In Nigeria, available data revealed that most women – especially Christian women – are poorly represented in the political arena. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of the need for Christian women to be actively involved in Nigerian governance. The leadership quality, style and successes of Deborah in the Bible is used as a case study, to encourage Nigerian Christian women to show interest in political offices so that they can help to remove the (...) scourge of human indignity that is plaguing the country. The paper explores some of the factors that are holding Christian women back from being involved in governance. This is achieved with reference to relevant books and personal interviews. Some of the factors identified as the constraints that keep women inactive in governance are socio-cultural constraints, violence that characterized governance, organization constraints, the poor leadership examples of some women, and economic and domestic workload. The paper therefore recommended that Interested and virtuous Christian women should come on board like Deborah to contribute their own quota to the progress and growth of Nigeria. (shrink)

The proclamation Banbiantian, which was proposed during the Mao era, is a vivid and straightforward appellation of women in new China that has gained popularity in national and folk discourses over the past seven decades. This article disassembles this term into three elements — quotation marks, Banbian, and tian — to conduct a political phenomenological analysis. By exploring and sorting reports related to Banbiantian in Renmin ribao, this article reflects on changes in relation to status and role of (...) women in the Mao era on the basis of three findings. Firstly, the quotation marks make Banbiantian a symbol of women’s actual experience and ideal image while playing a role in enhancement and guidance. Secondly, Banbian indicates the equal ratio of men and women and symbolizes the dynamic adjustment in determining equal rights, demonstrating equal capabilities, and improving equal status. Thirdly, tian is the scope of women’s liberation. Through women’s participation in public labor and political activities, coupled with balanced national and regional coordination, its scope continues to expand, extending from the family to society and the country. (shrink)

: The proclamation Banbiantian, which was proposed during the Mao era, is a vivid and straightforward appellation of women in new China that has gained popularity in national and folk discourses over the past seven decades. This article disassembles this term into three elements — quotation marks, Banbian, and tian — to conduct a political phenomenological analysis. By exploring and sorting reports related to Banbiantian in Renmin ribao, this article reflects on changes in relation to status and role (...) of women in the Mao era on the basis of three findings. Firstly, the quotation marks make Banbiantian a symbol of women’s actual experience and ideal image while playing a role in enhancement and guidance. Secondly, Banbian indicates the equal ratio of men and women and symbolizes the dynamic adjustment in determining equal rights, demonstrating equal capabilities, and improving equal status. Thirdly, tian is the scope of women’s liberation. Through women’s participation in public labor and political activities, coupled with balanced national and regional coordination, its scope continues to expand, extending from the family to society and the country. (shrink)

Susan Moller Okin. AFTERWORD or greater weighting of these over “masculine" values. For how are women to continue to assume all of the nurturing activities that allegedly both follow from and reinforce their “naturally” superior virtues, and  ...

Italy is one of the advanced industrial democracies with the smallest number of women elected to public office. Current literature has focused on several structural, institutional and cultural factors to explain such a gender gap in political participation and representation. However, one of the most basic forms of political participation, political discussion, has not received a thorough investigation. This article analyses gender differences in the attitudes and the habits of talking about politics with relatives, friends and (...) social acquaintances during the Italian 2006 electoral campaign. The main argument is that the analysis of political discussion may shed new light on how Italian women approach politics and help explain their reluctance to be involved in political activities in terms of elected office and party membership. (shrink)

The women’s liberation movements that emerged in Britain in the late 1960s are rarely thought of through their relationship with technology and technical knowledge. To overlook this is to misunderstand the movement’s social, cultural and economic interventions; it also understates how the technical environment conditioned the emergence of autonomous, women-centred politics. This article draws on archival evidence to demonstrate how the autonomous women’s liberation movement created experimental social contexts that enabled de-skilled, feminised social classes to confront their (...) technical environment and the deficits they experienced within it. The context for forging such politics was the workshop. More than a one-off, skill-sharing event, the workshop was a mobile habitus, adapted from a Marxist craft politics that prioritised the distribution of collective knowledge and responsibility and enabled the realisation of women's self-determination and autonomy. The workshop was discursively extended through women-authored publications in the 1970s and 1980s and designated a specific orientation within knowledge that supported women to practise a range of technical knowledge and gain expertise. An important, and largely forgotten political legacy of women's liberation is its world-making activisms: how it created social contexts that supported de-skilled, feminised classes to substantially intervene, shape and re-build their environments. Such histories can inspire how we practise politics today within an environment characterised, some theorists claim, by dramatic scales of de-skilling and dispossession. (shrink)

This article studies the conceptions of social justice of women active in transnational migrant politics over a period of roughly 20 years in the Netherlands. The novel focus on migrant women reveals that transnational politics is almost completely male-dominated and -directed. Two of the exceptions found in this article include a leftist and a Kurdish women organization supporting the communist cause in the 1980s and the Kurdish struggle in the 1990s in Turkey, respectively. In both organizations gender (...) equality was subordinated to broader ideologies of political parties in their homeland. Leftist activists in the cold war era supported a narrow definition of the "politics of redistribution," while and Kurdish activists, combined classical features of the latter with those of traditional identity politics. (shrink)

