Contemporary Women's Movement Research Articles

From 24/7 To 9-5: The Co-Optation And Indigenization1 Of Feminism By Women Rights NGOS In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

The study explores the nature and form of the contemporary women's rights movement utilizing a contextual understanding of feminist activities accentuated by selected women NGOs. The thematic working areas of these organizations were aimed to gauge the status of women in the region to see how coherent and impactful the women’s movement is to achieve its goals in the presence and pressure of government and donor policies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 participants working in Peshawar-based women/feminist NGOs using the purposive sampling technique. Herbert Blummer's theoretical model of stages of social movements was used to validate the findings. The study findings revealed that the contemporary women's rights movement in the region of Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) is diverse, fragmented and its existence is dependent on the efforts made by individuals and organizations. Furthermore, the women's rights struggle has been NGOized because NGOs are donors dependent for their activities, and volunteerism became a rare virtue as feminism is commercialized and carried out mostly for social media stories and for attacking more funding for the NGOs. Street activism which used to be the backbone of the Pakistani women’s movement has now changed into paid activism. In short, the definition of the contemporary women's rights movement is different from the water-tight definition discussed in the textbooks. It is rudimentary that may potentially be evolved into a vibrant and organized movement subject to favorable circumstances.

The potential for dialogical transversal politics and coalitional solidarities in the contemporary women's movement in Turkey

This study focuses on the fragmentations based on exclusionary identity politics within the women's movement in Turkey. Through in-depth interviews I conducted with women activists and academics in Turkey in 2014–2015, I explore activist women's positions on identity issues, such as gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as their views of each other. I argue that seeing identities as unalterable deepens the fragmentation within the movement, creates a false sense of homogeneity within groups and exacerbates activists' tendency to stay in their small groups. In order to move away from the limitations of identity politics, I offer adopting dialogical transversal politics in understanding differences among women, whereby activists can find a realm aside from the exclusionary structures of universalism and identity politics, and suggest coalition building as a realm where transversal politics can cultivate and in which a degree of solidarity within the women's movement in Turkey can develop.

Specialised Parliamentary Bodies: Their Role and Relevance to Women's Movement Repertoire

In the past, feminist scholarship was often highly sceptical of institution-building within existing political and governance institutions. This may have contributed to a neglect of the new phenomenon of specialised parliamentary bodies with a gender equality remit. This article explores whether such parliamentary bodies can be an effective means of promoting the substantive representation of women and whether they can be understood as part of the diverse repertoire of contemporary women's movements.

Book Review: Majority-Minority Relations in Contemporary Women's Movements: Strategic Sisterhood

Book Review: Majority-Minority Relations in Contemporary Women's Movements: Strategic Sisterhood

