Showing papers in "Feminist Review in 1989"

The Sexual Contract

Abstract: 1. Contracting In. 2. Patriarchal Confusions. 3. Contract, the Individual and Slavery. 4. Genesis, Fathers and the Political Liberty of Sons. 5. Wives, Slaves and Wage-Slaves. 6. Feminism and the Marriage Contract. 7. What's Wrong with Prostitution?

Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Abstract: In this landmark collection of original essays, outstanding feminist critics in Britain, France, and the United States present new perspectives on feminism and psychoanalysis, opening out deadlocked debates. The discussion ranges widely, with contributions from feminists identified with different, often opposed views on psychoanalytic criticism. The contributors reassess the history of Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism, and explore the significance of its institutional context. They write against the received views on 'French feminism' and essentialism. A remarkable restatement of current positions within psychoanalysis and feminism, the volume as a whole will change the terms of existing debates, and make its arguments and concerns more generally accessible.

Within School Walls: The Role of Discipline, Sexuality and the Curriculum

Abstract: Based on an in-depth study of a London comprehensive school, " Within School Walls " shows how gender formation for both girls and boys is mediated by disciplinary control, sexuality and the curriculum. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of education, women's studies, feminists with an interest in education.

'THOSE WHO DIE FOR LIFE CANNOT BE CALLED DEAD:' Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America

Abstract: But suddenly, as though taken by the wind, they disappeared. They were pulled from their houses, from work, from the university, or they waited to detain them in the silenced and solitary streets. Since then, they have ceased to exist, the slate was wiped clean as though they had never existed. We don't know how quickly they were silenced; there appeared Sthoughl to be one more order: to convert the disappeared into inhabitants of the silence and of the forgotten. Ther didn't want to give our relatives any human destiny, neither to live nor to die. But I to bel forever in doubt. (A female member of the Agrupacion, quoted in Vidal, 1982: 60)

Other Kinds of Dreams

Abstract: In 1984 a group of us who guest edited a special issue of FeministReview entitled 'Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives' stated in our editorial: 'We have attempted to provide a collection of perspectives which are in the process of continual development, refinement and growth. It [the issue] also indicated some of the diversities within Black feminism, a diversity from which we draw strength.' (Amos etal., 1984: 2). Rereading that issue now, four years later, it seems difficult to fathom where the optimism and stridency which many of us had who were active in the black women's movement has gone, and why. Where are the diverse black feminist perspectives which we felt were in the process of growth? And where indeed is the movement itself? In moments of despair one wonders if those years were merely imagined. Four years is not a long time, but it is obviously long enough to see the disintegration of what was once an energetic and active black women's movement: a movement which was given a shape and form by the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAI)) from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The history of OWAAD and its subsequent demise has been well documented and discussed, for instance by the Brixton Black Women's Group in their article 'Black Women Organizing' (Amos et al., 1984: 8>9) but suffice it to say here that there were some very real grounds for the optimism that many of us felt as we witnessed and became part of the growth of black women's groups around the country; groups that initiated campaigns around education, housing, immigration, health and policing. The end ofthe 1970s saw the demise and fragmentation ofthe white women's movement and by 1980 the countless campaigns, groups and support networks that had been build up in the 1970s and which were the backbone of the women's movement were already in disarray, as

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics

Abstract: Fifteen or so women crowded the tiny front room of the women's crisis centre. We sat in a circle, as far as that was possible, propped against cushions on the floor, perched precariously on the rickety sofa or swaddled in the effluent of overstuffed chairs. A facilitator had been imported for the occasion; she started the meeting with a simple exercise that quickly evolved to a type of ritual. The climate in the room became intense, it was an atmosphere the group of us would attempt to recreate in the months that followed. Five years later I can still recall the feelings of that time - a certain tone easily invokes the dynamics we set in motion that evening. As the 'exercise' progressed, each women spoke in turn: 'I am a white, working-class, heterosexual woman'; 'I am a white, middle-class, lesbian Jew'; 'I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual woman and a mother'. The more politically astute would add further categories -'I am a white, middle-class, ablebodied, Anglophone lesbian' - and the facilitator would nod her approval at each innovation. We were meant to be learning about the complex matrix of oppression and privilege and about our individual relationships to it. We were in fact learning a brand of identity politics though none of us would have used that term at the time. The idea was that an understanding of various oppressions and how we were affected by them or colluded with them would make us better counsellors and advocates to the women who sought our services. To some extent this was probably true, but for the most part we manipulated this knowledge within the collective itself. Together we ascribed a moral significance to our individual litanies of oppression and privilege, and though this process was never made explicit, the consequences of it were. A hierarchy of oppression was established internal to the group and the focus of our political work turned inward to address the inequalities among us. Our priorities did not reflect