The movement for ‘military preparedness’ in America and Britain gained tremendous momentum at the turn of the century. It assimilated the cult of manliness — the key public virtue, which allowed a person to claim possession of himself and a nation to reclaim possession of itself. An army was the means of marshalling a mass of people for regeneration. The symbol of a nation's preparedness to take control of its own soul was the readiness to bear arms. Although this movement (...) originated in the middle-class, Protestant cultures of the USA and England, its core ideas were adopted by many political movements. Affected by these ideas, as well as the formation of the Protestant Ulster Volunteers in 1913, a movement to reclaim Irish independence through the mass bearing of arms began in South and West Ireland in autumn 1914. Women were excluded from these Volunteer companies, but set up their own organization, Cumann na mBan, as an auxiliary to the men's. The Easter Rising in 1916 owed as much to older ideas of the coup d'état as new ideas of mass mobilization, but subsequent history recreated that Rising as the ‘founding’ moment of the Irish republic. It was not until mass conscription was threatened two years later that the mass of people were absorbed into the idea of an armed campaign against British rule. From 1919 to 1923, the reality of guerrilla-style war pressed people into a frame demanding discipline, secrecy, loyalty and a readiness to act as the prime nationalist virtues. The ideal form of relationship in war is the brotherhood, both as actuality and potent myth. The mythology of brotherhood creates its own myths of women (as not being there, and men not needing them) as well as creating the fear and the myth that rape is the inevitable expression of brotherhoods in action. Despite explicit anxiety at the time about the rape of Irish women by British soldiers, no evidence was found of mass rape, and that fear has disappeared into oblivion, throwing up important questions as to when rape is a weapon of war. The decade of war worsened the relationship of women to the political realm. Despite active involvement as ‘auxiliaries’ women's political status was permanently damaged by their exclusion as warriors and brothers, so much so that they disappear into the status of wives and mothers in the 1937 Irish Constitution. (shrink)

Recent years have brought enormous growth in the number of women-only art exhibitions. These exhibitions are accompanied by discussions that concentrate on curatorial feminist activism. In this text, I propose a different perspective by taking into consideration all exhibitions where the participants were determined by social category and which were organized in one country during one year. This perspective not only allows us to remark on and analyse activities that otherwise remain unnoticed but also encourages us to extend our (...) understanding of politics behind women-only initiatives. These exhibitions are generally intended to increase the capital of women artists, and to shift forces within the art and social fields in favour of women. However, as my analysis demonstrates, the organizers of different exhibitions occupy different places both in the art field and in the social field, and it is their position that determines, to a large extent, what changes they envision, what objectives they – in consequence – have and how they formulate their politics. This text also offers a reflection on whether the objectives behind organizing women-only shows has been constant or if they are a result of the current situation of women. (shrink)

This study examines online advocacy campaigns by five women action groups in Nigeria and Ghana. Based on modern social movement theories, the study utilizes computer-mediated discourse analysis to qualitatively analyze the content of the websites and social media platforms of these groups. Findings show that social media provide women advocacy groups a voice that tend to defy intimidation and the traditional patriarchal stereotypes to demand the rights of women to political leadership. Discourse structures of protest discourses (...) include imperative statements or direct acts that demand change by all means. Through online activism, the advocacy groups extend their voices, and activities to reach national and international audiences and communities of people – also reaching out to the most vulnerable rural women and the underprivileged. However, only a small percentage of women in rural areas have access to the Internet, thereby limiting participation in online activism in cities and urban centers. (shrink)

This article focuses on images of walking in Agnès Varda's films – Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Sans toit ni loi (1985), and Les Plages d’Agnès (2008). The activity of walking (as urban flânerie, circular travelling or walking backwards) is central to these films, and can be seen as a corporeal practice that not only interweaves striated and smooth spaces but also offer a gender-sensitive, political contemplation on the forces of striation and smoothing as well as a (...) re-invention of space. The women in movement in Varda's films embody a transgression of stratified territories such as the image-oriented society of the spectacle in Cléo, myths of adolescence and settled living in Sans toit ni loi, or the boundaries of aging in Les Plages d'Agnès. (shrink)

This article goes beyond the debate over whether culture competes with politics in the women's movement to explore the complex relationship between cultural and political action. A case study of the local women's movement in Bloomington, Indiana, provides little evidence that cultural feminism led to a decline in political activity in the women's movement. Rather, the attractiveness of cultural and political activities changes with shifts in political opportunities. During periods of opportunity or (...) threat that stimulate extensive action, activists are energized for both cultural and political projects. During “slow” periods when there are few opportunities to make political gains, cultural projects are particularly attractive to feminists and may compete with political activities. However, cultural activities also help to maintain a feminist collective identity and provide networks to political groups. Ongoing political action is provoked by countermovement actions and other critical events and supported by “outsiders” who bring new ideas to a local community, national feminist organizations, and feminists within local institutions. (shrink)

