Revolutionary Women Research Articles

The new feminist agenda: defining the next revolution for women, work, and family

As the first female governor of Vermont, and a lifelong feminist, Madeleine M. Kunin brings a wealth of knowledge and authority to her latest book, The New Feminist Agenda. Convinced that feminism has not lived up to its potential, Kunin seeks to infuse the movement with new vigor by redirecting its focus. And so she asks: “Can we mobilize under the banner of Feminists for Families?” And by “we,” she pretty much means everyone. “We need a revolution,” writes Kunin. “But women cannot lead it alone. We have to broaden the feminist conversation to include men, unions, the elderly, the disabled, religious groups, and the unaffiliated.” What she suggests is that feminists broaden their ranks so that they may “snatch back the words ‘family values’ and redefine them as the work/family policies necessary to sustain strong families.” In particular, Kunin calls for the institution of work flexibility across the board, for all men and women, wealthy and poor. Kunin looks to other countries for case studies where the institution of maternal/paternal leave and work flexibility has been successful. She investigates the more radical policies of the Nordic and European countries, as well as the policies of countries similar to the United States, including the United Kingdom and Canada. Her line of inquiry not only details the policies of these other countries but also asks, “Would this work in the US?” In studying the states that have successfully passed family leave policies (California, Washington, and New Jersey), Kunin details the lessons learned from those situations so that similar laws might be implemented elsewhere. The conclusions might seem simplistic or obvious—for example, “form a broad coalition,” “frame the question,” “do not accept the inevitable”—and yet, the work Kunin is doing here is important. She’s not only framing the conversation but also bringing a new generation of feminists into a discussion in which they may have never before played a part. Though at its heart this is a feminist manifesto, it’s not a polemic. Rather, The New Feminist Agenda reads like a practical guide, loaded with case studies and examples, all of which invite even the casual reader to consider that the “next revolution” may be not only definable but also attainable. OLINE EATON (May 31, 2012)

Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports

Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports

Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports

Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports

A ‘women's revolution from above’? Female leadership, intersectionality, and public policy under the Merkel government

Internationally, the number of female leaders has increased in recent years. While the rise of women to political prominence has been explored over the last two decades, we know much less about their actual decision-making. The article investigates what role Merkel's gender has played for governance during her first term in office. Has female leadership made a difference for the substantive representation of women's interests and, if so, how? This article compares and contrasts two explicitly gender-related policy areas, reconciliation and anti-discrimination policy, in a most-similar-case design. While major reforms were passed in the realm of family policy, anti-discrimination policy was considered a marginal political concern. To explain the different outcomes this analysis focuses on the identities and interests of relevant political players in their institutional context. In order to better understand female leadership and governance we use the lens of intersectionality, which has a promising theoretical and empirical potential.

Game, set, match: Billie Jean King and the revolution in women's sports

When Billie Jean King trounced Bobby Riggs in tennis's Battle of the Sexes in 1973, she placed sports squarely at the center of a national debate about gender equity. In this winning combination of biography and history, Susan Ware argues that King's challenge to sexism, the supportive climate of second-wave feminism, and the legislative clout of Title IX sparked a women's sports revolution in the 1970s that fundamentally reshaped American society. While King did not single-handedly cause the revolution in women's sports, she quickly became one of its most enduring symbols, as did Title IX, a federal law that was initially passed in 1972 to attack sex discrimination in educational institutions but had its greatest impact by opening opportunities for women in sports. King's place in tennis history is secure, and now, with Game, Set, Match , she can take her rightful place as a key player in the history of feminism as well. By linking the stories of King and Title IX, Ware explains why women's sports took off in the 1970s and demonstrates how giving women a sporting chance has permanently changed American life on and off the playing field.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Men, Women and an Integrated History of the Russian Revolutionary Movement

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Men, Women and an Integrated History of the Russian Revolutionary Movement

Men, Women and an Integrated History of the Russian Revolutionary Movement

AbstractSince its emergence as a discipline in the 1960s, women’s history has had a profound effect on the study of the past. Scholarship on women’s experiences of and contributions to the Russian revolutionary movement has increased exponentially since the publication of a number of biographies of Aleksandra Kollontai in the 1970s and 1980s and a comprehensive picture has emerged of women’s involvement in all the major revolutionary parties, as leading figures as well as rank and file activists. Despite this wealth of historical discovery, remarkably little has found its way into so‐called ‘general’ histories of the revolution. An integrated history, which is the ultimate aim of women’s history, has yet to be produced for the Russian revolutionary movement, even though recent prosopographical studies of revolutionary women have made clear the numerous ways in which men and women cooperated and interacted on a daily basis in the underground. This article explores the nature of and reasons for this failure, makes a case for why incorporating women’s experiences into the grand narrative of the Russian revolution is important and discusses how this might be achieved.

