainment is the same for both genders, Tsomo finds gender discrimination still functioning in both religions: both Buddhism and Christianity traditionally have assigned subordinate roles to women (especially with respect to monastic life), depict females negatively in scriptures, and generally ignore women's contributions to religious life.Despite these similarities, Tsomo thinks that in most respects Christian women have made more progress in securing equal rights to participate in the religious life of their faith than have Buddhist women. The only reason she provides for the greater extent of change in Christianity is that "Christian women have been far more active than Buddhists" (p. 253). Yet she fails to probe the possible reasons for this disparity in respect to the broader cultural, social, and economic differences in Christian and Buddhist contexts that have fostered a more activist and socially acceptable feminism in the former. The greater gender discrimination in Buddhist cultures has less to do with differences between Christianity and Buddhism per se than it does with other aspects of culture. Unfortunately, Tsomo does not develop the thesis she presents in the introduction to this essay that "Christian women have much to learn from the Buddhist tradition with respect to meditation and that Buddhist women have much to learn from Christian women with respect to service to society" (p. 241). Indeed, it is difficult to understand the basis for the latter claim, given Buddhist women's primary roles as service providers in most Buddhist cultures, unless she is speaking of the so-called socially engaged religious movement. If so, then as other scholars have noted, there are impediments to social action within certain interpretations of the Buddhist teachings themselves that would need to be resolved first. A... (shrink)

In the face of mounting militarism in south Asia, this essay turns to anti-state, ‘liberatory’ movements in the region that employ violence to achieve their political aims. It explores some of the ethical quandaries that arise from the embrace of such violence, particularly for feminists for whom political violence and militarism is today a moot point. Feminist responses towards resistant political violence have, however, been less straightforward than towards the violence of the state, suggesting a more ambivalent ethical position (...) towards the former than the latter. The nature of this ambivalence can be located in a postcolonial feminist ethics that is conceptually committed to the use of political violence in certain, albeit exceptional circumstances on the basis of the ethical ends that this violence (as opposed to other oppressive violence) serves. In opening up this ethical ambivalence — or the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir says — to interrogation and reflection, I underscore the difficulties involved in ethically discriminating between forms of violence, especially when we consider the manner in which such distinctions rely on and reproduce gendered modes of power. This raises particular problems for current feminist appraisals of resistant political violence as an expression of women's empowerment and ‘agency’. (shrink)

This article addresses the Egyptian women's movement of the 1950s–1970s through a recent film entitled Four Women of Egypt, which focuses on the lives of four prominent Egyptian women active in the movement during that period. Using the concept of political memory, the article traces some of the major debates within the women's movement throughout this era. By focusing on the ways in which these women conceptualize the geopolitical, I show that the twin concepts of imperialism and (...) capitalism were central to the ways in which they understood gender. The result was a complex understanding of how gender intersected with Egypt's position within a broader global system of imperial capitalism. Following the transition in the 1970s to an open-market economy, the women's movement shifted away from critiques of imperialism and capitalism. This shift can be understood Primarily in terms of geopolitics, specifically the rise of neoliberalism in Egypt. New neoliberal policies had dramatic effects on the women's movement, showing why both the rise and fall of the movement must be contextualized geopolitically and transnationally. (shrink)

Increasingly, feminist scholars examine how the stability of racial hierarchies is maintained through discourse. This article explores the importance of race discourse in the construction of white women's accounts explaining their race politics. Specifically, the author examines the connections between race discourse and politics as they emerged in interviews with white women involved in a local women's movement between 1972 and 1999. The interviews revealed five discursive strategies women used to talk about race and the movement's antiracist practices. (...) In addition, one of the most important contributions of this study is the evidence it provides of the relationship between the discursive construction of an “invisible white self” and the broader structure of power relations. (shrink)

Women’s movements in Western Europe are not dead, but they have altered their strategies in ways that require adaptation of investigative repertoires. Recent research highlights women’s movements’ pathways into institutions as well as the transnationalisation of activism. This article focuses on the shifting public communication repertoire associated with these developments. Communication and movement outreach across Europe are increasingly constituted online. The authors investigate the degree to which women’s networks in Germany and the UK mobilise constituencies via (...) online means. Utilising network mapping tools as well as original data from women’s NGOs, they analyse the density and distribution of relationships in German and UK networks, as well as their interactive communication repertoires as indicators of their capacity to engage constituents. The findings show that information-focused means of communication are more prevalent than interactive mobilisation tools. Women’s NGOs in the UK utilise more public engagement features than those in Germany. The authors relate these findings to second-, third- and fourth-wave feminisms, focusing on their distinct mobilisation strategies. (shrink)

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the (...) politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’. (shrink)

Legal mobilization in the courts and in political discourse has emerged as an increasingly important strategy of social movements that complements other political approaches. This is true also for women’s movements in post-socialist countries, but most research on strategic litigation has focused so far on common law countries and on supranational litigation in Europe. Using the case of Poland as an example, this article asks why references to the law are so attractive in post-socialist contexts and what can be (...) gained by this with respect to actual rights, justice and social change. It focuses thereby on strategic litigation as the most sophisticated strategy that results from other sustained movement activities connected with the law. It draws on field research, interviews with activists and analyses of primary as well as secondary sources. The article explores the reasons for using the law as the ‘master frame’ by analysing the traditions of gender and law in state socialism and during democratic consolidation. Two examples of strategic litigation, the Tysiąc case for reproductive rights and the ‘Biedronka’ cases for employment rights, are analysed and situated in the context of other legal mobilization activities. These cases set the agenda for crucial social problems and resulted in binding decisions by the courts. A broad and predominantly supportive media discourse was conducive to cultivating public opinion. These analyses support the conclusion that legal mobilization tends to directly influence law and legal practices. It has a socializing effect on the population and their legal consciousness. In aiming at both state and society, these legal strategies of the women’s movement are a modest but crucial success for democratic consolidation. (shrink)

Ackelsberg investigates women’s activist participation in the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a Brooklyn association established in 1974–75, which she treats as a model of democratic civic engagement that incorporated differences while avoiding the exclusions of the past. The NCNW assisted poor and working class women in organizing to better meet their needs and those of their communities. It arose in response to the ways women were either ignored or belittled when they attempted to engage in political work both (...) in their communities and beyond. In working with each other, the women found that they needed to address issues of diversity. The programs they created to help build bridges across differences that helped facilitate their successful activism while, simultaneously, broadening their understanding of what constitutes “politics.”. (shrink)

Feminism has been a major force in the reshaping of recent art. The women's movement has given new confidence to women who work in the visual arts; it has opened up new areas for art to deal with and challenged existing systems of values and imagery in the arts. In their comprehensive introduction, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock provide a richly illustrated history of the British women's art movement, covering the major events and debates in feminist art practice (...) which have taken place over the last fifteen years. They also examine the trends, the conflicts and the new directions of the 1980s in which issues of race, as well as gender, have necessarily become prominent. Griselda Pollock goes on to explore the place of feminist art in the context of post-modern culture, arguing that feminism is one of the most important and radical interventions in both modernism and post-modernism. --back cover. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how class and racial dynamics generate different styles of activism among women's movement organizations. Based on a comparative study of two feminist organizations—one composed of lower-class women of color and another of upper-class white women—it charts the formation of divergent types of gender politics. First, it explores how differences in the class and racial backgrounds of the memberships create distinct organizational needs; second, how these divergent political interests motivate contrasting organizational ideologies, activities, and structures; and finally (...) how they motivate different approaches to the wider women's movement. At the conclusion, implications are drawn for cross-class/race alliances among grassroots women's organizations. (shrink)