The essays are grouped in three sections. In Part I Vogel considers the relationship between feminism and socialism.

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

L’article aborde la construction de la « question des femmes » au sein des espaces socio-culturels interconnectés du Royaume grec et des communautés grecques ottomanes. Le contexte est celui de la transition (post)-ottomane, la destruction des structures impériales et la montée de l’État-nation. Durant cette période, de nouvelles divisions sociales et culturelles s’affirment, notamment celle entre public et privé. Les discours nationalistes grecs construisent une représentation des femmes dans la sphère publique qui insiste sur leur contribution aux objectifs et (...) stratégies nationales. Ces discours laissent cependant une marge de manœuvre aux femmes. L’article montre l’émergence de nouvelles formes d’engagement dans l’éducation, la philanthropie et le monde littéraire où femmes écrivaines, journalistes et militantes interviennent directement. Leurs écrits dans les magazines féminins ont un impact auprès du public féminin lettré. (shrink)

I would like to thank Barbara S. Kanner, Occidental College, for her inspiration is establishing the importance of historiographical and bibliographical essays in women's history and Mary Elizabeth Perry, University of Southern California, for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. My students in ‘The Reformation Debate on Women’ at the Harvard Divinity School and in ‘The Renaissance’ and ‘Woman and Man in Western Thought’, at Occidental College fostered lively discussions on the ‘image’ of the Renaissance woman. (...) In particular, I would like to thank Muffy Barman, Occidental College, for an Occidental Independent Study in 1986, parallel to my research on the woman question in the Renaissance. At the Huntington Library Seminar on Women's Studies, 6 December 1986, I gave an address on 'The Renaissance Debate on Women' which will appear in the 1986–1987 Proceedings. (shrink)

In this book, Mary Townsend proposes that, contrary to the current scholarship on Plato's Republic, Socrates does not in fact set out to prove the weakness of women. Rather, she argues that close attention to the drama of the Republic reveals that Plato dramatizes the reluctance of men to allow women into the public sphere and offers a deeply aporetic vision of women’s nature and political position—a vision full of concern not only for the human community, but for the desires (...) of women themselves. (shrink)

The Women's Movement has greatly benefitted women in the workplace. What about in their encounters with medicine? This paper reviews the history of physicians’ attitudes toward women and then considers three contemporary areas of medicine in particular: health research relevant to women, health policies, and women's success at working their way into the medical profession. The picture that emerges is somewhat less than rosy. The androcentrism that has been so glaring in the history of medicine has not entirely gone away. (...) Women and their concerns are still considered less important than men's, and women are valued more for what they provide than for who they are themselves. These problems are mostly not the fault of specific physicians or other individuals; they are, rather, systemic problems—the result of social practices and institutions that work together quite impersonally to favor the interests of men over women. Correcting them requires listening to women's voices better than medicine, or bioethics, has so far managed to do. (shrink)

This article considers for the first time the progressive Portuguese periodicals A Voz Feminina and O Progresso from a transnational perspective, with particular reference to contemporary debates about women’s suffrage in England as well as the wider emergence of transnational women’s networks around that time. It discusses the epistolary contact of the Principal Editor, Francisca Wood, with key radical figures such as Lydia Becker in England, Marie Goegg in Switzerland and André Léo in France, through an analysis of relevant editorials, (...) articles and correspondence received from abroad and published in the pages of the journals. Furthermore, it casts light on how Francisca Wood and her enlightened husband, William Thorold Wood, invoked the ongoing support of prominent men such as John Stuart Mill for the cause of women’s rights. Such a pioneer early feminism in Portugal was particularly remarkable in the 1860s – a context preceding the socio-political and cultural debates staged publicly in the 1871 Casino Lectures by the “Geração de 70” – which, furthermore, all but sidelined the “Woman Question.” The article concludes with a brief discussion of whether, notwithstanding Wood’s invisibility at the point of her death in 1900, she may have been behind a symbolically significant cultural intervention: the first translation of Jane Eyre into Portuguese, published in instalments from 1877 onwards in O Zoophilo. (shrink)

(2000). The treatment of the ‘woman question’ in radical utopian political thought. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 116-139.

Ces deux excellents ouvrages forment un continuum bien qu’ils puissent être lus séparément. En effet, ils portent sur des périodes différentes : 1400-1870 et 1870-1920 mais qui se suivent et traitent du même thème : « The Woman Question in France ». De plus, l’architecture de chaque livre est identique et débute par plusieurs pages de citations de protagonistes de l’époque, ce qui d’emblée rend la lecture vivante et nous fait comprendre que l’accent est mis sur les voix (...) des femmes et dans une... (shrink)