The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard's Adventure Fiction

Abstract: Rider Haggard's literary career began in the 1880s when public interest in Africa had reached a peak and when he himself had just returned from six years of public service in South Africa, as secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. Public attention had focused on Africa during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Philip Curtin in The Image ofAfrica (Curtin, 1964) argues that it was Livingstone's report of 1857 of his missionary journey which had captured and retained the public imagination. With the political unrest caused by the first Kaffir wars, then the Zulu war, and the first Boer war whereby Britain was forced to the retrocession of the Transvaal after its annexation three years earlier, public interest was focused on Southern and Eastern Africa rather than Western Africa. Popular magazines of this period, such as the London Illustrated News, catered for public demand with years of continual reporting of savage African life using visual images supplied by travelling artists.

Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses

Abstract: The current housing crisis is being seriously exacerbated by central government's policies. The Housing Act 1988 consolidates the fundamental erosion of public housing as, for example, in the 'right to buy'. The purchase of council homes consolidates inequality because it benefits those in the best council accommodation more than those in the worst estates. Here people may well not even like their homes enough to want to own them or may not be able to afford mortgage repayments on even their poor-quality homes. Privatization of public housing in its various forms is working to worsen the already bad housing prospects of homeless families. The impending rise in council rents (estimated to be as much as £20 a week on some estates) will add to the factors which are forcing the more reluctant public sector tenants to join the private sector, where market forces override any policy or moral considerations. As others have pointed out, the wide-ranging changes in welfare and housing being implemented by central government are having a disproportionate effect on women, who have more restricted access to housing in all sectors, but most particularly in the private rented and owner-occupier sectors because of their lower wages (Austerberry and Watson, 1986). Women as a group are most likely to rely on public housing at affordable prices, and will therefore be most seriously affected by the Thatcher Government's policies. The women's refuge movement in Britain arose in the 1970s to meet the desperate situation of women seeking to escape from violent assaults in their homes, most commonly at the hands of their spouses. As a spontaneous initiative, the refuge movement was closely related to the women's movement, and operated mainly on the basis of the feminist ethos of the times: the principles that Women's Aid took up

‘A Bit on the Side’?: Gender Struggles in the Politics of Transformation in South Africa

Abstract: engaged in a creative dialogue to formulate policies to effect the transition to a 'post-apartheid' state and to adopt forms of organization and strategy consistent with and complementary to such policy. Until recently, however, a consideration of gender has been lacking in this exciting debate.' This is not simply the result of a dominant androcentric discourse, but must also be attributed to gaps and shortcomings in the analysis of women's oppression in South Africa. We argue that the way in which political organizations have conceptualized women's oppression and their role in struggle has limitations. This has implications for the way in which women participate in struggle, for the way in which women's interests and needs are addressed in the course of struggle, and for development policy in a 'post-apartheid' future. This paper is a constructive critique of the 'woman question' position, which has been adopted by the progressive movement in SA. This position is broadly based on the classical socialist position on women's oppression, namely that women's oppression will be eliminated in the course of the transition to socialism. In strategic terms, this involves women's concerns being subordinated to, rather than included as part of, struggles to achieve socialism in SA. Where the emphasis is on national liberation, women's struggles are likewise subsumed. We offer, as an alternative, a socialist-feminist position which sees women's struggles as a legitimate and integral part of broader struggles, which tranform not

