Role Of Women In Politics Research Articles

Political Roles of Women in the Legislative and Presidential Election

Female representation in parliament is decreasing in 2014, from 18 to 17 percent. This is not good news at all. It deteriorates further with no focus on women’s status in each of presidential candidates. Status of women, sexual minorities, and other vulnerable groups were not becoming focus of issues in debates. Women’s movement in near future and in the long run shall fight hard to tackle previous problems. This 2014 General Election has been a powerful tool as well for women to participate and to voice their concern regarding issues of equality and justice. This study unearths how women usher peaceful campaign during the parliament and presidential elections—showing their political engagement to Indonesia as democratic state.

Women's Political Role and Poverty in the Educational Dimension. A District-Level Analysis in India

This paper contributes to the debate on the effects of women’s political representation. It has a threefold objective: (1) to analyse whether the gender of elected politicians is relevant to the educational achievements of residents of the Indian districts in which they were elected; (2) to test whether politicians are more sensitive to the needs of people of the same gender; (3) to explore the possible channels through which these relationships operate. By applying instrumental variable regressions to a data set obtained by merging individual data with district-level political variables, we concluded that a 10% increase in women’s political representation at district level may produce a 5.9% increase in the probability of children completing primary school. In a further analysis, we found a striking difference in the results when broken down by gender: women’s political agency affects the education of a significantly larger number of girls than boys. Finally, none of the channels we examined relating to school buildings and the coverage of the Mid-Day Meal scheme helped explain the above relationship. This is due in part to poor-quality data. In conclusion, these findings provide further evidence of the benefits of women’s political representation and should be taken into consideration in the current debate on the Women’s Reservation Bill in India.

URGENSI PENDIDIKAN POLITIK BAGI PEREMPUAN

Abstract: Through political education of women are expected to know and understand the rights and obligations as citizens, so that women have a significant role in developing democracy and intelligent in determining political attitudes. It is time women are placed as the subject in the political arena, not solely as a political object, which appears to be merely exploit them for elite interests or political party. Conditions, due to a lack of political education for women. For that a good political education, are expected to materialize the political role of women in the life of society, nation and the state towards the realization of a democratic civil society and justice. Thus the urge strengthening women's political rights should be increased primarily through the regulation / legislation in favor of women. Empowerment of women in various aspects of social life and civic culture, very urgent to increase women's political role.

Women's Participation in Rural China's Self‐Governance: Institutional, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Factors in a Jiangsu County

We examined women's participation in village self‐governance in an Eastern Chinese county. While they have more or less been universally participating in voting in village elections, their representation in the village self‐governance bodies remains low, and their political aspiration and sense of empowerment remain limited. A wide range of factors contribute to this situation. In general, women enjoy a much lower level of education and are economically dependent upon male members of their families. Social gender, or the stereotypes of women as less competent and are expected to stay away from public affairs, plays a very significant role too. Institutional problems, such as frauds and irregularities in election, lack of government's attention in promoting women's political roles, and the inability of state‐sponsored women organizations to influence local governance, all contribute to underrepresentation and inadequate participation of women. Policy responses must look beyond women's electoral participation and address these many deep‐rooted issues.

