Women's Efforts Research Articles

The Birth of Legal Aid: Gender Ideologies, Women, and the Bar in New York City, 1863–1910

At the New York Legal Aid Society's twenty-fifth anniversary banquet in 1901, Arthur von Briesen, the Society's longtime president, ended the evening with the following acknowledgement: “Before we separate I beg to be permitted to say a few words on … the valuable aid which the Society has received from the women of New York. I want you to understand that without them we could not have prospered, without their assistance we could not have done the work… . Their energetic efforts in our behalf, their clear understanding of the duties … has enabled us to increase not only the forte and our power for good, but enabled us to create a special branch in which the cases of women can be specially considered by an able lawyer who is also a woman.” Here Briesen publicly recognized women's efforts on behalf of legal aid as benefactors, supporters, volunteers, and lawyers. The audience that evening would not have been surprised to learn that a woman lawyer now would be providing legal services to women clients, for this was not a new phenomenon. The Society already employed a number of women lawyers. Furthermore women formally untrained in law, but nonetheless acting as lawyers, had prior to the turn of the century provided legal services to poor women through New York City's Working Women's Protective Union (WWPU). As I demonstrate, the origins of legal aid lay in the provision of legal services to poor women—often by other women.

Liberating Women with Islam? The Islamists and Women's Issues in Jordan

The question of where Jordanian Islamists stand on women's rights has generated a great deal of attention over the past few years. An analysis of recent shifts in gender relations and hierarchies within the Jordanian Islamic movement (namely the Muslim Brothers and their political wing the Islamic Action Front and the Islamic Centrist Party) reveals that over the past three decades their views on women's rights have shifted towards embracing a much wider and more visible participation of women in the public space and within the movement itself. This suggests that engaging Islamists in political processes helps a great deal in ‘detraditionalizing’ them. However, since 2003, the women's movement, supported by the Jordanian government, has aggressively promoted a CEDAW‐based discourse on rights that has challenged the Islamists to develop a more explicit discourse on women's rights. The new discourse is distinct in being promoted by women as well as men of the movement. This discourse is not entirely consistent with the above‐stated shifts and reveals a rejection of the body of rights suggested by CEDAW. Our analysis of the reaction to the CEDAW‐based discourse on women's rights shows that the Islamists base their opposition to CEDAW on an argument which states that Islam is concerned with justice rather than equality, yet this argument has not been consistently applied across a number of different issue areas, undermining the position of Islamists with regard to women's rights. The overall conclusion of the analysis is that definite change has occurred with regard to the role and status of women in Jordanian society through the activities of the women's movement and efforts to politically engage Islamists on this issue. Yet these changes remain precarious, as the views of Islamist political parties continue to border on traditionalism.

Managing breastfeeding and work: a Foucauldian secondary analysis

This paper is a report of a secondary analysis of the experiences of employed breastfeeding mothers. Health promotion policies exhort mothers to feed their infants breastmilk exclusively for the first 6 months and partially until the age of 2 years. More mothers are returning to paid employment less than a year after having a baby. Combining breastfeeding and paid work is an issue for nursing and midwifery as predominantly female professions caring for women and their children. Foucauldian discourse analysis was used for a secondary analysis of interviews performed in 2005 with 20 women who continued to breastfeed on their return to work. The discursive positions and disciplinary practices were identified and analysed. Combining breastfeeding and paid work required negotiating the positions of good mother and good worker. Being a good mother conferred health benefits on infants. Being a good worker required the mothers to constrain their breastfeeding practices. The practices performed by the mothers involved stockpiling breastmilk, maintaining milk supply, preparing the baby ready for absence, making sacrifices and remaining silent and invisible as a breastfeeding worker. Breastfeeding workers have the potential to threaten the focus of the workplace. They discipline themselves to minimize their disruptive potential. Such strategies serve to maintain the marginalization of breastfeeding in the workplace and to keep women's efforts to continue breastfeeding invisible. The work of breastfeeding workers needs to be better recognized and supported.

Passing Over: Identity Transition in Widows

This qualitative study of nine women examined the changes in their everyday lives as they cared for their terminally-ill husbands and after their husbands died. It also studied how the women coped with these changes, and how their coping contributed to their identity change from wife to widow. Symbolic interaction was utilized to study the changes in their social relationships, time usage, and the utilization of everyday objects. Initially, these changes eroded identity stability, but the women's efforts to deal with them contributed to the development of new skills, interests, and ultimately, new identities.

