Social Women Research Articles

Censorship and Self-Censorship: Revisiting the Belt Case in the Making of Dora Montefiore (1851–1933)

The Belt Case was a series of events that occurred in 1899 and 1900. At their heart sat gossip about Dora Montefiore (1851–1933) and an ‘inappropriate relationship’ she was rumoured to be having with a married, working-class socialist, George Belt, fifteen years her junior. The case led to him losing his job, her being forced to step down from a prestigious role in the women’s movement, and to a court case for slander. Prominent figures such as Lady Aberdeen, a future Labour prime minister, and many leading socialists of the time were swept up in the Belt Case which centred on whether socialists should censor the private behaviour of their comrades. This article takes as its focus an episode which was crucial to the making of Dora Montefiore as a socialist woman and considers how it affected her subsequent self-representation. Dora Montefiore produced various life writings. Her journalism (newspaper columns, letters, and poems) appeared in a range of progressive newspapers and periodicals. Here she drew on her own experiences to develop a distinctive political practice as a socialist, suffragist, and later, communist. Later, she looked back on her life to construct a narrative which formed her autobiography, From a Victorian to a Modern (1927). Across her life she experienced surveillance and even censorship — both formal and informal. The authorities read and archived her mail when she was travelling in Australia in 1923 after the British government initially denied her a passport because she was a communist. She also complained at her misrepresentation within the dominant narrative of suffrage history which was being constructed by suffragists before the vote was won. However, the Belt Case involves different kinds of censorship and self-censorship. In revisiting the case, the article focuses in particular on the peculiar role of letters — stolen and misappropriated ones; lost and saved ones — as a means to censor public and private behaviour. It can be argued that these events were crucial to Montefiore’s construction of herself as a socialist woman, as she journeyed from ‘a Victorian to a Modern’. Yet the Belt Case is absent from her published life writing. This article uses a range of archival sources to reconstruct the Belt Case in order to explore the role of censorship in Montefiore’s self-representation and the challenges that this presents to her biographer.

Hubungan antara Motivasi Belajar dengan Minat Belajar Warga Binaan pada Keterampilan Menjahit di Panti Sosial Karya Wanita Andam Dewi Solok

This research was motivated by the low level of learning interest of inmates in participating in skill activities at the Andam Dewi Solok Women's Social Workers' Organization (PSKW). This study aims to: 1) to describe learning motivation in sewing skills for inmates in PSKW Andam Dewi Solok, 2) to describe the learning interest in sewing skills for inmates in PSKW Andam Dewi Solok, 3) to see the relationship between learning motivation and interest in learning inmates following sewing skills in PSKW Andam Dewi Solok. This research includes correlational quantitative research. The population in this study were 40 people. The stratified random sampling technique was taken as many as 75% of the inmates. The number of samples in this study were 30 inmates. Data collection techniques used are questionnaires, while data collection tools use questionnaires. Data analysis techniques use percentages and product moments. From the results of the study, it can be seen that (1) the learning motivation of inmates in sewing skills activities is categorized as low, (2) learning interest of inmates in participating in sewing skills is categorized as low, and (3) there significant relationship between learning motivation and learning interest of inmates in participating in sewing skills activities. Keywords: Learning Motivation, Sewing Skills, Interest in Learning, Sex Worker (PSK)

Analysis of Women Social Entrepreneurship on Micro and Small Enterprises

Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are one of the main actors for national development process. This research is intending to explore the phenomenon or symptom of socio-economic problems in those SMEs. That done by observing women entrepreneur, especially social entrepreneurship subject in Micro and Small Enterprises, that become the member of economic program BUEKA. Therefore, this is a qualitative research with phenomenology approach. Data seeking is directly involved observation or Participating Observation in some of the entrepreneurship events that held by ‘Aisyiyah Movement, and thereafter record it in detail. Collecting data is done with interview about: 1) SMEs relation pattern with the companion institutions, 2) Comprehensive illustration about women empowerment in SMEs entrepreneur, 3) Activities that have been done by those women entrepreneurs are categorized as social entrepreneurship. And then, this research is completed thorough indepht interview for discovering data that is started from the key informant. The result from this research is ‘Aisyiyah is a women organization that driven to improve the life quality of women and family, with social entrepreneurship.