Louisa Stuart Costello and Women's War Poetry

bicentenary of the publication of Anna Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) is an appropriate time to consider women's war poetry the early years of the 19th century. In Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Bad auld attacks the consequences of British empire-building and the Tory establishment that propelled it. criticism Barbauld faced on publication of the poem focused on the impropriety of a woman's voicing political dissent and writing political satire. This critical reception is instructive, Barbauld (who had after all 1793 published an antiwar prose treatise--Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation [...]) was widely respected as an educator, critic, intellectual and (Behrendt [2009]70). In the unstable social and political environment of the early 19th century, women poets who shared Barbauld's concerns, but who could not afford--either financially or reputation--to endure the same criticism, manipulated the presentation of their war poetry to safeguard publication and commercial success, as the writing of Louisa Stuart Costello (1799-1870) demonstrates. Four years before Barbauld published Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Amelia Opie had produced The Warrior's Return, a poem with a similar message, which she criticised the bloodiness of the wars with France, and die political vanity that had led Britain to enter unnecessary wars. reviews Opie's but she avoided the censure that Barbauld suffered by using the historical distancing of medievalism. medieval screen to her work is thin and the contemporary references obvious, but it provides the safeguard that the poem is a romance about the Crusades, a sentimental work of the type going out of fashion, which was one of the main criticisms made by unfavourable reviewers. Beneath this surface is an anti-war polemic: Sir Walter returns from the Crusades to die Holy Land after fifteen years away at war to the grotesque discovery that he had unwittingly killed his own son a battle for disputed honours over a fallen Saracen chief. In 1808, when the poem was written, the wars with France had been raging for fifteen years, the age of Sir Walter's son, the son he kills through Opie's italics reinforce this emphasis, He fought like a hero! but vainly he fought. message is clear, that political vanity has caused Britain to enter many unnecessary wars and sacrifice her own sons. Opie's Lines on die Opening of a Spring Campaign, from the same volume but written about the contemporary war, also uses this play on in vain and vanity: here the speaker asks Spring to stay away as it will come in vain amid the fighting and the bloodshed, and not to waste itself on the war-torn world. Repetition of in vain is also a feature of lines 11-38 of Eighteen hundred and Eleven, the frantic man at strife is Bounteous vain, the proud mother is Fruitful vain, nature works in vain against Famine, Disease and Rapine. Opie's use of historical distance meant that, while critical reception was unenthusiastic, she avoided the response Barbauld endured four years later. In doing so she had set a precedent for literary descendents throughout the century. Other women turned to Opie's example the post. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven backlash, and used medievalism to question the wars, and women's political roles. Felicia Hemans, like Opie, demonstrates a particular interest the position of women war, that across cultures and through history women have been the victims of men's power struggles and battles, as she explores most obviously Records of Woman (1828). young poet was fascinated by the war: yet, beneath the apparent simplicity of many of her patriotic eulogies, Hemans's work often manifests the same tension that was apparent public opinion of the day, between the enthusiasm that made iconic heroes of Nelson and Wellington, and the concern about the wars that had dominated the first quarter of the century. …

Gender Disproportion And Political Representation: Case Studies Of Egypt And Morocco

The study was carried out Gender Disproportion and Political Representation: Case Studies of Egypt and Morocco. It is the topic which encompasses socio-politicaleconomic conditions of the women in Arab countries, and their different obstacles in achieving the appropriate status in society. This paper investigates the role of Arab women in politics. Content Analysis was used as a methodology for analysis of different theoretical approaches. Morocco and Egypt were selected as a case study in order to analyze women political conditions in Arab world. Combinations of patriarchy, conservative religious interpretations and cultural stereotypes have built a very strong psychological barrier among Arab population regarding women’s participation in the public sphere. The hierarchy of patriarchal tribal structure of several Arab societies in the history was another factor that contributed to this state of affairs. It is argued in the paper that the quota system is the only solution which may provide better representation of women in political sphere. At the end, researcher summed up by giving some suggestions for the prosperous future of Arab world.

Municipal Housekeeping in the American West: Bertha Knight Landes’s Entrance into Politics

Abstract As Seattle’s mayor in 1926, Bertha Landes made history as the first woman elected to lead a large city in the United States. To respond to the complicated demands of female political leadership in the early twentieth century American West, Landes pragmatically appealed to expectations of both public men and domestic women by making arguments from both sameness and difference. Using a rhetoric of municipal housekeeping to justify her entrance into political office, Landes paradoxically asserted beliefs about the difference between men and women in leadership, while simultaneously suggesting her political service did not differ from a mans. Although her municipal housekeeping arguments essentialized women as moral and different, they also assisted her entrance into politics and attested to women’s suitability for political leadership. She simultaneously employed a rhetoric of Western masculinity and sameness that reified masculine conceptions of political leadership, and suggested that womens roles in the nation functioned similarly to mens roles, thus expanding the role of women in politics beyond exclusively municipal housekeepers. This analysis not only illustrates the use of sameness and difference arguments in elective office, but also how they oxymoronically functioned together.