The Jurisprudence of Vulnerability: Property Rights, Domestic Violence and HIV/AIDS Among Women in Uganda

In Uganda a complex system linking property rights, domestic violence, and subordinating traditions leads to women's disproportionate vulnerability to HIV/AIDS infection. In order to dismantle this system we must recognize the gendered pattern of HIV/AIDS transmission and acknowledge that vulnerability to HIV/AIDS is the result of a patriarchal system of subordination. It is in the interstices between local custom and formal law that women suffer the effects of this system. Focusing on the situation in Uganda, this article examines cultural practices that contribute to women's disproportionate susceptibility to HIV/AIDS infection and posits that by relying on an international women's rights framework, grassroots organizations can support women's efforts to address HIV/AIDS, poverty and gendered violence.

"Like a Prison!": Homeless Women's Narratives of Surviving Shelter

Relying on field observation and twenty qualitative interviews with shelter residents, this article examines how the bureaucracy and institutionalization within a homeless shelter fits various tenets of Goffman's (1961) total institution, particularly with regard to systematic deterioration of personhood and loss of autonomy. Women's experiences as shelter residents are then explored via a typology of survival strategies: submission, adaptation, and resistance. This research contributes to existing literature on gendered poverty by analyzing the nuanced ways in which institutionalization affects and complicates women's efforts to survive homelessness.

A movement without marches: African American women and the politics of poverty in postwar Philadelphia

Government services come with strings attached. In this bold interpretation of U.S. history, Lisa Levenstein reframes highly charged debates over the origins of chronic African American poverty and the social and political struggles that led to the postwar urban crisis.A Movement Without Marches follows poor black women as they traveled from some of Philadelphia's most impoverished neighborhoods into its welfare offices, courtrooms, public housing, schools, and hospitals, laying claim to an unprecedented array of government benefits and services. Levenstein uncovers the constraints that led women to public institutions, emphasizing the importance not only of deindustrialization and racial discrimination but also of women's experiences with sex discrimination, inadequate public education, child rearing, domestic violence, and chronic illness.Women's claims on public institutions brought a range of new resources into poor African American communities. With these resources came new constraints, as public officials frequently responded to women's efforts by limiting benefits and attempting to control their personal lives. Scathing public narratives about women's 'dependency' and their children's 'illegitimacy' placed black women and public institutions at the center of the growing opposition to black migration and civil rights in northern U.S. cities. Countering stereotypes that have long plagued public debate, A Movement Without Marches offers a new paradigm for understanding postwar U.S. history.

Is the South African land reform programme gender sensitive to women's food security and livelihood efforts?

abstract Complexities created by the dichotomy between statutory and customary land laws and practices are proving to have an impact on women's efforts at deriving land-based livelihoods and food security. Water is required for sustained land-based livelihoods. This focus aims to provide insight into challenges of land-based livelihoods in two research sites in rural KwaZulu-Natal by considering questions around gender sensitivity of land reform and access to water for land-based livelihoods. Purposive sampling was used to select female land reform beneficiaries and those residing in communal areas. Focus group discussions complemented by a structured questionnaire were used for data collection. The results indicated the complexity in understanding, perception and values of land straddling the statutory and customary land laws and practice landscape. Women continue to be disenfranchised by the two systems, and their efforts at a land-based livelihood are undermined. A framework that allows functional elements of both land systems needs continued engagement and research to deal with this dichotomy. Ways to improve access to water should be sought, despite the challenges of the two land systems.

Women Helping Women: Citizenship, Gender, and the Society for Maternal Charity

After the Revolution, women's efforts to assist families, in league with state agents, gave them a quasi-official status and afforded them a new sense of both social utility and political efficacy in collaboration with like-minded individuals. In the instance of the Society for Maternal Charity, after it passed under imperial control in 1810, elite connections, substantial resources, and a public voice for women on issues concerning motherhood, the protection of infants, and social policy gave it important influence in debates over family politics and child welfare in the nineteenth century. The rationale for the Society was the ideal of solidarity among women as they fulfilled the new obligations of humanitarian citizenship. Associational activity taught its members modes of organizational and political behavior. They became skilled politicians, with claims to public as well as familial utility.