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for (...) class='Hi'>women's activities. I illustrate how it is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values. (shrink)

In ‘Listening to Music Together’, Nick Zangwill offers three arguments which aim to establish that listening to music can never be a joint activity. If any of these arguments were sound, then our experiences of music, qua object of aesthetic attention, would be essentially private. In this paper, I argue that Zangwill’s arguments are unsound and I develop an account of shared musical experience that defends three main conclusions. First, joint listening is not merely possible but a common feature (...) of our socially situated experiences of music. Second, when listening with others our experience of the music and our sense of community with our fellow listeners often reciprocally enhance one another. Third, how deeply and intimately we share a musical experience with others depends upon such factors as our respective backgrounds, interests, and levels of expertise. (shrink)

This volume challenges the view that women have not contributed to the historical development of political ideas, and highlights the depth and complexity of women’s political thought in the centuries prior to the French Revolution. -/- From the late medieval period to the enlightenment, a significant number of European women wrote works dealing with themes of political significance. The essays in this collection examine their writings with particular reference to the ideas of virtue, liberty, (...) and toleration. The figures discussed include Christine de Pizan, Catherine d’Amboise, Isabella d’Este, Elizabeth I, Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, Margaret Cavendish, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Elizabeth Carter, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Cornélie Wouters. These women actively contributed to the political practice and discourse of their times. Some of the women question their exclusion from political power and argue in favour of women’s virtue, prudence, and capacity to govern. Others aim to demonstrate women’s spiritual equality with men, to defend liberty of conscience, and to highlight the importance of education as a means to moral development. And some women explore the notion of female citizenship or attempt to come to terms with issues of religious freedom and religious toleration. -/- Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration serves as an introduction to a rich and as yet under-explored period in the history of women’s ideas. (shrink)

This article examines the influence of race/ethnicity and gender identity on the politics of American Indian and Hispanic women leaders. The data are drawn from personal interviews with 50 public officials and grassroots leaders active in state, local, or tribal politics in New Mexico. Borrowing from Tolleson Rinehart's model of “gender consciousness,” the author creates a classification scheme for assessing the role that race/ethnicity and gender play in the political ideology and motives of the leaders. The findings reveal (...) that racial/ethnic identity is generally more important to Native leaders and grassroots activists, while gender identity is somewhat more salient for Hispanic leaders and public officials. Her classification system for measuring racial/ethnic and gender identity is useful for analyzing qualitative data and may be helpful to other researchers. (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)

In this paper, I explore the ways in which human bodies, payback, and comestibility become inescapably entangled in cultures in which honor is the prevailing virtue. Shakespeare was deeply sensitive to the social and psychological processes through which these concepts become entwined when honor is at stake—to the ways in which, as a means of corrective response, men who transgress a code of honor can be rightly reduced to their bodies, similar to how those who are not allowed to be (...) full participants in an honor culture (most particularly women) always already are. I begin by examining Shakespeare’s earliest depictions of honor cultures in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, and then briefly discusses how the ideas they trade in are further developed and complicated later in his career, focusing specifically on Othello. -/- . (shrink)

Academic examination of the role of women as Australian citizens. Asks what it means to be a woman citizen in Australia today. Questions male domination of Australian public political life. Examines the histories of citizenship for Australian women of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, showing how gender has been central to the construction of citizenship. Demonstrates how the masculinisation of citizenship has marginalised women's activities as citizens. Includes notes, select bibliography, notes on contributors and index. Editors (...) both teach history at the University of Western Australia and have published on women's issues and Australian history. Crawford's previous titles include 'Women and Citizenship: Suffrage Centenary'. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) was one of the most influential and innovative political theorists of her generation who had a significant impact on a wide range of topics such as democratic theory, feminist theory, and justice. She bridged many longstanding divides among political theorists, engaging in Continental and critical theory, but also insisting on the importance of normative argument: her corpus stands as a testament to the fruitfulness of engaging in both abstract theory and the 'real world' of (...) everyday politics. This volume spans the several decades of her work, illustrating her intellectual development over time through three major areas of innovation: Gender: Maintaining that gender is both conceptually and politically meaningful, Young theorized gender in terms of structures that, in combination, position different people we call "women" in different ways, such that some women have some structures in common, without all women sharing all gendered structures in common. Justice: Young's early writings on a critical theory of justice evolved in her later and posthumously published works where she developed an account of justice that brought together her theorization of structure with her concern to respond to contemporary claims of injustice. The Politics of Difference: Young rejected universal and abstract theories of justice and maintained that justice instead required attending to the experiences of people marked by difference. (shrink)

