The Ambiguities of Power in Russia, the United States, Japan, and France

Abstract

The Ambiguities of Power in Russia, the United States, Japan, and France Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert This issue explores how women have accessed power, authority, and influence in different national and imperial settings, the ways they mobilized around women’s issues, and the implications of their strategic compromises, whether implicit or explicit. While the question of power is well-trodden ground in women’s and gender history, the six articles in this volume find it in unexpected places and treat it as politically ambiguous, contingent, and based on other exclusions. We begin with an article that analyzes how educated and reformist Muslim women articulated their own understandings of women’s rights and equality with reference to Islamic law (Sharia). Another article examines multiple pulls on women’s activism—on behalf of the pro-life movement. Two contributions discuss women’s suffrage, or the demand for formal political power through voting rights. A pair of articles considers how women’s authority is made manifest in domestic space, whether through charity and hospitality, or in accordance with such discourses on domesticity as home economics. We close with one final article and two book review essays that treat a different theme: the reproductive body, scientific discourses about reproduction, and the embodied experiences of gender and sexuality in conjunction with class and race. Marianne Kamp’s “Debating Sharia: The 1917 Muslim Women’s Congress in Russia” introduces many of the central themes of this volume: women’s rights, women’s activism, and the alliances and compromises that may seem necessary for influence in a rapidly changing political landscape. At the Muslim Women’s Congress, female scholars and activists engaged in a heated debate over women’s rights. Since the Provisional Government had granted all women and men the vote following the 1917 Revolution, women’s suffrage was not at stake. Their discussion centered instead on women’s rights within Islamic law and, specifically, on the vexing question of polygyny, the practice of one man having multiple wives. While all participants in the debate concurred that Sharia, rather than secular law, was the field in which women’s rights should be contested, an important question of interpretation remained. One group of reformers held that even if women’s and men’s rights in Sharia might not be “identical,” they could still be “just” and acknowledge women’s dependence on men. Another group assumed that “when Sharia was rightly understood, women’s and men’s rights were identical, and that any inequalities found in Sharia should be rejected.” The former group wished to limit rather than abolish [End Page 7] polygyny. Their strategic rereading of the Qur’an revealed that polygyny was sometimes necessary—for example, when the first wife could not have a child—and the problem was simply that men had abused it in the interest of their own “pleasure.” The latter group applied a historicist reading of the Qur’an to argue that because polygyny only made sense in the social context in which the Qur’an had originated, polygyny should be abrogated. In the end, the Congress sanctioned the position of the first group. While Sharia could be “re-interpreted to emphasize justice,” the words of the Qur’an could not be ignored nor could polygyny be abolished. But at the mostly male All-Russia Muslim Congress that followed the Women’s Congress, the discussion took an altogether different turn: the “feminist call to ban polygyny was at cross-purposes with the Congress’s nationalist assertion of autonomy.” Delegates were more concerned with preserving Sharia as an autonomous space in which only Muslims had authority and therefore entrusted the decision to the Muslim Spiritual Directorate. In the end, neither Sharia nor Muslim autonomy prevailed. When the Communist Party began its aggressively anti-Islamic policies, Sharia courts and other Islamic institutions were shut down. Women’s rights were to be built instead on a secular communist basis. Karissa Haugeberg’s “‘How Come There’s Only Men Up There?’: Catholic Women’s Grassroots Anti-Abortion Activism” clearly demonstrates the potentially disempowering consequences of strategic choices made by activist women alluded to by Kamp. Her article begins with the anti-abortion activism of...