Marginalization of Women in Social, Cultural and Family Relationship in Kamala Das's My Story

Marginalization of Women in Social, Cultural and Family Relationship in Kamala Das's My Story

El papel de las mujeres socialistas en los organismos internacionales durante los años treinta

El artículo analiza la presencia de las mujeres del sindicato socialista UGT en los organismos internacionales del período de entreguerras, la OIT, la SDN y la FSI, en especial durante la II República española, explicando las posturas de la UGT y sus representantes femeninas en esos foros. La base del trabajo son los documentos del Archivo del Instituto de Historia Social de Ámsterdam relativos a la Federación Socialista Internacional, completada con la generada por el PSOE y la UGT durante el período. El debate en torno al papel de las mujeres en el mercado de trabajo, que enfrentaba las posturas proteccionistas mayoritarias con las defensoras de la igualdad de derechos entre hombres y mujeres, marca la participación de las socialistas en estos foros internacionales a partir de la II República. Sus intervenciones fueron reducidas, dadas las limitaciones impuestas por el modelo de género de la domesticidad y por su cualificación. Las más destacadas representantes femeninas españolas en la SDN, la OIT y la FSI, Claudina García, Isabel de Palencia y Regina García, defendieron posturas contrapuestas en esos foros.

Gender and class: female workers, female resistance and female history in the communist system in Poland

ABSTRACTThis essay shows the effect of the systemic transformation on the role and place of women in society in post-war Poland. Relations between the socialist state and women were dynamic and changed over time. In the first post-war period, many women hoped that the new political order would improve their lives. The industrialization of the country led to the professional activation of women and changed their places of residence, social positions and lifestyles. However, the more the ideology of social justice proclaimed by the state differed from everyday experience, the more often the attitudes of women, as well as the rest of society, shifted from support to criticism. In the 1980s, a large part of the opposition and the Solidarity movement was composed of women, but there were also patriarchal relationships in those structures.Abbreviations:SDKP – Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego [Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland party]PPS – Polska Partia Socjalistyczna [Polish Socialist Party]PPR – Polska Partia Robotnicza [Polish Workers’ Party]

(Disgruntled) Social Warriors: Toward A Typology of Women Social Entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurship-as an entrepreneurial approach for solving social problems using commercial (market-based) solutions-has grown substantially as an area of inquiry in the mainstream entrepre...

“Women who dared to ask for a vote”: The Missing Memoirs of the Scottish Suffragettes

ABSTRACTIn an area of political history as under-represented as women's fight for their right to vote, the involvement of Scotland's suffrage campaigners is even less known, researched and discussed. These women contributed greatly to the cause, taking part in just as much militant activism as their London-based peers, but their stories have not received recognition in the same way. Some Scottish suffrage campaigners did seek to have their voices heard by writing first-person memoirs on their struggles, but these have largely gone unpublished and unnoticed. This article discusses the fascinating lives and autobiographies of two Scottish Women's Social and Political Union members, Elizabeth Thomson and Jessie Stephen, and questions why their fascinating stories have remained hidden away in inaccessible archives for so long.

Adopting a Female Perspective: An Account of the Films of Ethyle Batley, 1912–17

Ethyle Batley was Britain's first woman film director, responsible for some 64 one- and two-reel films between 1912 and her death in 1917. Her unique, albeit brief, career was carved out in an industry domain conventionally reserved for men but her film-making practice appears to have been inflected by her experiences as a woman, especially as she began producing at the moment the Women's Social and Political Union was entering its most militant phase. Consequently, she developed a subject matter that drew on an identifiably ‘female perspective’. Adopting a short-story narrative approach and working in a range of genres, she used them to address such themes as childhood, women and children in wartime, working-class poverty, fragmented families and intimate personal relationships – emphases contrasting with those of her closest male co-worker, her husband Ernest. At the same time, her command over the formal resources of film became increasingly confident and sophisticated, as a consecutive reading of her few extant films demonstrates.

“A Clean Break”: Clara Zetkin, the Socialist Women’s Movement, and Feminism

ABSTRACTThe movement of proletarian women of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and by extension of the Second International (1889–1914), was structured by Clara Zetkin around the principle of a “clean break” between the women of the exploiting and exploited classes, which laid the programmatic foundations for the development of a mass movement of socialist working women that eventually grew to have 174,754 members in 1914. This movement, whose central axis was the magazine Die Gleichheit edited by Zetkin, had as its central organizational proposition the idea that Marxism, as a working-class political tendency, and feminism, as a multi-class movement, were incompatible, and that therefore working-class women had to have their own organizations within socialist parties which also included working-class men. The International Socialist Women’s Movement, which celebrated its first conference in Stuttgart in 1907 and adopted universal female suffrage as its central transitional slogan, was responsible for the proclamation of International Women’s Day by the Second International Socialist Women’s Conference held in Copenhagen in 1910. The Russian Revolution started with demonstrations organized by the working women of Petrograd to celebrate International Women’s Day. The article closes with a brief assessment of the legacy of the proletarian women’s movements.

