Reconfiguring Patriarchal Paradigms: The Women March and Its Role in Reshaping Gender Norms and Feminist Activism

This year, South Africa celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Women's March, which was the commencement of a strong, female force that helped setting the agenda for our country's racial liberation. Yet, while liberation is to be celebrated, it is equally important to highlight its shortcomings—the provisions set out in South Africa's relatively new constitution do not translate into a better life for all, particularly young women. There are challenges that still need to be addressed. In this open forum, I argue that some of the challenges faced by young women today are an indirect result of a crippled and inconsistent women's movement. Many young women's initiatives lack a strong analysis of gendered, rights-based discourses in their programming, and this is based on a weak women's movement and lack of engagement with feminist ideology and practice. Without a vibrant and consistent women's movement, the spirit of the 1956 women's marches is not kept alive, and the legacy of the women's movement is not passed on to the younger generation. Additionally, I shall examine the current face of women's activism to ascertain whether these structures offer an enabling environment for ordinary young women to embrace feminist identity and become gender activists.

Gender inequality is a phenomenon that occurs in society without being denied. Women 's March activists who are also gender activists that oppose gender inequality with all their efforts have a lot of experience in fighting gender inequality and various motives in facing it all. The existence of individual experience in dealing with reality influences the individual's view of seeing the social world. Like their perspective in constructing the meaning of inequality. Therefore this research aims to find out how is the construction of the meaning of gender inequality base on the perspective of Women’s March Bandung activists. This research took five informants who became activists on gender issues such as activists from Women’s March Bandung. This research is qualitative research, a phenomenological approach and using the theory of phenomenology Alfred Schutz. With data collection techniques such as in-depth interviews, observation, literature study. And triangulators as validation and validity of data. The results of the research showed that the construction of the meaning of gender inequality gave results that showed an interactive based results between inequality and gender itself in this research with more than one factor. Namely, the concept of gender and patriarchy is the cause of the occurrence of gender injustice with all of its aspects. Then how is feminism as an ideology and movement against the cases of gender inequality? Motives and experiences become factors that influence informants in constructing the meaning of gender inequality. Motives here are divided into because of motive, and in order to motive, which influences them in taking action. Motives also influence their actions to produce various experiences, such as experience before declaring themselves as an activist of gender issues and their experience when they became activists of gender issues. The conclusion of this research showed that there is also an interactive relationship between each concept and model.

On January 21, 2017, massive demonstrations in Washington DC and sister marches held in over 600 American cities drew crowds of over four million people. Popularly called 'The Women's March,' it became the largest single-day protest in American history. The feminism that shaped the consciousness of millions in 2017 had distinct roots in the 1990s. In They Didn't See Us Coming, historian Lisa Levenstein argues we have missed much of the past quarter century of the women's movement because the conventional wisdom is that the '90s was the moment when the movement splintered into competing factions. But by showcasing voices and stories long overlooked by popular culture and scholars, They Didn't See Us Coming shows that this decade was actually a time of intense and international coalition building. This activism centered around the growing influence of women of color, women with disabilities, women from the global South, and people of ranging gender expressions and identities. Together, they built a movement from the margins. Exclusion sparked action. Moments like the 1995 Beijing Women's Conference, whose major players included Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug and where Hillary Clinton famously declared, 'Women's rights are human rights,' were also stages for less-remembered but no less important calls to action. Wheelchair riders staged a 'crawl in' protest when a panel on disabilities was held on the third floor of a building with no elevator-a consciousness-raising moment that informed much of the work around disabilities for the remainder of the decade. Meanwhile, new tools like e-mail, listservs, and discussion boards brought people with common purpose into instant contact; activists working on campuses and in culture, like Riot Grrls and Guerilla Girls, organized in ad hoc and less visible ways, without figureheads but with clarity of purpose. All this work reveals a thriving (but changing) women's movement. A necessary and fresh understanding of a transformative period in the history of American and international feminism, They Didn't See Us Coming also offers an urgent road map for thinking about organizing today and continuing to build on the work of these extraordinary activists.