Municipal Housekeeping in the American West: Bertha Knight Landes's Entrance into Politics

As Seattle's mayor in 1926, Bertha Landes made history as the first woman elected to lead a large city in the United States. To respond to the complicated demands of female political leadership in the early twentieth century American West, Landes pragmatically appealed to expectations of both public men and domestic women by making arguments from both sameness and difference. Using a rhetoric of municipal housekeeping to justify her entrance into political office, Landes paradoxically asserted beliefs about the difference between men and women in leadership, while simultaneously suggesting her political service did not differ from a man's. Although her municipal housekeeping arguments essentialized women as moral and different, they also assisted her entrance into politics and attested to women's suitability for political leadership. She simultaneously employed a rhetoric of Western masculinity and sameness that reified masculine conceptions of political leadership, and suggested that women's roles in the nation functioned similarly to men's roles, thus expanding the role of women in politics beyond exclusively municipal housekeepers. This analysis not only illustrates the use of sameness and difference arguments in elective office, but also how they oxymoronically functioned together.

Brechtian Journeys: Yvonne Rainer's Film as Counterpublic Art

The experience of watching Yvonne Rainer's two-hour film Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980) is best described as highly challenging. Combining a wide array of cinematic techniques (shots of exhausting duration, reverse motion bordering on the slapstick, investigative pans across still lifes, asynchronous picture and sound, the layering of visual, audio, and written narrative and storytelling), Journeys addresses suicide as a personal and social phenomenon, the role of women in politics, terrorism as a response to monopolies of power, and psychoanalysis as part of a culture that relies on the repetition of individual and social experience as a mechanism of appeasement and stability, to name just a few themes. By means of its strategies of distanciation no less than its complex and topical content, the film opens a participatory space for the critical assessment and discussion of political and aesthetic conduct in the late 1970s.

Cracks in the ‘Mightiest Fortress’: Jamaat-e-Islami's Changing Discourse on Women

AbstractIslamists' ideas about the position of women are readily invoked to portray them as ‘anti-modern’. The operating assumption is that Islamism (mutatis mutandis Islam) sanctions gender hierarchy. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic research and written sources of the Jamaat-e-Islami of India, founded in 1941, I question such assumptions. While defending Islam against the ‘epidemic’ of westernization, Maududi (b. 1903), the Jamaat's founder, called women ‘the mightiest fortress of Islamic culture’. Invoking the Quran and Prophetic traditions, he argued that women should not step outside of the home, and must veil themselves from head to toe. He stood against any political role for women. For decades, Maududi's interpretation went uncontested. However, from the 1970s onwards many members of the Jamaat began to critique Maududi and offered an alternative reading of Islam. They argued that women could indeed leave the home, assume key economic and political roles, unveil their faces, as well as act in films. By highlighting such voices and analysing the sociological coordinates of the contestations within the Jamaat, I underscore the transformation in the Jamaat's discourse. I conclude by discussing whether the critiques of Maududi by his own followers inaugurate an alternative discourse of Islamic feminism.

Interwar Fascism and the Franchise: Women's Suffrage and the Ligues

This article addresses the fascist leagues' policies and philosophies regarding the political role of women, particularly the question of female suffrage. Unlike the par liamentary Right, which did not attempt to mobilize women until 1935, the fascist leagues envisioned women as key political players as early as 1924. Often invoking female work and sacrifice during the war, as well as women's supposedly superior moral aptitude, the leagues presented themselves as the forces that truly respected women's potential and importance in the state. To the leagues the domestic identities and concerns of women were not only compatible with fascist notions of politics, but rendered women potentially better fascists and citizens. Leaders of the organizations expected women to be wives and mothers, producing more children for France, while at the same time the leagues advocated that women engage in national politics and world affairs.