There have, by now, been a number of thorough-going critiques of what has variously been called the ‘equality’, ‘equity’ or ‘liberal’ approach to understanding ‘the woman problem in technology’ by those who would prefer to focus on ‘the technology question in feminism’. Most of these critiques adopt deconstructivist techniques to expose the limitations of equality approaches, including, most centrally, their assumptions about the neutrality of technology and the limited nature of equality programmes designed simply to increase access for (...) women to that technology. However, the critiques themselves have so far failed to come up with convincing alternative interventionist strategies, either because the universalizing tendency of their theoretical perspective gives rise to interventions that fail to deal with the diverse and fragmented nature of women's experiences and needs, or because recognition of this diversity and fragmentation leaves very little common ground on which to build successful intervention strategies. This article addresses this dilemma in the context of computing and IT education and draws on empirical research on women's experiences of computing and IT in two different educational settings where issues of gender difference and equality were managed in very contrasting ways. It then offers some suggestions for how both a critical and constructivist discourse on technology might be made to coexist in educational programmes designed to promote gender equality. (shrink)

The classical social contract tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has come under significant scrutiny from those interested in the place of women in the philosophical canon, and Thomas Hobbes has been indicted along with John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. These philosophers have been accused of holding misogynistic beliefs and, more damningly, founding their theories on sexist and patriarchal assumptions. This paper explores the extent to which Hobbes deserves his place on the list of the condemned.

This paper proposes that in developing jurisprudence on women’s rights, the African Commission will need to ask the woman question, particularly the African woman question. The woman question requires a judicial or quasi-judicial body to always put woman at the centre of any decision with a view to addressing the historically disadvantaged position of women in society. Asking the African woman question means examining how the peculiar experiences of African women have (...) been ignored by laws rooted in patriarchy across the region. Although the Commission has handled few cases directly dealing with women’s rights, the paper suggests that the Commission can draw inspiration from decisions of other regional and international human rights bodies such as the European Court on Human Rights and the Committee on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women on how to ask the woman question. The paper recommends that in line with feminist reasoning, there is a need for the African Commission to develop a consistent gender-sensitive approach in dealing with cases that may have implications for women. In essence, the African Commission must ask the African woman question when dealing with cases on the enjoyment of women’s fundamental rights. (shrink)

Cet article analyse la connexion entre genre et émotions à travers un corpus d’environ cent articles publiés dans les premières rubriques entièrement dédiées à la « question féminine » dans des journaux soudanais entre 1950 et 1956, juste avant l’indépendance du Soudan (1956). Les auteurs, à la fois hommes et femmes, cherchent à brosser un portrait de la « femme nouvelle », « moderne et heureuse », et la contrastent avec celle « arriérée », prise au piège des « (...) coutumes obsolètes ». Ces portraits contiennent des suggestions plus ou moins voilées à propos du régime émotionnel que la « femme moderne » devrait adopter. Cet article se propose de tracer la généalogie de ces régimes émotionnels genrés et des stratégies narratives contradictoires déployées pour « émouvoir » le public de lecteurs. (shrink)

En Russie, après 1917, « la question des femmes » et la « la question sexuelle » ont fait l’objet de politiques publiques qui se voulaient éclairées par les sciences sociales. Après avoir été décrétées résolues sous Staline, ces questions ont pu être partiellement réouvertes avec le Dégel. Cet article explique comment, sur le temps long, ces sciences sociales supposées « socialistes » se sont distinguées des sciences « bourgeoises » moins par leur épistémologie que par la priorisation (...) ou l’exclusion de certaines problématiques, au gré des évolutions politiques du régime. Ainsi, les recherches sur la sexualité et le contrôle des naissances, avant-gardistes dans les années 1920, sont devenues relativement illégitimes après le dégel. Dans les années 1960-1980, c’était surtout la baisse de la natalité et le « double fardeau » – domestique et professionnel – des femmes qui faisaient problème. Les comportements familiaux semblaient étrangers à la logique de la planification, et les sciences sociales étaient travaillées par la perspective d’un art de gouverner d’orientation plus libérale. Il s’est alors formé un clivage qui est toujours d’actualité, entre une conceptualisation du changement social en termes de « modernisation » – démographique, sexuelle... – à accompagner, ou de « crise » à enrayer. (shrink)

‘With woman’, ‘woman centred’ and ‘in partnership with women’ are new terms associated with midwifery care in Australia, and the underlying philosophy has emerged both as an antidote to the medicalisation of pregnancy and in a bid to reacquaint women with their natural capacity to give birth successfully and without intervention. A reorientation of midwifery services in the 1990s, a shift towards midwifery‐led care (MLC) and the subsequent introduction of direct entry midwifery programs all contributed to this new (...) direction. Central concepts are a focus on the childbearing woman and a valuing of women's experiences. While this philosophical re‐alignment has been applauded by many midwives in terms of maternal empowerment and improved autonomy for midwives, there are nonetheless some concerns that, with its emphasis on normality, midwifery‐led care is in danger of becoming an exclusionary model. Particular concerns include meeting the needs of a growing cohort of women, those with ‘high risk’ pregnancies, and the educational adequacy of direct entry midwifery programs. To date, there has been no thorough evaluation of this emerging midwifery philosophy in Australia. In order to open the debate, this paper aims to initiate a discussion of ‘with woman’ midwifery care as it applies to Australian practice. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