The Association Between Women's Social Position and the Medicalization of Female Genital Cutting in Egypt.

Medicalization of female genital cutting (i.e., having the procedure done by a medical professional) has increased in Egypt in recent years. The relationship between a woman's social position and the decision to use a trained health professional to perform genital cutting is not well understood. Data from the 2005, 2008 and 2014 Egypt Demographic Health Surveys on 11,455 women whose daughter had undergone female genital cutting were used to examine relationships between mothers' social position and medicalization. Logistic regression models were used to identify associations between measures of social position and the decision to have genital cutting done by a trained provider. Seventy-nine percent of women had had their daughter cut by a trained health professional. The odds of medicalization were greater among women who had a primary education (odds ratio, 1.2) or a secondary or higher education (1.8) rather than no education; who lived in wealthier households rather than in the poorest ones (1.4-2.6); and who shared decision making on large household purchases rather than had no say in such decisions (1.2). In addition, working for pay and the magnitude of the age difference between women and their husband were negatively associated with medicalization (0.99 and 0.9, respectively). A woman's social position in Egypt is associated with medicalization of her daughter's genital cutting. Research is needed to explore the social meaning attributed to medicalized genital cutting, which may inform campaigns that could decrease the prevalence of the procedure.

Fuller and the French Socialist Women's Movement: New Evidence in a Transatlantic Conversation

ABSTRACT This article argues that Margaret Fuller's conversation with French Socialist women, directly in 1846–47 and for more extended time through textual exchange, provided a strong Parisian influence on her later allegiances in the Italian Revolution and that likewise these women responded positively to her writing. Her work held especially strong affinities with the Saint-Simonian vein of feminist socialism embodied in her editor and colleague Pauline Roland, who not only assisted her at the Paris Revue Indépendante but also had written for this group of dissident women since the early 1830s. Fuller knew at least partially of their work before her European trip but met it directly in Paris. Though Roland's promise to translate Woman in the Nineteenth Century into French for the Revue was apparently unfulfilled, the French Socialist women's long-term embrace of her Romantic feminism is apparent in the post-revolutionary Almanach des Femmes/Almanack of Women for 1853, where it was excerpted and celebrated even as Roland was also memorialized.

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films by Jennifer L. Creech

Reviewed by: Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films by Jennifer L. Creech Qinna Shen Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films. By Jennifer L. Creech. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Pp. xxi + 280. Paper $38.00. ISBN 978-0253023018. The tension between gender and socialism is inherent in many DEFA films. The first DEFA children’s film, Gerhard Lamprecht’s Irgendwo in Berlin (1946), ends with a group of boys helping Gustav’s father rebuild his automobile workshop. The only girl present, Lotte, is tasked with holding Uncle Kalle’s coat and does not participate in the reconstruction efforts. The scene’s implication that women would be excluded from building East Germany’s future is a gender-blind oversight on the filmmaker’s part. At the end of Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1964), Rita chooses to subordinate her sexual desire to the collective good by returning from Berlin-West. Yet [End Page 203] GDR studies with a feminist bent have engaged more extensively with GDR women’s literature than with DEFA films. Although several excellent articles have addressed how women are portrayed in DEFA films, more research in the vein of Jennifer Creech’s Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films will help to round out conclusions drawn from literature alone. Creech’s book focuses on selected DEFA women’s films that belong to the post-Kahlschlag Alltagsfilm, which the author argues represent the filmmakers’ attempts to deal with the politics of the personal and are not to be dismissed as “a retreat from political engagement” (32). Creech observes that DEFA film narratives shifted from the public sphere in the 1950s to the private in the 1960s and 1970s. The women’s films she discusses are well placed to expose the underlying contradictions between the socialist claim of emancipation and women’s unfulfilled desires. They offer realist, not socialist realist, representations of the “woman question.” The author applies Western feminist concepts to these DEFA films and in turn revisits those foundational concepts through the lens of socialist women’s films. Since feminism is a fraught concept in socialist countries, a feminist-oriented critique of the dominant socialist ideology is often covert. Creech’s goal is to tease out and make explicit such implicit critique by analyzing how these films work both narratively and visually. The preface begins with a detailed analysis of the opening scene in Egon Günther’s Der Dritte (1972), foreshadowing the close analysis of scenes and sequences that will be an important part of the book. In the introduction, Creech also delineates key contexts for her analysis of DEFA women’s films. In her conclusion, Creech compares DEFA women’s films with Berlin School films by Christian Petzold and Maria Speth. Chapter 1 focuses on one of the first East German Frauenfilme of the Alltagsfilm genre, Egon Günther’s Lots Weib (1965), and the critical potential of female desire. Creech discusses Lots Weib as an East German New Wave film within the context of the Italian, French, and West German New Waves, which discovered the feminine as a discursive tool for political engagement. Using Laura Mulvey’s and Kaja Silvermann’s theoretical approaches to gaze and voice, Creech asserts that “the female protagonist does not function as the object, but rather as the subject of gaze and of voice” (39), and indeed that Lots Weib had anticipated those approaches before they were formulated. Chapter 2 focuses on two DEFA women’s films—Evelyn Schmidt’s Das Fahrrad (1982) and Hermann Zschoche’s Bürgschaft für ein Jahr (1981)—that posit motherhood and reproduction as forms of critical resistance against socialist regimentation of progress and productivity. Creech uses Julia Kristeva’s theory of “women’s time” to analyze the cyclical temporality of motherhood, which contravenes the socialist notion of progressive and teleological time. The author compares these two DEFA films with West German feminist films as well as with East European films, in which motherhood is associated with loneliness and abandonment. [End Page 204] Chapter 3 discusses the importance of interpersonal relationships in Iris Gusner’s Alle meine Mädchen (1980) and the...