One of America's foremost public intellectuals, Jean Bethke Elshtain has been on the frontlines in the most hotly contested and deeply divisive issues of our time. Now in Real Politics , Elshtain gives further proof of her willingness to speak her mind, courting disagreement and even censure from those who prefer their ideologies neat. At the center of Elshtain's work is a passionate concern with the relationship between political rhetoric and political action. For Elshtain, politics is a sphere (...) of concrete responsibility. Political speech should, therefore, approach the richness of actual lives and commitments rather than present impossible utopias. In her essays, Elshtain finds in the writings of Václav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus a language appropriate to the complexity of everyday life and politics, and she critiques philosophers and writers who distance us from a concrete, embodied world. She argues against those repressive strains within contemporary feminism which insist that families and even sexual differentiation are inherently oppressive. Along the way, she challenges an ideology of victimization that too often loses sight of individual victims in its pursuit of abstract goals. Elshtain reaffirms the quirky and by no means simple pleasures of small-town life as a microcosm of the human condition and considers the current crisis in American education and its consequences for democracy. Beyond exploring the details of political life over the past two decades, Real Politics advocates a via media politics that avoids unacceptable extremes and serves as a model for responsible political discourse. Throughout her diverse and insightful writings, Elshtain champions a civic philosophy that tends to the dignity of everyday life as a democratic imperative of the first order. "Jean Bethke Elshtain is a person of rare intellect. The moral wisdom that pervades these essays reminds us that when all is said and done politics is about the life and death of real people who are anything but abstractions. Her erudition is remarkable, but equally stunning is her eye for the significant. What she is so good at is helping us see the moral and political significance of the everyday."--Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University " Real Politics serves as a forceful reminder that Jean Elshtain has been dealing with the real world in twenty-five years of powerful essaying. Transcending ideological categories, she writes out of hope that human beings can enjoy those capacities of reason and faith which make them human. It is a pleasure to be reintroduced to her sustained intelligence."--Alan Wolfe, Boston University. (shrink)

This paper introduces America's first women Idealists and discusses their appropriation and reconfiguration of Hegel's public/private distinction. Through their philosophies of education two of these women, Susan E. Blow (1843--1916) and Anna C. Brackett (1836--1911), legitimized women's active involvement in public life. A third, Marietta Kies (1853--1899), put forth a political theory of altruism. Her theory anticipates feminist critiques of male-centered political theory and has important implications for today's ethic of care. Blow and Brackett were (...) associates of William T. Harris (1835--1909) in the St. Louis Philosophical Movement (ca. 1860--1880) and contributors to The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Kies was associated with Harris through the Concord Summer School of Philosophy (1879--1888). She was also a student of John Dewey at the University of Michigan. (shrink)

RESUMEN: La dificultad de elaborar políticas públicas capaces de integrar una estrategia de acción dirigida a la participación política y el ejercicio de una ciudadanía activa por parte de las mujeres obliga a recapacitar sobre modelos de actuación cuyo objetivo contemple al mismo tiempo la dimensión colectiva y la individual del empoderamiento político, como clave estratégica para el diseño de políticas de igualdad de género que pretendan tal finalidad. El presente trabajo ofrece una propuesta de medidas para las políticas de (...) igualdad que, combinadas unas con otras atendiendo a la situación actual del panorama político, responden a una estrategia de acción integral para el empoderamiento político de las mujeres.ABSTRACT: The difficulty of developing public policies capable of integrating an action strategy aimed at political participation and the exercise of active citizenship by women forced to rethink models of action aimed at the same time contemplating collective and individual dimension of political empowerment as a strategic key to the design of gender equality policies that seek this purpose. This work presents a proposal of measures for equality policies, combined with each other in response to the current situation of the Spanish panorama, reflect a comprehensive action strategy for the political empowerment of women.PALABRAS CLAVE: empoderamiento; políticas; ciudadanía; participación; igualdad. KEYWORDS: empowerment; policies; citizenship; participation; equality. (shrink)

This article contextualizes some of the more specifically focused articles in this Special Issue of ‘Women and Mental Health’ by reviewing general historical and political currents structuring contemporary discussions around questions of models, treatment and provision for women within British mental health services. We highlight some particularities of the current British context (in relation to other national scenes) in terms of the forms and expressions of feminist activity around mental or emotional distress. While not absolute mirrors (...) of each other, resonances between general trends in feminist debates and organizational forms within feminist mental health work give rise to a wide spectrum of sites of intervention. We discuss some of the conditions that gave rise to these forms of (visible) feminist intervention within mental health service provision, focusing particularly on women's counselling and therapy services, and we offer an analysis of the range and conceptual tensions within which such interventions may be situated, including contested perspectives on power and empowerment. We also consider ways in which women's political activity around mental health issues is likely not to be noticed as such, given women's prototypical positions as patients and practitioners. We end by identifying what we see as current challenges for feminist activism around distress and its links with the conditions of women's lives and oppression more generally, not only as instances of more general tensions and challenges within contemporary feminisms, but also as offering an arena of opportunity for broader alliance and coalition-building. (shrink)

This article examines women who have been antinuclear activists at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant for two decades. Qualitative interviews focus on their perceived transformations over time that are based on gender and everyday experiences. They perceive gender as both a barrier and a facilitator to activism, even after 20 years. Women describe their technological education as one strategy to overcome the barrier of gender. On the other hand, they consider the gendered role of motherhood as (...) a primary catalyst for action. In addition, they discuss individual everyday experiences focused on the health concerns for family members that influenced their political activity. Over time, women linked personal transformations with increased political understanding and involvement. (shrink)