'YOUNG BESS': Historical Novels and Growing Up

Abstract: What visions of grandeur did these words conjur up for me, an eager grammar-school swot, in the early 1960s? I was introduced to Margaret Irwin's trilogy about Queen Elizabeth I by my mother on one of our many trips to the Carnegie Public Library in Fratton Road, Portsmouth: Young Bess (1944), Elizabeth Captive Princess (1948) and Elizabeth and The Prince of Spain (1953), all chart the fortunes of the Tudor monarch from girlhood to her coronation as England's Virgin Queen. These opening lines can still thrill me, though I'm less excited by the prospect of leading a regiment. No one in my family was a royalist my mother and grandmother were outspoken antimonarchists -'about time they pensioned off Mr and Mrs Windsor' was their usual attitude. Yet perhaps the fact that my middle name is Elizabeth, my birthday shared with the Queen Mother, and I too was about twelve years old when I first encountered Young Bess, made me more susceptible. This imaginary exchange between the princess and Admiral Thomas Seymour on the flagship of her father's navy, as they watch the French fleet approaching in the Solent, was itself not a million miles

Sex and Race in the Labour Market

Abstract: We know from our everyday experience that black women have some of the worst jobs. Yet this is not quite what published statistics suggest. Official data certainly show marked differences between men's and women's jobs and between the jobs that black and white men hold, but racial differences between women appear slight in national survey results. This article attempts to unravel the reasons for the apparent conflict between the evidence of our eyes and those of surveys such as Colin Brown's. One critical difference is the fact that black women are more often full-time workers; they are also concentrated in the London area and in jobs where redundancies have been particularly high. To uncover the true scale of race inequalities these points have to be considered as well as the qualifications of black women and the inadequacies of standard socio-economic/occupational classification systems. This paper also draws out the key effects of the recession on black and white women's working lives using the evidence of the Greater London Council's (GLC) London Living Standards Survey (LLSS) between 1981 and 1986. This survey shows that black women are not only at the bottom of the pile, but that their position has got worse relative both to black men and white women over the last few years. '

Contemporary Indian Feminism

Abstract: The Women's Liberation movement in India today is so diverse that it cannot be properly described in a brief article, so the focus here shall be on its main currents and the course they have taken over the last ten years, with occasional digressions into their history. In many ways the development of feminism in India is similar to that in Western Europe or the United States: like them, India too saw a feminist movement in the early twentieth century; like them, again, the movement gradually died away after the winning of certain demands, until, recently, a new feminist movement developed out of contemporary radical movements. The sixties and early seventies saw the development of a whole spate of radical movements in India, from student uprisings, workers' agitations and peasant insurgencies to tribal, anticaste and consumer action movements. These spanned a political spectrum from Gandhiansocialist (that is, nonviolent protest, based on explicitly moral values, over specific working or living conditions) to the far left, in particular, the Maoists. The Gandhian-socialists initiated several of the first women's movements in post-Independence India (e.g. an antialcohol agitation in north India, a consumer action and anticorruption agitation in western India, and a women's trade union, also in western India). Interestingly, however, neither they, nor others, looked upon these movements as feminist, nor did they advance any theories of women's oppression. These were advanced first by two women's groups which were formed in 1975, both of which grew out of the Maoist far left. The Progressive Organization of Women in Hyderabad offered an Engelian analysis of women's subordination, and the League of Women Soldiers for Equality, in Aurangabad linked feminism and anticasteism, saying that religious texts were used to subordinate both women and the lower castes. Although the imposition of a State of Emergency on India in 1975 led to a break in most agitational activities, there was, in many ways, an intensification of theoretical discussion. In 1977, when the Emergency

To be or Not to Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering:

Abstract: Women's Liberation as a movement created a political space in which women were able to consider the whys and wherefores of motherhood. A formative tenet of the women's movement has been that there should be a conscious decision whether or not to have a child. Michelene Wandor reflects on the contrast between this questioning approach and the prevailing attitudes when she married and had two sons in the early 1960s:

Restructuring the ‘Woman Question’: Perestroika and Prostitution

Abstract: A Soviet historian writing in 1979 could confidently declare that the USSR was the first country in the world to have eradicated prostitution. 'The experience of the USSR has proved that prostitution is explained by social reasons and exists only where there is private property' (Chirkov, 1979: 214). The link between private property and prostitution had first been made by nineteenth-century socialists who argued that once economic exploitation and oppression were eliminated, relations between men and women would be transformed and sex cease to be a commodity. The Bolsheviks who came to power in Russia in October 1917 initially believed that their victory put this bright future on the immediate agenda, but the social upheavals of revolution and civil war brought instead a lowering of living standards and the return of prostitution. Paradise was postponed. In the meantime revolutionaries saw it as their duty to provide sheltered workshops and hostels for women forced by circumstances to sell themselves. A decade later with Stalin at the helm, paradise was introduced by fiat: 'recalcitrant prostitutes' were sent to terms in special camps or on the construction sites of the first five-year plans; by the mid thirties the Soviet government insisted that prostitution had been 'liquidated' and that its re-emergence in the USSR was a theoretical impossibility since the social and economic relations which gave rise to it had been buried for ever. Propaganda compared the unhappy women of the west, frequently driven by economic need onto the streets, with Soviet women who enjoyed every right and equality. Silence on the subject of Soviet prostitution continued for half a century, to be broken only at the beginning of 1986, less than a year after Mikhail Gorbachev had taken over as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Initial references to the subject were indirect and

Gender, Class and The Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia

Abstract: When feminism has raised questions about the state these have invariably also raised questions about class and the relation between gender and class. The trilogy of terms invokes a triangle of conceptual relationships. For most of its history discussion of the welfare state has privileged the relationship between state and class. It is only in the last decade that feminists have forced recognition that the welfare state is also deeply implicated in a politics of gender. The first feminist analyses of the welfare state called attention to areas of history and policy unmentioned in decades of class analysis. Thus Elizabeth Wilson (1977) pointed to the woman-to-woman character of the archetypal welfare transaction. Hilary Land (1976) showed how the Beveridge legacy reinforced a sexual division of labour taking women's dependency for granted. Linda Gordon (1976) documented state resistance to women's demands for autonomous control of their bodies and fertility. These and related themes have since been expanded in feminist accounts of a variety of welfare states (for example, Baldock and Cass,1983; Nelson,1984; Ungerson,1985). Feminist theory and politics have nevertheless remained undeservedly marginal to mainstream debate about the welfare state and its contemporary restructuring. No doubt this is partly attributable to plain intellectual sexism: not all writers want to face the fundamental questions raised by feminist social science (Harding and Hintikka, 1983). But perhaps feminist theory must also take some responsibility, both for inadequacies in the analyses offered to date and for abandoning public politics for the more exotic enticements of subjectivity, sexuality and semiotics (Segal, 1987). These important beginnings, now more than ten years old, have developed little beyond their first formulations, and while vital policy debates ensue, theoretical discussion of gender and the welfare state has lately all but ceased.

Women in Management: A Suitable Case for Treatment?

Abstract: Management, like science and engineering, is an occupational area where women are severely under represented and consequently has been the focus of a number of positive-action training initiatives designed to increase the proportion of women in management. These initiatives have tended to cluster around two different strategies. One has been to target adult women and women 'returners' and to facilitate their entry into management jobs through the provision of special management-skills training courses for women. This has resulted in the development of a number of'Women into Management' courses delivered by educational institutions in both the further and higher education sectors. A second strategy has been to target mromen already in management, or deemed of'management potential' and this has led to the development of a range of employer-sponsored management training courses, designed to facilitate women's access to management opportunities and promotion within the context of their current employment. All of these initiatives have forged extraordinarily diverse and, often, very contradictory alliances. It has brought together employers, the education sector, statutory funding bodies (especially the Manpower Services Commission1 ), and an assortment of individuals and groups including management consultants, trainers and feminists. This article examines the effectiveness of these initiatiatives in the context of women's experience of management and assesses whether women in management has been a useful focus for feminist activity.