The effort to recover and reevaluate British working-class women's writing is still in its early stages. One writer who certainly deserves such attention is Ethel Carnie (1886-1962), first British working-class woman to sustain a long and varied publishing career. This essay will focus on Carnie's earliest publications, three volumes of poetry that appeared between 1907 and 1914, and interpret their themes and developments against backgrounds of both nineteenth-century working-class poetry and early twentieth-century labor unrest and women's suffrage agitation. (1) Carnie's poetic growth across seven years between 1907 and 1914 is striking. Although she began writing as a factory girl supported by middle-class mentors, her first volume, Rhymes from Factory (1907 and 1908), barely touches on realities of working-class life and is largely unmarked by class consciousness or feminist concerns, focusing more on imitations of Romantic odes to Nature and filled with impressive allusions to Greek and Roman classics. Gradually, however, Carnie's poetry begins to reflect both context she writes in and influence of earlier working-class poets. When her poetry reaches maturity in her 1914 volume, Voices of Womanhood, Carnie moves from ignoring her working-class background to embracing it with detailed poems dramatizing working-class women's lives as well as poems that critique ideals of art that ignore its basis in class distinctions. Like Ernest Jones and other Chartist poets, Carnie's later poems often employ a collective voice, and, like such working-class predecessors as Scottish poet Janet Hamilton, she writes with a particular awareness of issues that face working-class women. But Carnie does not merely place herself in working-class poetic tradition; she revises that tradition through her strongly feminist interpretations of traditional working-class metaphors such as slavery and motherhood that tended to align women with political passivity or, at most, allowed them virtue of endurance. In fact, I would argue that Carnie's Voices of Womanhood is unique in its careful rereading of place of working-class women and their importance to working-class politics as a whole. Carnie is distinctive in her emphatic stress on women's liberation as a necessary component of working-class and human liberation. In Voices, her dramatic monologues bring a remarkable range of working-class women's voices into play, voices which resonate with words of their foremothers and fathers and yet also strike out on their own, inspired by women's suffrage and union movements. Further, her collective voices are gender-egalitarian, and, in concert with her socialist background, offer images of a transformed artistic practice that challenges past traditions' reliance on gender stereotypes or class exploitation. 1 As a British working-class woman writer, Ethel Carnie had a unique career, both in terms of its length and its variety. Between 1907 and 1936, Carnie produced three books of poetry, eleven novels--one of which, Helen of Four Gates, was made into a silent film--four books of children's fairy tales, and one novella, in addition to numerous short stories and journalistic pieces. She also edited weekly newspaper, The Woman Worker, for nearly a year. (2) In 1913, Ethel Smyth, composer of suffrage anthem, March of Women, set two of Carnie's poems--Possession and Song of Road--to music, dedicating them to suffrage leaders Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Thus, while a website on Smyth now refers to the completely forgotten Ethel Carnie, (3) during first decades of twentieth century Carnie's work attracted considerable attention. Carnie's work is also significant because of her background and political affiliations. Born in 1886, daughter of two cotton-mill weavers, she began half-time work in mill at age eleven and left school for full-time work as a winder at thirteen. …

Concerned, meet terrified: Intersectional feminism and the Women's March

Reflections on the New Latter-day Saint Temple in Bengaluru and Religious Gender Norms

Throughout history, society has downgraded women. They have not been treated equally and did not have many rights. Women used to not have rights in education and were seen out of the norm when they wanted to seek an education or a job before the late 20th century. In the 1920s, after the Suffrage Movement women won the right to vote based on the Nineteenth Amendment. After many years, in the 1960s, women felt that the first movement was not successful enough and created a second wave of feminist movements pushing for more equality in the workforce and abortion rights. Some movements women created in the 1960s were NOW and Women's Liberation movement. Although the years have passed, women today still protest about their right of their own body and equal pay. In January 2017, over one million people protested for women's rights around the nation, which shows how women still feel downgraded by society in a way. Despite the fact that the Women's March Movement has been inspired by the Women's rights movement from the 1960s, there are many differences such as diversity, the image of women, and the goals. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Corrigendum to “Why we march! Feminist activism in critical times: Lessons from the women's march on Washington” [Women's Studies International Forum 81 (2020) 102375

Why we march! Feminist activism in critical times: Lessons from the women's march on Washington

Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories

On January 21, 2017, over four hundred cities across the United States organized sister marches in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington. In this paper, we first compare the size of these marches to that of several significant protest-event sources to show how extraordinary turnout was that day. Then, analyzing a nationally representative sample of sister marches, we present univariate statistics for both event-level characteristics (such as demographics of participants or types of speakers) and mobilization processes (such as composition of organizing teams or recruitment efforts). We situate the descriptive findings in the broader literature on protest events and the women's movement to identify how they converge or diverge from established patterns. In addition, our study shows that many event-level characteristics of the sister marches were distinct relative to a recent national study of protests. Also discussed are the ways in which our results contribute to understanding the sister marches' success in mobilizing millions of people to take to the streets.