This paper discusses three adaptations of Shakespeare's history plays written during the 1720s. These texts, I contend, counter claims that positive representations of women during this period were confined to the domestic sphere. In these plays women are active participants in the public realm of politics and commerce. The heroines of Ambrose Philips? Humfrey Duke of Gloucester (1723), Aaron Hill's King Henry the Fifth (1723) and Theophilus Cibber's King Henry the Sixth (1724), rather than being driven by love (...) and domestic duty, act on political motivation. Patriotism, which characterises these women, is the primary political slogan of all three plays. These female protagonists exemplify the value of a patriotic political conduct that crosses party lines. Their unpartisan or universal brand of patriotism anticipates the opposition views expressed by Bolingbroke in the following decade. This paper also addresses the broad consensus amongst Feminist critics that women in adaptations of Shakespeare provide little more than mere ?breeches roles? titillation. The histories of Philips, Hill and Cibber represent heroines who, no less than their male counterparts, exercise control during political crises. These women are not objects of titillation but subjects for emulation. (shrink)

This paper is about women’s complicity or women’s involvement in actions that directly or indirectly lead to the restriction of other women’s freedoms and rights. Among the first to mention women’s complicity was Simone de Beauvoir, who in her book The Second Sex described the phenomenon of women’s participation in unjust patriarchal practices, suggesting the existence of passive and active complicity. Using Christopher Kutz’s theory of collective complicity and its extension by Brian Lawson, the validity (...) of the notion of female complicity is examined through selected examples of anti-female practice mentioned in the works of feminist theorists. Although feminists spoke of women’s complicity in the context of women’s self-objectification, domestic work, and political activity on the right, the conclusion of this paper is that only in the latter case can we speak of active and then only of feminist and politically relevant female complicity. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have been remaking the landscape in political theory, and in this important book some of the most important feminist political theorists provide reconstructions of those concepts most central to the tradition of political philosophy. The goal is nothing less than the construction of a blueprint for a positive feminist theory.Many of these papers are completely new; others are extensions of important earlier work; two are reprints of classic papers. The result is a progress report on (...) the continuing feminist project to re-envision traditional political theory. As such, it constitutes essential reading not only for feminist thinkers but also for traditional philosophers and political theorists, who will need to come to terms with these contemporary critiques and re-readings. (shrink)

This paper is based on a research conducted between 2004 and 2006 and dealing with the memories of women in a steel valley struck by depression since the seventies, in the North-Eastern part of France. The imagery of steel-producing Lorraine coalesced in a rather standardized way around the figure of the steelworker working at the blast furnace. This research and the exhibition which followed from it, highlighted the activities of women, in the working place as well as in (...) the domestic realm and in community or political movements. It thus contributes to a more complex imagining and less androcentric perspective on the ironworks past of the Lorraine region. (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)

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)

When attempting to capture the concept of enlightenment that underlies and motivates philosophical (and political and scientific) developments in the 18th century, historians of philosophy frequently rely upon a needlessly but intentionally exclusive account. This, namely, is the conception of enlightenment first proposed by Kant in his famous essay of 1784, which takes enlightenment to consist in the “emergence from the self-imposed state of minority” and which is only possible for a “public” to attain as a result of the (...) public use of reason, a privilege enjoyed by citizens and exemplified in the activity of the scholar. That women, among other groups, did not hold the status of citizens and did not enjoy access to the institutions or training that might gain them recognition as scholars is apparently not a concern for Kant, as he notes that the enlightened condition is likely out of reach anyway for “by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex)” (AA 8:35). This naturally leads one to wonder what a history of this period could look like when considered from the perspective of a different, more inclusive conception of enlightenment, and in this chapter I propose to conduct an experiment of sorts just along these lines. As opposed to Kant’s exclusionary conception, I will instead take that proposed by his distinguished contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, as my starting point. In addition to offering a conception of enlightenment distinctive both for its wide scope and progressive character, Mendelssohn’s has the advantage, or so I will show, of bringing the manifold intellectual contributions of a diverse set of women into focus, though it does more than this in that it also reveals these women to actively and critically engage with key aspects of Mendelssohn’s and others’ philosophical views. (shrink)

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of the agency of women who reside in the rural areas of the Argentine Pampas, based on their promotion and production of agroecological family horticulture. The recognition of these women’s agency through care – care of their children, global care, and green care – offers a significant challenge to some metrocentric and Eurocentric feminist perspectives that claim care work can only be oppressive for women. The first of these types of care (...) empowers women to improve the nutrition of their children. It also relates to another underlying type of care, which is to provide a sufficiently robust education as to ensure their children have a better and alternative future. The second type of care has the power to socially transform the territorial space of the district’s countryside and its marginalized populations which, through care, acquire greater public and political attention. The third type of care empowers women to transform and care for the environment, and is exercised by not using pesticides in horticultural production and by disseminating knowledge on the matter. In line with discussions of postcolonial feminism (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Mahmood, 2001; Suárez Navaz, 2008), I argue that certain properties that are attributed to women relative to caregiving – by way of a dichotomous view of gender relations – fuel their agency: for these women the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats food, training and labor inequality. (shrink)