The Piety of Public Participation: The Revolutionary Muslim Woman in the Islamic Republic of Iran

The ‘woman question’ played a central role in the rhetoric and debates surrounding the Islamic Revolution in Iran, yet the precise outcome of the woman question is still debated. While some scholars argue that the revolution has repressed women by forcing them into traditional roles, others argue that the revolution has liberated women by mobilising them in the public sphere. This article claims that the revolution tried to create a female subject who was simultaneously pious and politically active, and that the creation of this particular subjectivity exceeds and defies the categories and dichotomies of earlier scholars. To make this claim, the article utilises both an intellectual history of ‘the woman question’ and the interpretivist trends of women themselves, showing how the ideal, revolutionary Islamist women was discursively produced and enforced. This unique subjectivity gives rise to a productive tension in that women are using this new identity to act in ways that are both beyond and contrary to what the Islamist regime initially anticipated. In this way, the subjectivity has destabilised so‐called Islamic norms as well as the legitimacy of the regime itself.

Revolutionary conceptions: women, fertility, and family limitation in America, 1760-1820

In the Age of Revolution, how did American women conceive their lives and marital obligations? By examining the attitudes and behaviors surrounding the contentious issues of family, contraception, abortion, sexuality, beauty, and identity, Susan E. Klepp demonstrates that many women - rural and urban, free and enslaved - began to radically redefine motherhood. They asserted, or attempted to assert, control over their bodies, their marriages, and their daughters' opportunities. Late-eighteenth-century American women were among the first in the world to disavow the continual childbearing and large families that had long been considered ideal. Liberty, equality, and heartfelt religion led to new conceptions of virtuous, rational womanhood and responsible parenthood. These changes can be seen in falling birthrates, in advice to friends and kin, in portraits, and in a gradual, even reluctant, shift in men's opinions. Revolutionary-era women redefined femininity, fertility, family, and their futures by limiting births. Women might not have won the vote in the new Republic, they might not have gained formal rights in other spheres, but, Klepp argues, there was a women's revolution nonetheless.

Spectre and/or Ideal: Representations of Revolutionary Women in the German Press, 1789-1794

As a harbinger of the modern political era, the French Revolution altered the social and political landscape of Western Europe. One such alteration was the destabilisation of borders: the geo-political border between French and German territories was under attack as was the gendered boundary between public and private spheres of activity. This instability that threatened to undermine social order in France also endangered the gender norms within German-speaking territories. German newspapers and journals played a decisive role in shaping public opinion about the Revolution by targeting revolutionary women's presence and participation in matters of politics and war. In an attempt to defend and reinforce reactionary political ideologies and social norms against revolutionary fervour that threatened to engulf German regions, the German press mobilised diametrically-opposed representations of female participants in the public sphere: ‘violent’ armed women and ‘well-mannered’ patriotic ladies. The press depicted armed women's presence in the political realm as ‘unnatural’ and ‘dangerous’ while at the same time it privileged images of the patriotic mother and wife whose support of the political cause was depicted as ‘natural’ and ‘non-threatening’. These competing images of revolutionary women, as either spectre or ideal, served as expressions of the hopes and fears Germans felt toward the events unfolding in neighbouring France and border regions of Germany. Als Vorbote der politischen Neuzeit anderte die Franzosische Revolution die gesellschaftlichen und politischen Landschaften Westeuropas. Eine dieser Anderungen war die Entstabilisierung der Grenzen: der geopolitischen Grenze zwischen Frankreich und den deutschen Landern als auch der von Gender gepragten Grenzlinie zwischen der politischen und der privaten Sphare. Diese Instabilitat drohte die gesellschaftliche Ordnung in Frankreich zu unterminieren und gefahrdete auch die Geschlechternormen innerhalb der deutschsprachigen Gebiete. Deutsche Zeitschriften und Journale spielten eine entscheidende Rolle in der Bildung der offentlichen Meinung zur Revolution, indem sie das Auftreten und die Beteiligung revolutionarer Frauen an politischen und militarischen Angelegenheiten ins Visier nahmen. Als Versuch, die reaktionaren Ideologien und gesellschaftlichen Normen gegen den revolutionaren Eifer zu verteidigen und zu verstarken, der die deutschen Lander zu verschlingen drohte, mobilisierte die deutsche Presse polarisierte Darstellungen der Teilnehmerinnen: ‘gewalttatige’ bewaffnete ‘Weiber’ und dagegen ‘folgsame’ patriotische ‘Damen’. Die Presse stellte die Beteiligung der bewaffneten Frauen im politischen Bereich als ‘unnaturlich’ und ‘gefahrlich’ dar, wahrend sie das Bild der patriotischen Mutter und Hausfrau bevorzugte und deren Unterstutzung der politischen Rechtssache als ‘naturlich’ und ‘harmlos’ beschrieb. Diese konkurrierenden Bilder revolutionarer Frauen, entweder als Schreck- oder Wunschbild, waren Ausdruck der Hoffnungen und auch der Angste, die die Deutschen gegenuber den Entwicklungen im benachbarten Frankreich und den deutschen Grenzgebieten empfanden.