Propaganda Emancipation and Stalinist Internationalism In Romanian Communist Magazines for Women

My research concerns on Dolgozo no (Working Woman) and Femeia (Thee Woman) , the most important monthly magazines for women from the socialist-communist Romania. I was studying the texts and the illustrations from these magazines in a special context, I concentrated on propaganda, female emancipation and Stalinist internationalism, on typical topics from the period and the given political system. These magazines influences millions, women who got information, studied from these periodical, socialized by them. These magazines are in a very close relationship with topics like the female emancipation, the female rights, the role of the female in the socialist society, the representation of the ideal socialist women. These topics have begun to be fashionable in Romania, but the expert mostly put an accent on the female emancipation, on the political references. Hardly ever there is focus on the simple women, on the every days. My research focuses on the history of these magazines, what is more, by analyzing the magazine we can notice that there exists a progress: in the first period we see the military woman, in the mild period we can see the intellectual, the mother in the center of her family, while in the late, very cruel years we can see only the dictator leader`s portraits, Ceausescu appears most frequent then the working women. In this study I try to present the first period, the propagandistic messages of the era, the visual content, the specific style. How to cite: Iringo, T. G. (2017). Propaganda, Emancipation and Stalinist Internationalism in Romanian Communist Magazines for Women. Logos Universality Mentality Education Novelty, Section: Philosophy and Humanistic Sciences, V (2), 13-25. Doi: https://doi.org/10.18662/lumenphs.2017.0502.02

Cutting through the discussion on caesarean delivery: birth practices as social practices

ABSTRACTWomen are finding appeal in (or, at minimum, a lower level of resistance to) caesarean delivery despite the health risks that it poses, and I investigate how this decision figures into a broader pattern of women's gender socialisation within a culture that is deeply anxious about women's bodies. I review scholarship on caesarean delivery, and use social practice theory to map possible contact points between theories of embodiment, a sociology of gender, and the specific practice of caesarean section. I consider caesarean delivery as a component of a social practice, and adopt a practice framework to analyze women's motivation for selecting (or consenting to) caesarean delivery. I detail the materiality of the hospital, the medicalisation of women's bodies, and women's antagonistic body relationship to reveal some of the less immediately apparent reasons why caesarean delivery has been normalised and rendered invisible as part of the pattern of modern childbirth. Interventions to address the further escalation of caesarean delivery might consider how this decision aligns with other social practices. I conclude that activism addressing the social conditions that make caesarean delivery so attractive may radiate out to other aspects of women's lives where the practices of normative femininity have proven equally restrictive.

Race and Women of Color in Socialist/Postsocialist Transnational Feminisms in Central and Southeastern Europe

Abstract Recent scholarship on Black American women and feminists in the radical Left documents how these women's travel to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in the twentieth century influenced their understanding of racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism in the United States and abroad. This study draws from a related but ignored archive of documents to examine how the travel and knowledges of these Black women have affected women and feminisms in the socialist/postsocialist countries they were visiting. The study explores these affects in the encounter, in 1972, between a young Muslim girl in socialist Bulgaria and African American feminist Angela Davis. This encounter is linked to postsocialist Romani feminisms explicitly rooted in African American women's epistemologies of intersectionality to confront racism and anti-Gypsyism in the European Union and former socialist states in central and southeastern Europe. Women members of dominant majorities in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania seek links to women of color in the Global North and South but their bridgework rests upon claims to racial innocence and shared victimization. The study relates these modes of socialist/postsocialist transnational feminisms to global and historical racial formations wherein Western racial sciences, colonial technologies, Marxist-Leninist imaginations, and socialist state policies intertwined to produce socialist women belonging to privileged ethnic majorities attached to racial Whiteness and European civilization, as well as Romani and Muslim women whose Otherness marked them for state-led socialist emancipation or eradication. These women engage with women and feminisms of color from the United States and around the world, and the consequences of these engagements illuminate possibilities for new and extended feminist collectives and political alliances that include women in the so-called “Second World.”