Institutional ethnography: An emerging approach for health and nursing research

IntroductionInstitutional ethnography (IE) is critical form of social founded by Dorothy Smith. Institutional ethnography can be described as Marxist-feminist, reflexive-materialist, qualitative method of inquiry (Hussey, 2012, p. 2). Since Smith's early writings during the 1970s, IE has continued to be shaped and developed by Smith along with growing group of well-respected researchers and theorists from North America and, increasingly, other parts of the world. Institutional ethnography publications listed on Scopus have more than doubled for each five year period from 1990, to total of 184 in August, 2014. Institutional ethnography is now being used across wide diversity of disciplines, including health, social work, law and justice, and education, because of its relevance to exploring and making visible the relationship between the everyday activities and experiences of people, and the institutional construction of the social world. The term institutional ethnography explicitly connects an emphasis on the structures of power - institutions - with the everyday practices and experiences of people at the local level - ethnography (Appelrouth & Edles, 2011).This paper introduces IE as valuable research approach for health and nursing in New Zealand and adds to previous articles on methodology published in this journal. The theoretical underpinnings of IE as an alternative sociology, and the key concepts of the ruling relations and experiential knowledge in the everyday world are described. Finally, brief overview is provided of how IE is being used for research on nurse practitioners in rural primary health care.Dorothy Smith (b. 1926), Canadian sociologist and feminist activist, began her work developing an alternative sociology during the second-wave of the contemporary women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s. She has been described as a worldrenowned Marxist feminist scholar and activist and formidable intellect (Carroll, 2010, p. 9). Her work in founding IE stemmed from what Smith described as the disjuncture she experienced early in her career between being sociologist in male dominated and gendered institution, and single mother of two young children (Smith, 2005). She objected to the ways that traditional positivist sociology categorised people into designated groups, including housewives and single mothers, and then sought to explain their activities, behaviours, or their culture. She believed that this generated ideology not knowledge, and served further to perpetuate oppression and discrimination, particularly for women (Smith, 1974, 1990a). She identified that her own experience and knowledge of her everyday life was disconnected from the official or authoritative representations of her world and work as sociologist (Bisaillon, 2012). However, as her work progressed Smith updated her terminology from sociology for women to that of sociology for people clearly signalling that we must begin our understanding of the social world from the experiences or standpoint of people as they go about their everyday lives (Smith, 2005).Today, Dorothy Smith still holds position as professor emerita at the University of Toronto, as well as adjunct professoratthe University ofVictoria, British Columbia, where she continues to develop IE with scholars and students from across the world.Institutional ethnography: An alternative sociologyInstitutional ethnography is an alternative sociology. It describes how the social world is (ontology), the knowledge required to understand our social world (epistemology), and how we go about collecting that knowledge (methodology). The key premise of IE is that our social world, and our everyday activities in it, are controlled and coordinated textually and discursively by the institutional or ruling relations of our society. The web of ruling relations is produced by the ruling apparatuses that are those institutions of administration, management, and professional authority, and of intellectual and cultural discourses, which organise, regulate, lead and direct contemporary capitalist societies (Smith, 1990b, p. …

Strategies of Contentious Action: A comparative analysis of the women's movements in Poland and the Czech Republic

ABSTRACTThis article compares the contemporary Czech and Polish women's movements and demonstrates that there are significant differences in their strategies. While the Polish women's movement is more active in mobilizing the population and uses both transactional and participatory strategies in order to achieve its goals, the Czech women's movement focuses more on transactional activities, such as lobbying, setting up cooperation with national and international organizations, and negotiating with the authorities, as well as on educational activities. The article explains why these differences occur and why during the last decade the Polish women's movement has attempted at mobilizing the population successfully, while the Czech women's movement has not tried to organize any mass mobilizations. Based on interviews with women's organizations in Poland and the Czech Republic, we argue that institutional factors can explain these differences. This includes such factors as the role of the reformed, postcommunist women's organization in each country and the political opportunity structures. The most important political opportunity structures include a law in Poland that force the parliament to debate a law proposal if civil society organizations can get 100,000 signatures, as well as the facility for residents to allocate 1% of their income taxes to a registered civil society organization of their choosing. Another important difference in the political opportunity structures has been the types of institutional arrangements made to accommodate European Union's demands for gender mainstreaming.

Disciplining the “Second World”: the relationship between transnational and local forces in contemporary Hungarian women's social movements

During the past 20 years, Hungarian women's movements have been increasingly reaching out to their transnational counterparts for inspiration and support. The activists' growing exposure at the transnational level has profoundly affected the thematic foci that they select for mobilisation. Generational and information-technology changes have both added to the increasing focus of Hungarian women's organisations on domestic violence. Such a shift has channelled attention away from welfare-related issues for the sake of resonance and transnational support. This article investigates these trends and changes, suggests reasons for their emergence, and addresses their implications.