Elite Women in English Political Life, c. 1754-1790 (review)

Reviewed by: Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754-1790 G.M. Ditchfield Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754-1790. By Elaine Chalus. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2005. vii, 278 pp. £50.00. ISBN 019928010X. During recent years there has been a series of biographical studies of prominent aristocratic women of the eighteenth century, focusing particularly on their political influence. Frances Harris on Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, Amanda Foreman on Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire and Stella Tillyard on the Lennox sisters are familiar examples, while the whig hostesses of Holland House continue to exercise fascination. Although each of these women, and particularly the duchess of Devonshire, feature predictably in Elaine Chalus's meticulous and well-researched book, that book takes a much more thematic than a biographical form. Its purpose is set out succinctly at the start: it aims 'to perform the dual historical tasks of recovering women as political figures and reintegrating them to form a more comprehensive picture of the political culture of the eighteenth-century political elite' (p. 12). Each of these objectives is manifestly achieved. The definition of 'élite' for these purposes is essentially (and understandably) aristocratic. Women who themselves held aristocratic titles or who were related to the peerage were the most likely to be able to exert political influence, especially as the number of seats in the house of commons which came under peerage control is generally reckoned to have increased during the eighteenth century. A high proportion of Dr Chalus's book, accordingly, is devoted to parliamentary elections and electioneering (both of its terminal dates are general election years), and there are substantial sections on women's political roles (confidante, adviser, agent, partner), on female access to, and solicitation for, patronage, and the importance of social politics. Dr Chalus has no difficulty in providing ample evidence of the almost unavoidable engagement in politics on the part of many female members of key propertied families. Their motives for such involvement - the promotion of the electoral or professional interests of a brother, son or husband - are neatly demonstrated. Examples include the nomination of male voters in burgage and freeholder boroughs to support a family connexion, Lady Irwin's prolonged struggle with the eleventh duke of Norfolk for control of the borough of Horsham and Elizabeth Montagu's efforts on her husband's behalf in Northumberland in 1760. A particularly interesting section examines the female pressure for patronage exerted upon the long-suffering duke of Newcastle (with a success rate in excess of 50 per cent). Readers of this journal will not be surprised to find detailed treatments of Lady Susan Keck's campaigns in the celebrated Oxfordshire election of 1754, and of the duchess of Devonshire's high-profile contribution to that of Westminster 30 years later. This sort of female involvement was not new in the eighteenth century but it was facilitated by the regularity of parliamentary sessions after 1689 and of general elections after 1694. Even though elections became less frequent after 1716 and the number of contested constituencies declined sharply from the 1740s, opportunities remained at local level for the exercise of influence through entertaining, canvassing and charitable bequests. There are cogent observations on [End Page 253] the semi-legitimacy which convention conferred upon such female political involvement, although any explicit departure from the women's subordinate role in a male polity was likely to be met with slander and innuendo, often of a sexual nature. Partly for this reason propertied spinsters and widows were at an advantage in taking initiatives; her widowhood from 1746 undoubtedly facilitated the evangelical endeavours of Selina, countess of Huntingdon (who, oddly, receives only one reference in this volume). Dr Chalus argues convincingly that the motives for such extensive female politicking were mainly traditional and may be found in 'a combination of personal, familial, or factional reasons' (p. 15). The expectation that the daughter and/or the wife of a major landowner would play a part in the advancement of the family's economic, social and possibly ecclesiastical interests clearly weighed heavily on many élite women. Those women 'were also motivated by personal interest, sheer ambition, the excitement of being part of...

Diferenças de gênero na República Dominicana, 1994-2004: dois passos à frente, um passo para trás?