O trabalho apresenta-se como um estudo preliminar sobre a representação das mulheres negras em Portugal durante os anos da guerra colonial (1961-1975). Seguindo as sugestões dos actuais movimentos globais das mulheres (Ni una menos, Women's March, Non una di Meno…) o artigo quer investigar a dupla hirarquização sofrida das mulheres negras e ao mesmo tempo analisar como e se as resistências contra o fascismo e o colonialismo português influíram nas representações. As imagens das mulheres negras em Portugal ao longo do século revelam corpos sexualizados, objectos à disposição dos colonizadores. Porém, centrando a reflexão na a Banda Desenhada, é preciso lembrar com Luís Cunha (1995) como a representação dos homens negros na BD mudou ao longo do século e sobretudo durante a guerra colonial. O artigo analisa os desenhos de Augusto Cid publicados em Que se passa na frente (1973), no intento de verificar se a guerra e as resistências levaram algumas mudanças na representação das mulheres feitas pelos colonizadores. Estas análises permitem reflectir sobre como os estereótipos racistas e sexistas mudaram nos últimos anos no regime fascista português, construindo as bases para interrogar a sociedade do pós-25 de Abril e ver assim se os rastos destas violências chegam até hoje.

Abortion and Human Rights for Women in Argentina Barbara Sutton (bio) and Elizabeth Borland (bio) introduction Legal abortion is one among several dimensions of a reproductive justice agenda, and yet it continues to be at the center of controversy in many places around the world. While in countries such as the United States abortion is legal but contested,1 in places such as Argentina, abortion is largely illegal, with few exceptions.2 Despite its criminalization, it is estimated that up to 522,000 abortions take place annually in Argentina.3 Abortion is also a leading cause of maternal mortality, and the clandestinity of the practice especially hurts the most destitute women.4 In this context, women's movement and feminist activists in Argentina have long advocated for the legalization of abortion. Their cause gained momentum in the last decade. Unlike the more narrow emphasis on "choice" that has been prevalent in the United States and other contexts,5 and critiqued by scholars and activists advocating for "reproductive justice,"6 abortion rights activists in Argentina have included expansive frames in their discursive repertoire, even as they concentrate on legalizing abortion. One of these expansive frames pertains to the notion of human rights. The proliferation of human rights discourse as a recognized and shared language across national borders and cultures—for example, as evidenced by international human rights treaties—suggests the need to examine how this frame works in practice and whether it has local resonance in different national contexts. According to Elizabeth Jay Friedman, from a feminist perspective, part of the power of the human rights frame derives from its ability to "provide legitimacy to political demands, given both its political acceptance and its 'machinery,' or instruments for its realization."7 Furthermore, the notion that "women's rights are human rights" was increasingly deployed in the global arena during the 1990s and is still being invoked in prominent activist spaces in different locales, including the 2017 Women's March on Washington.8 Still, [End Page 27] as we shall see, this frame is not without critics, including among feminists who have taken issue with its usefulness both philosophically and in terms of its concrete application in specific national contexts.9 Thus the question emerges: Is the human rights frame useful or viable when it comes to articulating long-standing feminist demands such as abortion rights? If so, in which circumstances? In the case of Argentina, why have abortion rights activists chosen to incorporate the language of human rights as an important component of their discursive repertoire? Within Argentina, the movement for abortion rights needs to be situated in the context of broader struggles for social justice, democracy, and gender and sexuality rights. In the last two decades several progressive laws were passed in Argentina, including legislation on sexual and reproductive health (2002), comprehensive sex education (2006), ending violence against women (2009), marriage equality (2010), and self-determination of gender identity (2012). These changes followed a historic turning point marked by a severe economic and political crisis in 2001, when a variety of social movements were agitating for new and old demands.10 However, despite legislative progress on matters of sexual and reproductive rights, legalizing abortion has proven more difficult to achieve. This article examines activist efforts to decriminalize and legalize abortion, paying special attention to the strategic use of a human rights frame. The prominent coalition to demand the legalization and decriminalization of abortion in Argentina is the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion, launched in 2005.11 By its tenth anniversary the Campaign had the support of more than three hundred organizations as well as countless individuals from all walks of life. Groups in the coalition include political parties, labor organizations, academic institutions, human rights groups, and many more. Activists characterize the Campaign as plural (comprising a diversity of individuals, social sectors, and political ideologies), federal (reaching the various regions of the country), self-organized (not directed by any external entity), and democratic (with the main direction of the Campaign determined through plenary meetings and collective discussion). The Campaign's key slogan, which has unified it when tensions and disagreement have arisen, is: "Sex education...

Introduction

From the Women's Marches to the #MeToo movement, it is clear that feminist activism is still alive and well in the twenty-first century. But how does a new generation of activists understand the work of the movement today? How are their strategies and goals unfolding? What worries feminist leaders most, and what are their hopes for the future? In Speaking of Feminism, Rachel F. Seidman presents insights from twenty-five feminist activists from around the United States, ranging in age from twenty to fifty. Allowing their voices to take center stage through the use of in-depth oral history interviews, Seidman places their narratives in historical context and argues that they help explain how recent new forms of activism developed and flourished so quickly. These individuals' compelling life stories reveal their hard work to build flexible networks, bridge past and present, and forge global connections. This book offers essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary American women’s movement in all its diversity.