Majority-minority relations in contemporary women's movements: strategic sisterhood

Dedication Preface Acknowledgements Foreword Women's Movements, Gender Equality, Citizenship and Ethnic Diversity in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom Women's Movements in Norway, Spain and the UK Citizenship, Recognition and Justice Political Opportunities and Violence Against Women Researching Women's Movements Towards Strategic Sisterhood on Balanced Terms: Recognition, Participation, Inclusion and Solidarity Seeking Policy Impact Conclusion Bibliography Appendices Index

Researching women's movements: An introduction to FEMCIT and Sisterhood and After

This article offers an overview of two research projects that are concerned with investigating the histories, social organisation and impacts of women's movements. It introduces FEMCIT (Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: the impact of contemporary women's movements), a transdisciplinary, cross-national European research project, and Sisterhood and After, a UK-based oral history project, outlining their specific research questions, foci and research designs. The article raises a number of key issues that arise in researching women's movements that are then taken up in the eight paired papers that follow: method and research design; difference and diversity; place, space and nation; and understanding impact.

From Fashion Colours to Spectrum Analysis: negotiating femininities in mid-Victorian women's magazines

This article argues that supplements are indispensable to Victorian periodical research, for together with their parent periodicals, they function to construct specific cultural values. The authors' case study of the Treasury of Literature (1868–75), literary supplement to the Ladies' Treasury (1857–1895), examines how this addendum enabled the Ladies' Treasury to negotiate the tensions between the restrictive social and domestic roles prescribed to Victorian middle-class women on the one hand, and women's own varied everyday experience on the other. Conceived just as the contemporary women's movement was beginning to gain strength, its scientific and informative content, reminiscent of the ‘enlightened’ women's journals of the late eighteenth century, provided a perfect counterpart to the more traditional values of domesticity which predominated in the main magazine. As such, it provides further insights into the unstable construction of femininities during this critical period.

Sexual Slander and the 1965/66 Mass Killings in Indonesia: Political and Methodological Considerations

Indonesia has been haunted by the “spectre of communism” since the putsch by military officers on 1 October 1965. That event saw the country's top brass murdered and the military attributing this putsch to the Communist Party. The genocide that followed was triggered by a campaign of sexual slander. This led to the real coup and the replacement of President Sukarno by General Suharto. Today, accusations about communism continue to play a major role in public life and state control remains shored up by control over women's bodies. This article introduces the putsch and the socialist women's organisation Gerwani, members of which were, at the time, accused of sexual debauchery. The focus is on the question of how Gerwani was portrayed in the aftermath of the putsch and how this affects the contemporary women's movement. It is found that women's political agency has been restricted, being associated with sexual debauchery and social turmoil. State women's organisations were set up and women's organisations forced to help build a “stable” society, based on women's subordination. The more independent women's groups were afraid to be labelled “new Gerwani ” as that would unleash strong state repression. This article assesses the implications of these events for the post-1998 period of Reformasi and reviews some recent analyses of 1965, state terrorism and violence and reveals blind spots in dealing with gender and sexual politics. It is argued that the slander against Gerwani is downplayed in these analyses. In fact, this slander was the spark without which the bloodbath would not have happened and would not have acquired its gruesome significance.