A lenta mudança da natureza da diferença de gênero responde tanto a mudanças sociais, como urbanização, educação, o ingresso das mulheres na força de trabalho e a democratização, quanto a esforços combinados por movimentos sociais e líderes políticos para a ampliação dos direitos da mulher. Esses fatores claramente tiveram impacto na República Dominicana na última década, influenciando as diferenças de gênero no país. Avaliamos a natureza e a evolução das diferenças de gênero na Rep. Dominicana mo período de 1994 a 2004, utilizando dados de surveys nacionais - Demos surveys - realizados em 1994, 1997, 2001 e 2004. A análise desses surveys indica que aspectos do que tem sido denominado uma 'diferença de gênero tradicional' permanece no país com relação ao engajamento cívico, interesse político e atitudes democráticas. Ao mesmo tempo, essa diferença desaparece com relação à participação eleitoral , e uma 'diferença moderna de gênero' emerge pela primeira vez com relação às atitudes sobre o papel da mulher na política. Idade e escolaridade têm efeitos diferenciais significativos e substantivos no conjunto de atitudes de homens e mulheres dominicanos nesse período.

Neopatriarchy, Islam and female labour force participation: A reconsideration

This article reconsiders the cross‐national determinants of female labour force participation in Islamic settings. It explores a neopatriarchal perspective using in dicators of the role of the government and the political role of women. The study shows that government plays a significant role in determining female employment. Islamic ideology as a cultural variable also contributes significantly to the model. Thus, the results indicate that Islamic ideology per se is not the only factor determining female labour force participation; the political atmosphere and economic development also contribute. In main stream sociology, Muslim countries have usually been classified as outliers on gender relations and demographic factors. These countries generally have lower‐than‐average levels of female labour force participation (FLFP) and higher‐than‐average levels of fertility and mortality relative to non‐Muslim nations at the same level of economic development (Weeks, 1988). For example, in 1995, female employment in Islamic countries was 21.7% while other Muslim and non‐Muslim developing countries, it was 38.1% (World Bank World Tables, 1999). The popular press and much of the academic literature interpret Islam as the “secluder” and “excluder” of women which, in turn, inhibits women’s integration into the formal labour force. What is missing from the analysis is the role of the state in those societies as the main employer and investor. In many Islamic societies, the patriarchal system has never been weakened but rather modernised into a system referred to in this study as the neopatriachal state (Moghadam, 1992; Sharabi, 1988). Neopatriarchy will be defined in this article as traditional patriarchy, especially embedded in religion, which gets appropriated by the state to reinforce its rule. In the following section the meaning of each of these factors and how they affect female employment opportunities is explored.

The Female in Aristotle's Biology: Reason or Rationalization (review)

Reviewed by: The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization Tony Preus Robert Mayhew . The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xi +136. Cloth, $28.00. Aristotle's views on the ethical, social, and political roles of women have repeatedly drawn the attention of scholars. Often, the central focus of the discussion is Politics I.13, 1260 a13, where Aristotle says that although women have a deliberative faculty, it is akuron, "without authority." A charitable (from our point of view) interpretation of that word would have him mean that women are capable of ethical and political decision-making, but fourth-century BCE Athenian social arrangements prevent their exercising that capacity outside the home. However, many readers of Aristotle suppose that he means to indicate a natural difference between men and women, some mental or moral inferiority of women. A few passages in the Politics support that interpretation (e.g., Pol. I.2, 1254 b13, 12.1259 a40), but those do not provide a "scientific" or "biological" grounding of female inferiority. That sort of thing one would expect to find in the biological works. Mayhew's monograph is an exposition of the errors and exaggerations of some of those writers, from the usually careful Martha Nussbaum to the usually unreliable Luce Iragaray. The least cautious critics of Aristotle's views on women typically fasten on his views on sexual generation; as Mayhew shows (ch. 3), such critics either claim that Aristotle believed that women contribute only a place for generation to occur, or that women contribute totally passive matter. Mayhew is able to demonstrate, rather easily, that either claim depends on total ignorance or total misunderstanding of the actual contents of the Generation of Animals. In Aristotle's opinion, the female provides proximate matter for the offspring, something that is almost able to develop into a new individual and needing only the impetus and form provided by the male contribution. Having started with the "form/matter" distinction, it is pretty obvious that the female provides the matter (a bird egg is all of the matter that goes to make the chick), and the male is necessary for reproduction to [End Page 109] occur, so it must be a source of movement (at least) and some element of form (since the offspring partially resembles its male parent) that comes from that source. (For older discussions of this issue, see my Science and Philosophy in Aristotle's Biological Works [Hildesheim, 1975], ch. 2, and J. Morsink, "Was Aristotle's Biology Sexist?" J. Hist. Biol.12 [1979]:83-112, neither noted by Mayhew). But what would be the ethical or political implications of that distinction? Aristotle says that it is "better" to provide form, but there's no straightforward way to conclude from that difference that a woman's deliberative faculty is less authoritative than a man's, any more than there is any straightforward way to argue from the fact that a woman might spend some time pregnant that a permanent pay differential is justified. And Aristotle does not try to make that sort of argument, as a matter of fact. Mayhew deals with most of the other arguments that some have derived from the biological works to support their view that Aristotle's "science" is the foundation of his (supposed) sexism. For example, he points out that although Aristotle does call "kings" the bees that we call "queens," he also calls the analogue among wasps the "mothers" or "wombs"; Mayhew says that Aristotle seems to have thought that the king/queen bee was hermaphroditic and parthenogenetic. Mayhew also has an original and interesting chapter on Aristotle's comparisons between women and eunuchs; although he notes that Aristotle was friendly with at least one eunuch, Hermeias, the uncle of Aristotle's young wife, he leaves out Aristotle's poetic praise of Hermeias (see R. Renehan, in Greek, Roman, and Byz. Stud.23 [1982]: 251-74). Suppose women were "eunuchoid" according to Aristotle, it couldn't mean that they were consequently intellectually inferior, since at least one eunuch was, in Aristotle's opinion, intellectually superior. Mayhew also discusses, adequately enough, the issues of brain...