This article investigates African women commuter trading activities in Nairobi in the first decade after World War One. Its findings derive mainly from a research project carried out in 1989-1996. The major source of data for the study was oral interviews with the women who traded in Nairobi during the years under study, as well as with eyewitnesses to their trading activities. Sampling of such respondents employed the purposive technique because of its ability to deal with the problem (...) of an incomplete population frame by conveniently drawing the required study sample from available resources. The research drew other data from library and archival sources, especially to corroborate the oral evidence. However, this article utilises additional archival and library data to achieve greater comprehensiveness than was attained in the earlier version. The article therefore makes an important intellectual contribution to the ongoing debate on the social, political and economic role and impact of African women’s economic activities such as commodity trade in African towns. (shrink)

This book project reshapes the way we think about Enlightenment: rather than viewing it primarily as the era of the emancipation of human reason, it emphasizes the gendered nature of the Enlightenment ideal of human progress and investigates how this ideal oppressed women. I take a critical look at this ideal from within intellectual debates of the time, examining how the restrictive view of women’s socio-political and educational opportunities was challenged by progressive female German and Polish thinkers (...) of the late Enlightenment. The under-studied views of these thinkers exhibit insightful early-feminist arguments against women’s inability to take an active role in the Enlightenment project and the confinement of women to the “private” sphere of the household, in which they take care of men – “public”, free-thinking citizens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and the Democratic StateNicole Fermon (bio)Best known for her subtle interrogation of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray clearly also conducts a dialogue with the political, proposing that women’s erasure from culture and society invalidates all economies, sexual or political. Because woman has disappeared both figuratively and literally from society [see Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing”], (...) Irigaray conceives the contemporary ethical project as a recall to difference rather than equality, to difference between women and men—that is, sexual difference. She characterizes relations between men and women as market relations in which women are commodities, objects, but never subjects of exchange, objects to men but not to themselves: women do not belong to themselves but exist “to keep relationships among men running smoothly” [TS 192]. Women under these conditions require imaginative ways to reconfigure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would experience it as a positivity worth emulating.Irigaray contends that after the gains of egalitarian politics are carefully examined, the inclusion of women in the political arena has failed to take into account women’s distinct and different position from men, and from each other, as well as perpetuating the fiction of the “neutral” citizen, the ahistorical individual citizen of the nation-state. It is that fiction Irigaray dispels in her critique of liberal democratic politics and its creation, “citizens who are neuter in regard to familial singularity, its laws, and necessary sexual difference” [SG 112] in order to benefit the State and its laws. The subject is male; the citizen is neuter. Who is the female citizen in contemporary society? What is the ethical elaboration of the contractual relations between women and men, and between sexed individuals and the community? How do women imagine a distinct set of rights and responsibilities based on self-definition and autonomy, given the particular strictures of contemporary politics—that is, the market-driven, antidemocratic nature of the current economic national and global forces? Irigaray suggests that “the return of women to collective work, to public places, to social relations, demands linguistic mutations” and profound transformations, an embodied imagination with force and agency in civil life [TD 65].Irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial “circuits” alone, we overlook the symbolic organization of power—women risk losing “everything without even being acknowledged” [TD 56]. Instead an interval of recognition can expand the political to include the concerns and activities of real women, lest silence imply consent to sexual neutrality, or more likely, to women’s obliteration under men’s interests and concerns. Women’s insistence on self-definition and wage labor, on love and justly remunerated work, [End Page 120] testifies to the obduracy of women’s difference, one that is not likely to disappear. The patriarchal family is still the legal norm, even when certain exceptions are made, while enduring questions regarding women’s health and children’s physical welfare as priorities beyond market considerations are consigned to legislative obfuscation, still a political afterthought. Instead, in the US the liberal state removes the slender welfare net specific to women and children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and fails to provide medical coverage to those who are among the most vulnerable of its citizens. Women without access to the legal protection of sex-neutral citizenship, poor working women without language (the money for an effective “mouthpiece” to represent their distress in a court of law), are further disempowered by liberal politics’ insistence on sexual neutrality—that is, on repression or amnesia regarding the lived experiences of women.Sexual difference is key to any project of self-definition by women. Irigaray insists on the sexual nature of this self-definition, not solely for its obvious procreative necessity, but because the natural world is a source of renewal and fecundity which requires attentive interrogation and respect [SG 15]. This rebirth seems alien to the structure of male politics, which instead seem to provoke disasters (Bhopal, Chernobyl, or the current runaway... (shrink)

In Tudor and Stuart Britain, women writers took active roles in negotiating cultural ideas and systems to gain power by participating in politics through writing, shaping the aesthetics of genre, and fashioning feminine gender, despite constraints on women. Through the lens of cultural studies, the authors explore the ways in which women of this era worked to actually create culture. Articles cover five areas: women, writing, and material culture; women as objects and agents in reproducing (...) culture; women's role in producing gender; popular culture and women's pamphlets; and women's bodies as inscriptions of culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. To start, while (...) there is a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