Women's Rights and Gendered Spaces in 1970s Boston

Women's Rights and Gendered Spaces in 1970s Boston Daphne Spain (bio) The status of women and the nature of cities have changed dramatically since World War II. In fact, the two phenomena are related. By pursuing greater rights, the contemporary women's movement created opportunities for women to claim urban space for daily use. The struggle for reproductive control took shape in women's health clinics. Establishing the right to personal safety in the home produced shelters for victims of domestic violence. And the quest for rights to an independent identity was expressed through women's centers, feminist bookstores, and banking facilities. These were voluntarily gendered spaces created by and for women, and new to American cities and suburbs. Despite schisms caused by internal arguments over organizational structure, goals, sexuality, class, and race, feminism had revolutionary consequences for the rights of all women, not the least of which was the opening up of the city. Using interviews and archival data for 1970s Boston, I expand our understanding of the Second Wave by exploring its spatial consequences. Women's Rights and Gendered Spaces: 1970s Boston During the 1970s feminists in Boston declared their rights to their own bodies by establishing women's health clinics and domestic violence shelters. In doing so, they wrote a modern chapter in the distinguished history about how women have shaped the city. Almost one hundred years earlier, in 1877, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union opened on Boylston Street as a center to promote women's intellectual and economic independence.1 Elite and middle-class women of the era also sought a role in urban politics. They became "municipal housekeepers" who did more than clean up the city the way they cleaned their homes. By learning as much as they could about local government, these women influenced policies that improved air and water quality, public health, and children's [End Page 152] welfare. Other women of privilege established settlement houses that became "neighborhood living rooms" where immigrants could take English and citizenship classes and escape filthy tenements. Settlement house residents also lobbied for housing reform that had a major impact on the regulation of tenement construction. Women often worked together through voluntary associations to provide places of respite in the urban landscape. Members of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) opened vocational schools and boardinghouses to educate and protect young women living in the city away from their families. According to historian Sarah Deutsch, women in the late nineteenth century "took a hand in altering the map of the city and defining its meaning."2 Women's successes in making themselves visible and viable in the urban realm were remarkable, given the general male intransigence to their presence. For example, wealthy male patrons of Chicago's Hull House cut off donations when Jane Addams backed Eugene Debs and the workers in the 1894 Pullman railroad strike.3 Yet Hull House persevered for many more decades as a major site of Progressive reform.4 Barkeepers vigorously opposed temperance, yet the Woman's Christian Temperance Union closed thousands of saloons in its battles for Prohibition. When women marched for suffrage, some men were so outraged that they attacked demonstrators. On March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, more than five thousand suffragists took to the streets of Washington, DC, on behalf of their cause. Mobs heckled, tripped, and shoved the women, sending more than one hundred to the hospital and injuring hundreds more.5 Yet women eventually won the vote in 1920. Much had changed for women by the twentieth century, but much remained to be done. The women's movement of the 1970s, known as the Second Wave, continued the fight for women's rights.6 Legalized abortion, personal safety, and equal pay and credit opportunities were the most important issues. In the process of pursuing gender equality, the feminist movement created new openings for women in the postwar city. This article illustrates how women in the Boston metropolitan area established their place in the city during the height of the contemporary women's movement. Spaces created by and for women provided...

Contemporary Women's Movements in Hungary: Globalization, Democracy, and Gender Equality. By Katalin Fábián. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. xvi, 396 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. $65.00, hard bound.

Contemporary Women's Movements in Hungary: Globalization, Democracy, and Gender Equality. By Katalin Fábián. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. xvi, 396 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. $65.00, hard bound. - Volume 70 Issue 1

Managing Organizational Emotions: Framing Feelings of Illegitimacy in the Radical Women's Prison Movement

This article examines how activists manage the potentially deleterious emotions that arise in social movement organizations. Using data from a case study of an organization in the contemporary radical women's prison movement in California, I explore how feelings of illegitimacy are managed and sublimated by activists, during the course of organizational life, to sustain participation in the movement. Drawing on framing theory, I find that organizational frames serve as mechanisms that manage and focus activists' feelings, delimit movement strategies, and inspire and legitimate collective action.

Women's activism and feminist agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua

List of Maps and Tables Preface Acknowledgements List of Acronyms 1. Women Must Occupy and Give Themselves the Place They Deserve Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua 2. After Acknowledging Differences, We Must Also See What We Have in Common Feminist Contestations and Commonalities across First World/Third World, African, and Latin American Divides 3. Doing a Revolution Doesn't Stop You from Being Machista Birth of Revolutionary Women's Organizations and the Limits of Marxism-Leninism in Mozambique and Nicaragua 4. Women are Not Cows-We Are Active Agents of History Autonomy Struggles Emerge in Mozambique and Nicaragua 5. The Oppressed Woman Is Easier to Deal With Political Participation, Legal Reforms, and Cultural Constraints in Mozambique and Nicaragua 6. I Can Anything a Man Can Do Military Participation, Economic Production, and Women's Emancipation in Mozambique and Nicaragua 7. There Are No Alternatives: Is This Really Democracy? Democratization and Civil Society in Mozambique and Nicaragua 8. Partners in the Home, at Work, and on the Street Contemporary Women's Movements and Emergent Feminisms in Mozambique and Nicaragua Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

Through the Looking Glass: Process and power within feminist movements

Jessica Horn provides an account and analysis of a plenary at the AWID Forum in 2008 that looked at the internal dynamics and state of organizing within contemporary women's movements. It explores common experiences and tensions around negotiating power within movements and between activists themselves, and the ways in which the institutionalization of women's activism has affected these dynamics.

Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement (review)

Reviewed by: Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement Marcia Hernandez (bio) Reger, Jo , ed. Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement. New York: Routledge, 2005. 320 pp. In academic circles the debate over whether or not a new wave of feminism exists has largely been replaced with how women, and increasingly men, are actively engaged in the third wave. Feminism is now also part of the mainstream dialogue regarding women's rights, although the range and diversity of ideologies represented under this umbrella term are often reduced to simple stereotypes in popular culture. Outside of gender studies and women's studies departments there is limited understanding that feminism as a social movement, an academic field of study, or a political identity, represents a multilayered and complex way to understand and respond to social inequality. Since it is through popular culture that most contemporary students learn about feminism, it is not a surprise that many resist identifying with the label as a personal political ideology and lack a clear understanding of how the changes brought by the second wave affect them. Jo Reger's Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement provides an engaging read for students who have come of age enjoying the benefits of feminism yet are unsure how to interpret what feminism means for their own lives. Different Wavelengths offers a refreshing blend of chapters featuring personal observation, textual analysis, and theoretical arguments. As Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor state in the introduction, "we need to understand where we've been and where we're going." Taken as a whole, the chapters in Reger's text provide a response to this challenge. The book is easily organized for readers into separate sections as replies to often-cited criticisms of the second wave, ranging from exclusivity to out-of-date activist techniques to its distance from contemporary culture. In the first section, "Who Is Third Wave? Issues of Diversity," the authors explore various forms of diversity within the contemporary feminist movement, challenging the notion that only white, middle class, middle-aged women are engaged. Florence Maatita's chapter on Chicana feminism explores the ways in which young Latinas negotiate their race and ethnic [End Page 241] identity as well as their gender identity while finding a racial and feminist voice in college. Her respondents remind readers that personal and political identities are complicated, fluid, and often based within a specific context of family, culture and peer groups. Karen Schilt's "The Punk White Privilege Scene" argues that despite the rhetoric of inclusion within the third wave, white, middle-class women remain fully ensconced within a privileged position due to resources at their command and racial privilege. Together Schilt's and Maatita's chapters offer a wonderful contrast for students to analyze the accomplishments of second-wave feminism and the challenges that remain for feminists in the third wave. The second section, "Mothers and Daughters? Relations between the Second and Third Waves," deals with the ways in which feminists connect with each other in efforts at social justice yet also disconnect due to differences in social location, practice, and ideology. Stephanie Beechley's article, "When Feminism is Your Job: Age and Power in Women's Policy Organizations," offers an empirical analysis of what for some young feminists may be an all-too-familiar description of life in an established women's organization. Astrid Henry's chapter titled "Solitary Sisterhood" may also touch a personal chord with students who struggle to engage with feminism, unsure of where or how they fit into it. The stance of many third-wave pioneers to declare feminism an individualistic, "on-your-own-terms" personal identity created a multitude of opportunities for young women to engage in activism. Students may enjoy debating Henry's various points regarding how diversity and individuality are framed according to third wavers. Section three, "What Brings Change: Tactics of the Third Wave," offers an interesting selection for students to understand contemporary strategies for social change. Most students will be familiar, at least in passing, with the themes in Reger and Story's chapter on campus productions of the Vagina Monologues. Although the Monologues offer...

Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement

Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement

Trends in the Contemporary Women's Movement in Taiwan

Trends in the Contemporary Women's Movement in Taiwan

The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women's Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance

This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, critique, and transform ignorance.