‘I am, by God, fit for high positions’ On the political role of women in al-Andalus

Narrating and explaining the fairly emancipated women in al-Andalus has been fraught with ambiguity for the approximately one century of scholarship on the subject. There has been much stereotyping depending upon the investigator's particular perspective. This paper clarifies the roles of Andalusian women in political relations from the Muslim Conquest in 711 through the fall of Granada in 1492. The interpretations used in historiography pit a traditionalist trend, in which continuity from the pre Islamic past is stressed, against the anti-continuist trend, in which an Oriental culture of the Muslims added the distinctive features of Iberian character today. In order to evaluate the two historiographic approaches, the contributions of seven prominent women are presented and evaluated for their social contexts during the eight centuries of al-Andalus. Comparisons are then made to prominent women in other political contexts within the Arab world in order to evaluate the strength of the two competing historiographic perspectives.

Gender Issues in Jewish Law: Essays and Responsa (review)

New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. 230 pp. $19.95.This book contains eight essays and eight responsa on various issues associated with Judaism and gender. While several of the essays contain historical overviews of specific topics or types of decision-making, the focus of the volume is modern responses to gender issues within Jewish law.One issue explored in many of the essays is the extent to which extra-legal concerns influence legal decision-making. This argument is set forth in Elliot Dorff's essay Custom Drives Jewish Law on Women. Dorff's essay serves as a critique of the Conservative Movement's attempts to transform the legal role of women. For the past thirty years, this effort has focused on responsa that analyzed legal texts; the underlying assumption was that the status of women vis-a-vis Jewish ritual could be changed only if there was sufficient textual support. Dorff argues that earlier legal opinions and their textual justifications were, in fact, post facto reflections of what was determined by custom in the first place (p. 82). Dorff reviews ways in which he believes custom influenced legal rulings about women in ancient and medieval Judaism before turning to contemporary Conservative Judaism.The claim set forth in Dorff's essay is strengthened by the work of other contributors to this volume. Rachel Adler's essay Innovation and Authority explores a 1985 responsum by Zvi Schachter on the subject of women's prayer groups. Adler notes two points of in the responsum. First, the author seeks to render a halakhic decision on a phenomenon...which involves behaviors in which classical halakhah had no interest (p. 4); the respondent must fashion from silence arguments to forbid a practice he finds objectionable. Second, because we have many writings on women's prayer groups from the participants themselves as well as their rabbinic supporters and detractors, we can more fully appreciate the social milieu in which the responsum was formulated. Finally, Adler's piece underscores a feature common to all halakhic decision-making, whether Orthodox or liberal, the tendency of decisors to talk to and with each other while ignoring the voices of the outsiders whose acts provide the content for the elite conversation (p. 5). In her analysis of Schachter's responsum, Adler demonstrates that custom, rather than legal precedent, shapes a Jewish community's notions of the proper sphere of women.This idea is also evident in and Women's Suffrage, David Ellenson and Michael Rosen's essay on rabbinic responsa about the political role of women in the Jewish State. three responsa reach different conclusions, but all three indicate the influence of social custom on decision-making. While one respondent argued against women's suffrage while the others supported it, all three responsa indicate a lack