Women Social Freedom among Married and Unmarried Women College Students

The present study aimed to know the women social freedom among the married and unmarried women college students. The sample constituted total 100 women college students out of which 50 were from married (25 joint family and 25 nuclear family) and 50 were from unmarried (25 joint family and 25 nuclear family). The “Women Social Freedom Scale (WSFS)” prepared by L.I. Bhushan (2011) was used. The data was collected, scored and calculated. ‘t’ test was being calculated. The result showed that (1) There is significant difference between the mean score of the women social freedom among the married and unmarried women college students. Thereafter could be said that, the unmarried women college students is having more women social freedom than married women college students. (2) There is no significant difference between the mean score of women social freedom with regards to women college students of joint family and nuclear family.

Black Women Social Workers in the Great Depression: A Test of Sheltered Labor Market Theory

Sheltered labor market theory proposes that, under favorable public-sector policies, members of an outcast minority group can find relief from discrimination by performing an occupation that delivers social welfare services to a co-ethnic clientele that the majority group seeks to avoid. The present study tests this proposition, examining black women’s employment in social work during the Great Depression. Regression analyses of census data support the theory, suggesting that black women had a sheltered labor market in the social work profession in the North, where official non-discrimination policies in New Deal job creation programs were more scrupulously enforced than in the South. In northern cities, black women’s employment in social work is positively associated with black–white residential segregation as well as with blacks’ employment in public emergency work projects (e.g., the WPA). Thus, consistent with sheltered labor market theory, a minority group’s representation in a social welfare delivery occupation is enhanced by both public-sector economic intervention and the minority’s social and spatial distance from the majority.

Paid Maternity Leave and Breastfeeding in Urban China

ABSTRACTUsing data from the 2010 Survey on Chinese Women's Social Status, this contribution estimates the effect of paid maternity leave on breastfeeding duration in urban China during the 1988–2008 period. The analysis applies a policy-based identification strategy to control for the endogenous relationship between paid leave entitlements and breastfeeding decisions. Estimates show that paid maternity leave has a strong positive effect on breastfeeding duration. Specifically, if the length of paid leave increases by thirty days, then the probability of breastfeeding for at least six months increases by 12 percentage points. Between 1988 and 2008, the average length of paid leave for mothers without a college education decreased by twenty-three days, which reduced these mothers’ probability of breastfeeding for at least six months by 9 percentage points. These results support the view that paid maternity leave enhances the ability of employed women to sustain breastfeeding and call for universal paid leave entitlements.

Slovenia's Socialist Superwoman: Feeding the Family, Nourishing the Nation

This article explores how the Slovenian women's lifestyle magazine Naša žena ( Our Woman) helped the Yugoslavian socialist project construct and shape the ideal socialist woman, and argues that she became the crucial ally in implementing socialist ideas in the everyday lives of Slovenians. The article shows how texts on food preparation and consumption, as well as those touching on household management and family care, published in Naša žena from 1960 to 1991 played an important part in the ‘civilising’ process that shaped behaviour, directed cultural and social practices, influenced social relations and constructed women's identities during socialism. We show how food-related texts (articles, recipes, columns, advertisements and advertorials) were never far removed from the larger political and economic socialist realities. In fact, they bore witness to changes in living standards and told stories about gender regimes, socialist ideologies and fantasies. These texts belong to a corpus of social transcripts that guide collective understandings of what it means to select, prepare, cook and eat food; what constitutes good cooking and eating; and who is responsible for preparing meals. Despite official socialist feminist rhetoric about freeing women from backward patriarchal arrangements, this article shows that texts offering food-related advice in socialist Yugoslavia contained explicit instructions for the ‘correct’ performance of the social roles of women, legitimising women's roles as worker, mother, wife and housekeeper. Above all, a woman was to be an ‘engineer’ of the private domain whose goals were to feed her family and keep the nation healthy and hence productive, and to modernise her kitchen in support of the technological and economic development of Yugoslavia.