Archival Triage: Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh's Notebook at the Harry Ransom Center

Archival Triage:Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh's Notebook at the Harry Ransom Center Molly O'Hagan Hardy (bio) In the spring of 2006, the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) in Austin, Texas, displayed "Technologies of Writing," an exhibition with over 200 items from the Center's collection. After passing by clay tablets from 1980 BCE and a Thai accordion-style book, I stopped at the "Power Writing" case to admire one of the smallest items in the exhibition. Tucked between a grand Napoleonic Decree and a Charles V letter appointing Hernando Cortez governor of Spain was a tiny notebook opened to Éamon De Valera's signature (Fig. 1).1 The size of the two documents served to highlight a greater contrast—the case's unifying theme, "power"—applied in starkly different ways. The decrees of Napoleon and Charles V were written manifestations of imperial dominance, testimony to Bishop Avila's observation to Queen Isabella in 1492, "Language is the perfect instrument of empire," whereas the notebook was emblematic of Ireland's efforts to caste off the shackles of imperialism in the 1916 Easter Rising. To put it bluntly, the large documents were about having power, and the small one was about a lack of power, a struggle for power. And yet, as the [End Page 31] exhibition was in part highlighting, all these items are now housed together, harmoniously coexisting in the HRC archives. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Éamon De Valera's signature. The "Technologies of Writing" exhibition invited visitors to contemplate the importance of the written record: "Writing . . . is what enables language to be copied and stored. Writing is memory. It is what makes us human" (HRC press release 2005a). Items in the exhibition testified to this curatorial claim, showcasing seminal moments in the development of the written record as analogs to human development. The exhibition provided a coherent depiction of progress and innovation, but the notebook that caught my attention challenged that depiction. Filled with affect and mystery, the piece defied the exhibition's and the archive's classification of it. [End Page 32] How that tiny notebook got into the "Power Writing" case is the story I want to tell here. The notebook serves as a meditation on the triage inherent in all archives: what gets bought by a wealthy collector and what remains in the hands of a frustrated auctioneer; what gets catalogued and what gets left in unmarked boxes awaiting the next archivist to be hired or grant to come through; and finally, what makes it to the exhibition cases to be admired by the public and what gets left on the shelves of the closed collections to languish in obscurity. In the last decade, feminist scholars such as Karen Steele, Sinéad Mc-Coole, and Margaret Ward have recovered the stories and contributions of women involved in Irish politics from 1916 to 1923. Because the dominant historical narrative had long overlooked the political and social commitments of women like Kathleen Clarke, Anne Cooney, and Linda Kearns, these scholars had to delve into the archives. In her recent investigation of revolutionary women's writing during the Irish Revival, Karen Steele explains this historical erasure: "Their stories . . . fit uneasily in the well-established nationalist narratives that prescribe women as symbol, icon, or emblem of the nation" (2007, 201). The result of this "uneasiness" is that "the women writers of advanced nationalism, who actively maneuvered around, revised, and sometimes rejected their appointed roles as passive embodiments of modest maidens, have largely been overlooked in Irish history and literature" (206). Steele's study of newspapers in the first decades of twentieth-century Ireland aims to show that these women "have left behind intricate textual legacies that challenge many of the standard narratives of Ireland's literary and political revival" (207). In No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900-1923, Sinéad McCoole looks at women who were similarly active but did not leave behind the journalistic record that Steele traces. To write her book, McCoole consulted autograph books both in the Kilmainham Gaol collection and in private collections. In her introduction to McCoole's book, Margaret Ward describes McCoole's...