During the Philippine-American War, the Anti-Imperialist League was the organizational vanguard of an anti-imperialist movement. Research on this period of U.S. imperialism has focused on empire building, ignoring the gendered activity of anti-imperialists in the metropole. The author outlines the constitutive relationship between gendered structures and experience that informed anti-imperialists' “contentious politics,” using archival sources of the Anti-Imperialist League and anti-imperialist debates in newspapers. The author shows how anti-imperialist leaders informally included women's monetary donations, labor, networks, and reputations (...) while formally excluding their full membership. Finally, the author shows how masculinist ambivalence, or the pattern of the gendered inclusions/exclusions of anti-imperialists, explains the incremental transformations and reproductions of gendered structures in anti-imperialists' contentious politics. The author suggests masculinist ambivalence has theoretical utility for explaining gendered inclusions and exclusions in movements that are not explicitly about gender conflict or change. (shrink)

The paper aims at tracing a collective portrait and the trajectories of a group of about forty women active in the communist movement after Poland had regained independence, and after the Second World War. I explore the relations between gender, communist activity, and the changing circumstances of the communist movement. I argue that interwar activities shaped women communists as radical, uncompromising, and questioning traditional femininity political agents, accepted as comrades at every organisational level. This image and (...) identity, though, contributed to the creation of the gender division of political work after the war, when women were assigned specific roles as guardians of revolutionary past. The post-war situation of state socialism with the communist party as the ruling party assigned women mainly to invisible, secondary positions. (shrink)

In 2008, Dutch anti-Islam Member of Parliament Geert Wilders produced a short video called Fitna to visualize his argument that Islam is a dangerous religion. Thousands of men and women across the globe uploaded their own videos to YouTube to criticize or support the film. In this article, we look at these alternative videos from a feminist perspective, contrasting the gender portrayal and narratives in Fitna with those in the alternative videos. We contend that Fitna expressed an extremist Orientalist (...) discourse, in which women are presented as the current and future victims of the oppression of Muslim men and Islam. In contrast, the YouTube videos give voice to women themselves who come from across the globe, are relatively young and often active Muslims. Second, they express different view points in generically new ways, criticizing and ridiculing Wilders or producing serious and committed explanations of their own understanding of Islam. Third, although relatively few women appeared in the videos, those that did speak for themselves, not only take on Wilders, but also claim their right to speak within Islam. We propose to understand these videos as acts of citizenships through which women constitute themselves as global citizens, in some cases by engaging in ‘deliberation’ as it is understood in feminist political theory, in other cases by taking a ‘voice’ that can be responded to. (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)

This article examines the development of a women's movement in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. It describes the types of activities and the strategies of different women activists, as well as highlighting the main divisions among them. The article also discusses the various ways in which the ongoing occupation and escalating violence in Iraq has shaped women's activism and the object of their struggles. Communal and sectarian tensions had been fostered by the previous regime as well (...) as by the political opposition in exile prior to 2003, but the systematic destruction of national institutions, such as the army and the police, by the occupation forces, has led to a flare-up of the sectarian conflict. The article concludes by evaluating women's activism in terms of its contributions to conflict on the one hand and national reconciliation on the other. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Political Identity of the Philosopher:Resistance, Relative Power, and the Endurance of PotentialSamuel McCormickThe troublemaker is precisely the one who tries to force sovereign power to translate itself into actuality.—Giorgio AgambenBeyond the Straussian Practice of "Philosophic Politics"In the second half of the 1920s, Bertolt Brecht began a series of short stories about a "thinking man" named Mr. Keuner. Among the first stories he published was "Measures Against Power" (...) ("Maßnahmen gegen die Gewalt"), the opening passage of which provides the subject of this essay:As Mr. Keuner, the thinking man [Denkende], was speaking out against power in front of a large audience in a hall, he noticed the people in front of him shrinking back and leaving. He looked around and saw standing behind him—Power [Gewalt]."What were you saying," Power asked him."I was speaking out in favor of Power," replied Mr. Keuner. [End Page 72]After Mr. Keuner had left the hall, his students inquired about his backbone [Rückgrat]. Mr. Keuner replied: "I don't have a backbone to be broken. I'm the one who has to live longer than Power [Gerade ich muß länger leben als die Gewalt]."(2001, 3)How are we to understand the political activity of this "thinking man"? Clearly, Mr. Keuner is no Cynic. Unlike Diogenes, who famously ordered Alexander the Great to step out of the way and then openly rebuked his authority as king, Mr. Keuner refuses to play the part of the parrhesiastes.1 His political activity more closely resembles that of a Stoic philosopher. Consider, for instance, the way his reply to Power echoes that of Seneca the Younger: "It seems to me erroneous to believe that those who have loyally dedicated themselves to philosophy are stubborn and rebellious, scorners of magistrates or kings or of those who control the administration of public affairs. For, on the contrary, no class of man is so popular with the philosopher as the ruler is" (Ep. 73.1–2 [1920, 105]).Given this attitude toward the powers that be, we might also figure Mr. Keuner's conduct in terms of the Straussian practice of "philosophic politics." For Leo Strauss, one of the most striking, and sometimes strident, twentieth-century scholars to consider the political identity of the philosopher, philosophic politics consists in "satisfying the city that the philosophers are not atheists, that they do not desecrate everything sacred to the city, that they reverence what the city reverences, that they are not subversives, in short, that they are not irresponsible adventurers but good citizens and even the best of citizens." This is the defense of philosophy that is required "always and everywhere," Strauss concludes, regardless of what the dominant political order might be (1991, 205–6).Although he is certainly willing to appease Power, Mr. Keuner differs from Strauss's philosophic politician in three fundamental ways, each of which suggests that a closer examination of his speech and action is in order. First, the Straussian practice of philosophic politics does not consist in advocating for political or social change but in defending the discipline of philosophy. For Strauss, "there is no necessary connection between the philosopher's indispensible philosophic politics and the efforts which he might or might not make to contribute toward the establishment of the best regime" (1991, 205). For Mr. Keuner, however, the discipline of philosophy—and with it his identity as a "thinking man"—is neither in need of defense nor distinct from his political activity but, instead, available for use as a persuasive resource in his interaction with Power. How he [End Page 73] avails himself of the tropes and topoi of philosophical inquiry can only be determined by examining his conduct closely.Second, the proper site of philosophic politics is not the political activity of "thinking" men and women but their philosophical tracts and treatises. Thus, in searching for the "philosophic politics" of Mr. Keuner, Strauss would have us focus not on his interaction with Power but on the writings for which he has come to be known as a "thinking man." As I argue in a recent edition of this journal (2005, 302–3), this... (shrink)