of legal precedent for extending or denying women the right to vote. Each decisor's opinion reflects his vision of women's status in Judaism and the extent to which suffrage might impact that status.The role of custom in Jewish law is also the theme of Halakhah, Women and Gender, Richard Rosenthal's consideration of the evolution of the prohibition against women wearing men's clothing.The collection also offers the reader a window into the evolution of law and custom in Reform Judaism. In his essay The Woman in Reform Judaism, Walter Jacob reviews the Reform Movement's treatment of women from the early nineteenth century to the present. responsa, most of which were written in the 1980's and 1990's, deal with concerns surrounding divorce, homosexuality, and women's observance of Jewish rituals previously observed only by men. …

Melancholy Men and Mythic Women: Jon Juaristi's El bucle melancólico: historias de nacionalistas' vascos

Jon Juaristi's best-selling El bucle melancólico: historias de nacionalistas vascos traces 'the history of Basque nationalism, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the recent violence of ETA, focusing on the stories of a series of male writers and activists. Taking his title from Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia', Juaristi draws on both psychoanalysis and ancient myth in his interpretation of nationalism as a melancholic movement. Although his lengthy attack on nationalism has virtually nothing to say about the political roles of women in the movement, this article argues that Juaristi's study exhibits an abiding gender politics which places men at the centre of nationalist activism, as it relegates women to the realm of myths and symbols. Here we will suggest an alternative interpretation of Basque nationalism, inspired by feminist psychoanalytical theory and re-workings of the Antigone myth. In contrast to Juaristi's 'stories of Basque nationalists', which marginalize both women and gender, this feminist interpretation puts the question of sexual difference back at the centre of the history of nationalism.

Amatory Jurisprudence and the Querelle des lois

It is my view, and here, no doubt, I am pre-empting my conclusion, that what literary and feminist historicism recognizes as the querelle des femmes, the debate as to the status and political role of women, is in fact underpinned and motivated by a much less explicit, yet nonetheless portentous, querelle des lois. The querelle des femmes, in other words, was always a polemic as to the legal status of women, as to their definition and role in theology and jurisprudence, canon and civil law. More than that, however, what the recovery of amatory jurisprudence can help to show is that the querelle des femmes was predicated upon a conflict of jurisdictions and at base addressed the primary political question of which law, masculine or feminine, that of amity or fraternity, of Venus or polity, of love or regality, was to govern.

Gender Inequality in Political Representation: A Worldwide Comparative Analysis

We examine the determinants of cross-national variation in the share ofparliamentary seats held by women in 1998. Thefindings ofprior research on this issue have differed sharply. Studiesfocusing on the most affluent longstanding democracies have emphasized the importance of political factors, whereas three of the four studies to include less developed nationsfound that only socioeconomic and/or culturalfactors matter. Our analysis uses improved variable measures, a more complete set of variables, and a larger sample of countries than has heretofore been examined. We find that political, socioeconomic, and culturalfactors are each important. Specifically, electoral system structure, leftparty government, the timing of women's suffrage; the share of women in professional occupations, and cultural attitudes toward the role of women in politics each play a role in accountingfor variation in the degree ofgender inequality in political representation around the world.