Dressed to Kill and Die: Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, Gender, and Dress

This article makes a series of interlocking arguments regarding the way in which gender and dress contributed to the meaning of the terrorist act in revolutionary Russia. It argues that because “populist political terrorism” entailed political assassination targeting specific individuals, the individual attributes of both terrorist and victim acquired symbolic significance. The terrorist act was troped as a duel that staged a contest of superior and legitimate violence - and thus of sovereignty - between the regime and its opponents (representing “the will of the people”). Women were prominent participants in terrorist acts throughout the revolutionary period, and the relative novelty of female political violence enhanced the spectacularity of that violence. Female terrorists, however, opted for an anti-spectacular spectacularity, or renunciatory display, that was rendered by a means available to all women: through their dress. While period memoirs and literature, as well as the historiography, are equally enthralled by the self-renunciation of revolutionary women and characterize it as a moral/ideological stance, the female terrorists’ “great renunciation” in fact became the dominant trope in the (self) representation of the female Russian revolutionary terrorist. Textual reencodings of the relationship between dress and female gender in discourses of different orders, including the self-writing of female terrorists, find in “the great renunciation” the womens’ right to act politically - “to kill and die” in public - as well as the moral legitimacy of their act.

Citizenship, Ethnicity, Gender, and Mobilization

Citizenship, Ethnicity, Gender, and Mobilization María Teresa Fernández Aceves (bio) Jocelyn Olcott . Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. ix + 337 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8223-3653-7 (cl); 0-8223-3665-0 (pb). Shannon Speed, R. Aída Hernández Castillo, and Lynn M. Stephen, eds. Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. xxiv + 280 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-292-71417 (cl); 978-292-714440-3 (pb). Susan Berger . Guatemaltecas: The Women's Movement, 1986–2003. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 157 pp. ISBN 0-292-70944-7 (cl); 0-292-71253-7 (pb). Elaine Carey . Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xvii + 254 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8263-3544-6 (cl); 0-8263-3545-4 (pb). The recent expansion of scholarship on women's mobilization in Mexico and Latin America has revealed a neglected history of female activism, as it has incorporated a gender perspective and new ways of thinking about politics, social movements, social and political change, citizenship, feminism, ethnicity, the rise and fall of the Corporatist State, and how neoliberal policies and globalization have been challenged and resisted. The four works under review tackle complex relations among class, gender, identity, ethnicity, generation, and state policies in the history of Latin American politics. Studies of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the postrevolutionary process of state formation (1917–1940) have shown that popular sectors gained political voice and space through the process and influenced the policies and forms of the new state, while at the same time being integrated into it within new frameworks of domination. Analyzing mainly the roles of peasants and workers, this literature has not truly examined women's politics in the Mexican Revolution, a topic that new scholarship addresses. Jocelyn Olcott's Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico exemplifies this growing historiography. Olcott examines women's political involvement after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 by combining rich [End Page 162] detailed archival information with sophisticated theoretical discussion about citizenship, politics, power, negotiation, and everyday life. Olcott gives especial attention to what happened with organized progressive and radical women during the rise and development of Cardenismo (1928–1940) in three different regions—La Comarca Lagunera, Michoacán, and Yucatán—where the Communist Party organized peasant and labor women's leagues. Olcott refers to Cardenismo as a "revolutionary" regime, with traditional and paternalist political and gender policies that promoted socialist education, land redistribution, and labor reform by recognizing the collective rights of disenfranchised groups—peasants, workers, and women. The national Cardenista project flourished during the pinnacle of Mexico's Popular Front. Olcott contextualizes and contrasts these cases with the expansion of women's movements and the campaigns for female suffrage in Mexico during the 1910s and 1930s. She contends that progressive and radical women became central actors in the mobilizations of the 1930s and in the consolidation of postrevolutionary Mexico because they sought "to make the revolution meaningful for ordinary Mexicans" by claiming revolutionary citizenship (3). Olcott particularly opens up scholarly debates on the meaning and significance of citizenship by reconstructing local cases and contrasting this data with theoretical discussions. She points out that between 1917 and 1934, the characteristics of revolutionary citizenship experienced important transformations and setbacks and two questions dominated the meanings and qualifications for citizenship: "what is the proper balance between the rights and the obligations of citizenship, and to what extent is citizenship a status versus a practice" (4). This book argues that men and women "experienced revolutionary citizenship as contingent, inhabited, and gendered" in accordance with local, regional, and national processes and transformations (6). Olcott argues that Mexican activists used three contrasting forms of citizenship—a liberal rhetoric of suffrage, traditional practices of patronage, and revolutionary promises of popular mobilization—to obtain certain benefits. Olcott affirms that Mexican women's mobilization followed patterns similar to the regional processes of revolutionary state formation. Incipient feminist associations and congresses also debated how to define citizenship from a gender perspective: "Should they strive to create a place for the citizen-mother, or should they highlight women's...

Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (eds.), The Women's Revolution in Mexico, 1910–1953 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. viii+233, $82.50, $29.95 pb.

Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (eds.), The Women's Revolution in Mexico, 1910–1953 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. viii+233, $82.50, $29.95 pb.

Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics and Power in Modern Mexico

Editors Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano have assembled a crisp, well-integrated set of articles focused primarily on the experience of women during and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Indeed, the title is somewhat misleading, because the collected articles deal far more with questions of gender identity and the use of ideas about masculinity and femininity in the popular classes’ negotiation with the state in the aftermath of armed upheaval than they do with the history of sexuality. The essays are revised versions of papers presented at a 2001 Yale University conference on women and gender in the Mexican Revolution. Framed by a foreword by Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsivais, introduction by Mary Kay Vaughan, and epilogue by labor historian Temma Kaplan, the collection’s short essays by scholars based in Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States provide an overview of women’s activism during the revolution and in labor movements afterwards; the deployment of gendered imagery through literature, song, and cinema chronicling the achievements of the revolution; and considerations of transgendered figures who established new identities over the course of the conflict and its aftermath. Researchers interested in the social, political, and cultural history of women in twentieth-century Mexico will want to consult this collection.The volume is organized into three sections. Gabriela Cano’s examination of the life of Amelia/Amelio Robles initiates the book’s first section on revolutionary culture. Cano identifies the steps that a young woman from rural Guerrero state took in order to become a man and fight as a revolutionary soldier, living life after the conflict as a man and seeking recognition as a male veteran many years later. The analysis establishes the characteristics that were regularly recognized as female and male in southern Mexico during the middle of the twentieth century. In her consideration of the work of postrevolutionary filmmaker Emilio “el Indio” Fernández, Julia Tuñón shows that indigenous women were all too often represented as victims, docile or too strong for their own good, but rarely as more complex or nuanced figures. Anne Rubenstein’s depiction of the social tensions sparked by Mexico City women’s adoption of flapper hairstyles and dress reveals the fears held by men who contested the independence and challenge to gender norms embraced by “las pelonas,” as those with short hair were called.In the second section, essays by Patience A. Schell and Ann S. Blum examine the gendered assumptions that underpinned reform activities related to vocational training and family formation in Mexico City. Stephanie Smith’s review of official and popular attitudes toward divorce in the radical state of Yucatán nicely contextualizes the debates that occurred there and demonstrates the international implications of the state’s liberal divorce laws, which attracted great numbers of foreigners seeking quick remedies to unfortunate relationships.The articles on the gendered nature of labor organizing in the third section are particularly strong. María Teresa Fernández Aceves’s nuanced exploration of union politics related to tortilla production in Guadalajara reveals the complex ways in which male union bosses marginalized women workers to the least skilled tasks, even as they built a political machine based on an integrated approach to the food-making trades. In her study of trade unionism among coffee workers in Veracruz state, Heather Fowler-Salamini uses interviews with former bean sorters to elucidate the persistence of paternalism, despite the radicalism of the revolutionary years, and to reveal that women who sought employment in the coffee industry were regularly regarded as promiscuous because of their proximity at work to men who were not family members. Susan Gauss’s analysis of gender politics within the Puebla state textile industry shows how industrial work in that region became identified with the image of a nonviolent, politically active male work force, effectively marginalizing their female co-workers.In a final section, Kristina A. Boylan’s work on Catholic women’s organizing provides an important contrast to the previous section’s consideration of more radical women, while Jocelyn Olcott’s overview of women’s political organizations sheds light on the ideological and class differences that frequently challenged a unified women’s movement in Mexico. An essay by anthropologist Lynn Stephen considers women’s participation in more recent collective action, including the 1994 Zapatista uprising, and identifies areas that reflect change and continuity with respect to preoccupations with gender in regional and national politics.Instructors will find many of the individual essays in this collection useful for helping students appreciate the ways in which the Mexican Revolution was or was not a revolution for women. For those undertaking research, this engaging collection complements other recent work on the topic, including a number of monographs on gender politics and cultural politics in the Mexican Revolution, and essays in the recent collection The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910 – 1953, edited by Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

Jocelyn Olcott.Revolutionary Women in Post‐Revolutionary Mexico.:Revolutionary Women in Post‐Revolutionary Mexico.(Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies.)

Jocelyn Olcott.<i>Revolutionary Women in Post‐Revolutionary Mexico.</i>:Revolutionary Women in Post‐Revolutionary Mexico.<i>(Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies.)</i>

Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico

JOCELYN OLCOTT. Revolutionary Women in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 337. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95

JOCELYN OLCOTT. Revolutionary Women in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 337. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95

The Women's revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953

The Women's revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953

Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Jocelyn Olcott

Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Jocelyn Olcott