In recent scholarly works on automata, a major topic of discussion has been the man-machine, or the idea of considering a human being in mechanical terms.1 The notion has been deployed in the various fields of biology and physiology, in the use of the machine analogy in the description of the body; in psychology and sociology, in the elucidation of individual as well as mass behavior; and in philosophy, in the understanding of the mind in relation to, as well as (...) reaction against, the concept of machinery. The man-machine has, in fact, been a central idea with which Western culture has pondered the nature of humanity.But what of the woman-machine? When we speak of the man-machine, is the word 'man' used merely as a... (shrink)

Doctors have always thought, it seems, that the female body is more susceptible to illness than the male. Ancient medicine founded this dogma on the doctrine of elementary qualities, in attributing to woman a cold and humid constitution. As heat is the principal instrument which nature uses to produce the forces of the body and to maintain them, it must be lacking in woman, as is proved by her weakness, the softness of her limbs, her lack of external (...) sexual organs and the crudeness of her menstrual blood. If the Aristotelians and the Galenists diverge, in the Renaissance and in the XVIIth century, about the nature—fertile or not—of the “female seed,” they agree to pledge the female body to illnesses. Such a predisposition is explained by the female constitution: its coldness and its humidity, as well as retaining women's strength badly, contribute to giving them a “soft, slack body, of rare texture,” little suited to letting the body fluids, of which it is full, circulate correctly; their blood, corrupted by humidity, instead of being properly heated like it is in men, accumulates, blocks up the too small blood-vessels and causes all the illnesses of which they are the habitual victims. To this it is necessary to add the pathogenic importance of the womb, “a part of the body so sensitive and so easily upset, that its least indisposition causes an infinity of strange and almost unbearable evils.” The indispositions which affect this part of the body are always in relation to humidity or dryness, that is with “the two excrements” which it receives: sperm and menstrual blood. Whether, insufficiently impregnated by the virile liquor, “it mounts to the liver and other higher parts of the body to suck humidity from them until it becomes moist,” or it retains for an abnormally long time the seed, which decays inside it; or the periods are suppressed, or on the other hand they are produced too often; all womens illnesses are a question of impeded or excessive discharge. (shrink)

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis—“woman,” “femininity,” etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A “discursive” approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis—“woman,” “femininity,” etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A “discursive” approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis-"woman," "femininity," etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A "discursive" approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

This anthology contextualizes key feminist texts and ideas by linking them with the transformation of public opinion brought about by the late Victorian debate on marriage, motherhood and women's right to an independent life. Included are Mona Caird's controversial The Morality of Marriage ; debates between feminists, traditionalists and anti-feminists on marriage, divorce and the New Woman, and selected reading from New Woman fiction, both feminist and anti-feminist, which reproduces the media debate on morality in literature.

Christine Battersby rethinks questions of embodiment, essence, sameness and difference, self and "other", patriarchy and power. Using analyses of Kant, Adorno, Irigaray, Butler, Kierkegaard and Deleuze, she challenges those who argue that a feminist metaphysics is a a contradiction in terms. This book explores place for a metaphysics of fluidity in the current debates concerning postmodernism, feminism and identity politics.

In ____Womanizing Nietzsche,__ Kelly Oliver uses an analysis of the position of woman in Nietzsche's texts to open onto the larger question of philosophy's relation to the feminine and the maternal. Offering readings from Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud and Lacan, Oliver builds an innovative foundation for an ontology of intersubjective relationships that suggests a new approach to ethics.

In this paper I argue that the idea ‘becoming-woman’ is an attempt to transform embodied experience but, because it is unable to concern itself with mechanisms, structures and processes of sexual differentiation, fails in this task. In the first section I elaborate the relationship between becoming-woman and Deleuze's ‘superior’ or ‘transcendental’ empiricism and suggest that problems can be traced back to an underlying Humean empiricism. Along with Hume, Deleuze, it seems, presumes a bundle model of the object which (...) dissolves things into episodic objects of perception and leaves the subject unable to distinguish between fanciful objects, erroneous perception and any other thing. The empiricist ontology thus has consequences for epistemology and leaves us unable to question the conservative tendencies of common sense. As an alternative to transcendental empiricism, the second section considers how transcendental realism, with its ontological commitment to the mind-independent character of things, may provide a more fruitful and productive line of enquiry. Given that there is such a choice, in the third section I speculate as to the specific desires that drive such philosophical abstraction; abstraction which culminates in the non sex-specific figure becoming-woman whilst disguising the mind-independent character of the mechanisms, structures and objects that affect the subject. So I conclude that, despite all appearances of radicalism, the philosophical model ‘becoming-woman’ – aligned as it is with schizo-processes and the philosophical loss of mind-independent things – is more of the same and sexual difference remains a hidden term. Due to this, I believe that feminists should view it with suspicion. (shrink)

The first-ever compilation of articles that highlights the intersection of Derridean and feminist theories--a work that represents the extensive and diverse response feminist theorists have had to Derrida, particularly to the issues of gender, identity, and the construction of the subject.

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

The woman being is a human being. This paper critiques gender politics and questions the mistreatment, the second class status and some of the socio-cultural gender roles of women. It posits critical education of men and women, sensitivity and sensibleness as the surest way out of the quagmire.