SLOW CHANGE OR NO CHANGE?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men

Abstract: 'Love Your Enemy?', revolutionary feminists mockingly named their political manifesto of 1979, expressing the accumulated rage of some feminists after a decade of women's liberation. In it they exhorted all feminists to abandon heterosexuality at once. (Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, 1981) Another decade on, and loving or hating one's 'enemy' seems largely irrelevant to whether one accepts subordination or struggles against it. We may well hate those against whose customary power and authority over us we would never think of rebelling. We may well love those whose power and authority over us we begin to challenge and overthrow. Knowing your enemy, on the other hand, is always relevant. For the success of women's struggle against men's habitual power, knowing the forces of opposition lined up against women's full autonomy and equality will always be necessary. But feminists share little agreement about the nature of this 'enemy'.

Older Women and Feminism: A Note About My Experience of the WLM

Abstract: The sun has just risen from behind a Tuscan hill; sitting on the terrace of a crumbling farmhouse where I watched it rise, I finished the last three pages of May Sarton's A Reckoning. My lover is still asleep indoors; she arranged this beautiful place for our holiday. May Sarton wrote A Reckoning in 1978, a novel in which she explicitly discusses lesbian relationships. Without the Women's Liberation Movement, May Sarton would not have written that novel as she did, nor would I have been here with my lover. You asked me to write as a woman 'of an older generation . . . about the problems and possibilities the new feminism raised for women who had already struggled to find a place in the public world'. An old woman now, and proud of it, that personal liberation (I had a good marriage, raised five children and stayed married until I was widowed) was a most important and unexpected outcome for me of the WLM. As I understood it, I had always been a feminist. Brought up by a suffragist mother and a militant suffragette father and in a religious sect where God was equally Mother and Father, the equality of women and men was taken for granted in our household. My parents chose for my sister and me a girls school of late nineteenth-century foundation whose school song included lines such as 'Women of England, the half of the nation,/Here the full share of our birthright we claim'. It wasn't till I entered the world of work and, soon after, of marriage, that I realized just how little the world out there accepted these values on which I had been raised. When I followed my husband to a new place (not just out of wifely duty long years of war separation seemed enough) I did not find work available. Discriminated against less because I was a woman than because I was the mother of children, for ten years I was not gainfully occupied. Finally, when the shortage of qualified sociologists became Femini.st Review No 31, Spring 1989

Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression

Abstract: Pelletier was one of the most significant feminist thinkers in France before de Beauvoir. She broke with nineteenth-century feminism to develop a cultural theory of sexual difference. To articulate the case for sexual equality, nineteenth-century feminists had extolled the social value of women's traditional roles and celebrated feminine virtues against masculine vices. This was the wrong track, Pelletier thought, since it confined women to their traditional roles by rooting femininity in biology. If, on the contrary, it could be proved that femininity and masculinity were the products of culture, then feminism could make advances by attacking cultural phenomena. At the turn of the century Pelletier set out to investigate the social forms which constructed and maintained sexual difference, thus laying the foundations for a wealth of future work in sociology. Pelletier has never been given credit for this work, either by post-war feminists or by the American historians who have recently rediscovered her, only to perceive her as an 'extraordinary failure'. The purpose of this study is to retrieve the feminist framework Pelletier created.

OLDER WOMEN AND FEMINISM: Don't Say Sorry

Abstract: 'Greenham Common here we come!' we whooped, as the four of us from our older women's group piled into the car. We set offin high spirits with our packs of food and a large flask filled with Bloody Marys, sufficient to intoxicate not only us but also half the women we expected to meet at the peace camp. As our car sped past the hundreds of coaches bringing women from all over Britain, we exchanged greetings with them and felt the elation of being a part of history in the making. It was a crisply cold December day, but underfoot was still the deep muddiness that is for ever a part of Greenham memories. There were 30,000 women ringing the base and it took us hours to walk round the perimeter, stopping every now and again to chat to friends, sometimes starting up a discussion about peace or feminism with the young police who ringed us in, and at other times getting into rowdy arguments with the soldiers who wolf-whistled and yelled rude remarks from inside the fence. Like animals they brayed. Finally we settled at our chosen part of the fence and decorated it with a web of coloured wools, leaves and twigs twined around the messages we'd penned to make it clear we women wanted to be rid of nuclear weapons and foreign bases. Next to us they had tied up a banner declaring 'Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light'. Suddenly the word went round that on the hour and every hour we were to shout loudly. The cry went up - a cry that must have been heard for miles around. What a feeling of solidarity there was! For too long women's voices had been suppressed and their warnings gone unheeded. Now we were roaring like lions. That was one of the highest points of the last twenty years of feminism for me - twenty years of fun and fury, of reassessment and relearning, sisterhood and separatism, trauma and triumph. And

Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the Pseudo-Pluralists

Abstract: For years scholars and media in unholy alliance have elaborated racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes and called them science. In Beyond the Melting Pot, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1963) set the framework for all later work on North American ethnicity. It was a book of enormous influence. It had a huge impact on the media and on popular thought. The book was first published in 1963, just two years before Moynihan, as a member of President Lyndon Johnson's Cabinet, published his infamous 'Report on the Negro Family' blaming Black poverty on the emasculating power of women in 'the Black Matriarchy'. The seeds of the Moynihan Report can be found in Beyond the Melting Pot, both specifically in its treatment of Black people and generally in the centrality of the family as the major category explaining ethnic inequality. The officially sanctified stereotypes of the 'good' Italian and Jewish family are counterfoil to the 'bad' Black and Puerto Rican family. The one set of stereotypes is used against the other and both are used against women. According to Glazer and Moynihan 'the melting pot ... did not happen' because the 'group-forming tendencies' of American life have transformed ethnic groups into a new social form, acting as interest

Lessons from the Women's Movement in Europe

Abstract: [This is a talk that Frigga Haug gave in the opening session of the European Forum of Socialist-Feminists in Madrid in November 1987. The first forum, organized jointly by feminists in the Psychology Department of the University of Copenhagen and the autonomous women's group of the editorial collective of the West German Marxist theoretical journal Das Argument and its publishers Argument-Verlag, had been held in Copenhagen in October 1985. The second forum was in Hamburg in November 1986. There are accounts of these meetings in Feminist Review Nos 23 and 26. The Madrid meeting was the third, and a fourth was held near Manchester in England in November 1988. The editorial collective of Feminist Review has been represented at each forum and we shall keep our readers informed about plans in the future. Frigga Haug has been a leading spirit in the forum and this talk represents her thoughts about what it can achieve and also about the problems and future directions for socialist-feminist politics in Europe. One of the issues that she refers to in her talk is the demand for quotas, which has been discussed a good deal in the forum. In the Federal Republic of Germany and the Scandinavian countries in particular, feminists have succeeded in getting some political parties and other organizations to establish minimum proportions of women to be selected for electoral lists (where these form part of a proportional representation system), or elected to executive committees and so on. There has been much debate about whether simply getting women into these positions represents an advance for feminism: is it just tokenism? do the women become honorary men? 'Entering the structures changing the structures' was the theme of the 1988 forum and it took up many of the issues that Frigga Haug raises here about the demand for quotas.]

Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction

Abstract: This passage from Marge Piercy's Vida marks an important moment in the history of women's writing. A battered woman, Tara, has just been evacuated from her marital home and violent husband, together with her two young children. Vida and Joel, the rescuers, are political fugitives: Vida is being sought for her part in a number of bombing operations with a revolutionary organization called The Network; Joel is a draft-dodger. Both are living underground, a number of years after

Younger Women and Feminism: A Kaleidoscope of Old and New

Abstract: JM: I think if someone had asked me whether I was a feminist before the age of seventeen, I would have been unsure. I certainly did not regard myself as inferior to men, yet I suppose the usual cliche of'I'm not a feminist but . . .' applied to me. Then there was a point when I started to see my life and that of other women in the context of feminist ideas. JH: What was that point? JM: For me a catalyst was reading The Womens Room by Marilyn French (1978) at the age of eighteen. I read that at a particular time when the need to identify my anger was strong- I was working in an office which was particularly detrimental to women, where sexual harassment was rife, and that was only part of the story.