The only complete study of Buber as a political thinker. Shed new light upon Buber's I Thou, while also attempting to understand Buber's Zionist thought and activity in a new and fresh manner.

Studies of local knowledge and farmer participatory research tend to focus on raising crops and livestock. Little attention is given to processing and marketing farm products, an important source of income for rural households, particularly women.This article presents the case of an investigation into processing and marketing of milk products by agropastoral Fulani women, which revealed how the women under stand local market forces and recognize important social and even local political functions of their marketing activities. (...) However, it also revealed the limits of their knowledge about how the local economy interlinks with national and international economies.Reasons are examined why the study did not lead to local technical and institutional development in dairying. Differentiation is made between two types of research: “extractive” research to provide information for development planners and academics; and participatory or “enriching” research, in which data collection, analysis, and reporting are done with rural people, to use in their own problem-solving. It is argued that “enriching” research should be aimed at increasing rural people's present knowledge, so that they can better understand and cope with external influences on their activities. They could then better defend their own interests against the macroplanning State.Finally, the ethics of documenting the research results are questioned. Documentation of conventional research is primarily for empowerment and enrichment of the extractive economic and academic systems. But there is also a danger that wider dissemination of results of participatory research and local knowledge will not benefit the rural participants but rather strengthen the information base of planners, so that they can better manipulate local economies. (shrink)

Over the last few decades the arts and humanities have seen an increase in interest in questions surrounding gender. Not only did the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s see the growth of feminism as an academic discipline as well as a political movement, but in recent years there has been a huge expansion of research into Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and LGBT Studies. In essence, these disciplines all offer a critique of the system known as patriarchy, in which the ‘rule (...) of the father’ legitimates the exercise of political power and social control by men. In turn, this critique raises questions about alternatives to the patriarchal system, and it is in this context that some theorists and historians have been interested in the system known as ‘matriarchy’. In so doing, they are linking back to the work undertaken by such late nineteenth-century thinkers as the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan and, in particular, the Swiss legal historian Johann Jakob Bachofen. From 1841 to 1845 Bachofen served as Professor for Roman Law at the University of Basel, and it is with the cultural and intellectual life of this city that his work is most often connected. Now Bachofen’s outlook is well summarized by the title of his 1861 work, Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. In it Bachofen proposed that humankind had undergone four phases of cultural evolution, which he described as hetaerism; matriarchy; the Dionysian; and the Apollonian. The contrast between the Dionysian and the Apollonian exercised an influence on another thinker connected with Basel, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche ; and it was in the Nietzschean circles of the early twentieth century in German-speaking Europe that Bachofen’s work came to the fore. That this happened was due in no small measure to the figure who stands at the centre of Chiara Gianni Ardic’s new study, whose title translates into English as The Flight of the Gods: Myth, Matrarchy, and Fundamentalism in Ludwig Klages. For it was the circle around the charismatic thinker Ludwig Klages, arguably the most significant figure in a group of thinkers and writers known as the ‘Cosmic Circle’, that Bachofen’s ideas found a fruitful reception. The significance of Klages in the history of philosophy has frequently been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or even actively suppressed; so it is extremely welcome that Dr Ardic has undertaken to research so thoroughly the interest in matriarchy demonstrated by Klages and the members of the circle around him. (shrink)