The Impact of Network Relationships, Prison Experiences, and Internal Transformation on Women's Success After Prison Release

Using data obtained from retrospective, in-depth interviews with 20 successful female parolees, the present study examines the effects of women offenders' relationships with people in their social networks (i.e., their network relationships) before, during, and after incarceration on their postrelease desistence from crime. Because women's social networks facilitate women's criminal activity in the past, shifts are necessary to promote successful parole outcomes. A combination of negative relationships dissolving due to incarceration, women's conscious efforts to improve their social networks, and the availability of prison programming and some prosocial family members work together to enable women to access social networks that help them avoid crime after release. The study suggests the value of prison and parole programming that systematically identifies networks that can meet women's needs and that ensures access and availability of social networks for women with varying needs.

From co‐op to co‐opt: gender and class in the early Civil Rights Movement

This essay begins with a discussion of how the Homeless Citizens League based in Dungannon and comprised almost entirely of young Catholic mothers coalesced around the issue of discriminatory housing allocation in the early 1960s. Drawing on tactics pioneered by American civil rights activists, these women challenged Unionist political domination of the town's Catholics on the street. Quickly after they began to protest, the local doctor's wife joined the group and set about professionalizing the women's advocacy efforts as the group's “chairman.” Utilizing a combination of archival research, documentary evidence, and supplementary semi‐structured interviews this essay analyzes how class and gender hierarchies interacted to change the face of the nascent housing rights movement and transform it into a middle class civil rights pressure group. I argue that by manipulating the prevailing patriarchal and middle class attitudes of their political innocence, these women were able to challenge the local council and, by extension, the state. Once the state met their initial demands, however, their own acceptance of gender and class hierarchies contributed to their complicit withdrawal from the movement.

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World , and: Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , and: From Abolition to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Edited by Pamela Scully and Diana Paton. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. 376. Maps. Cloth, $89.95; Paper, $23.95.)Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation. Edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xxiv, 385. Illustrations. Paper, $35.00.)From Abolition to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century. By John T. Cumbler. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 238. Cloth, $49.95.)Reviewed by Amanda Bowie MonizEssays on Brazilian abolition, early European feminists' use of the concept of emancipation, and the strategies of freedwomen in French West Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might seem far afield for a JER review. Rather than being out of place, however, their inclusion signals compelling directions in the study of abolition, emancipation, and women's rights, and of the early United States more generally.The three works under review, two edited collections and one monograph, cover much time and space and many peoples, but they share a common interest in how people in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world built lives and communities free from bondage based on race or gender or dedicated themselves to freeing others from those shackles. Rather than analyzing broad causes and effects, the authors, with some exceptions, explore developments close to the ground. Taken together, the books argue that to understand the process of emancipation, the meaning of freedom, and the nature of reform activity, we must focus on the lived experiences of individuals or groups. The personal is political, and vice versa, the authors stress.To steer scholars in a new direction in the study of emancipation, Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World asks how gender affected men's and women's emergence from slavery and how ex-slaves remade gender relations as part of that transformation. While the volume surveys the Atlantic world, the individual authors generally take particular nations, colonies, or regions as their analytical units. The collective result is an illuminating examination of gender and the ending of slavery in given places (as opposed to an approach featuring the circulation of peoples, ideas, or practices) that reveals how distinct local dynamics led to differences in the reworking of gender relations. There is a big picture, however: Men benefitted more from emancipation than women did.In the first section, Men, Women, and Citizens, five essays consider how gender ideologies shaped political agency and ideas about freedom and citizenship. An 1834 court case involving a Cape Colony freedman, who asserted to a poor white widow his right to marry her daughter, is Pamela Scully's starting point to plumb newly freed men's expectations about the special rights and responsibilities they gained as emancipated men (44). Scully's chapter opens the book effectively not only because it conveys the immediate and personal nature of freedpeople's efforts to fashion their gendered and political identities, but also because it flags the frequent problem that freedpeople's voices are highly mediated. To avoid the problem, Mimi Sheller relies on sources that record the speech of her subjects. Her essay, which argues that working-class black Jamaican men constructed masculinity and citizenship in part in opposition to foreign men, calls attention to another important direction for the study of Atlantic world slavery and emancipation, namely, comparisons and connections to the Indian Ocean world.Four chapters in Families, Land, and Labor probe women's efforts to rebuild or protect their families and to grasp some measure of economic autonomy. Bridget Brereton, for example, examines women's much-discussed withdrawal from plantation labor after British Caribbean emancipation. …

Fathers’ narratives of reducing and quitting smoking

Despite much attention on women's efforts to reduce or stop smoking during pregnancy and postpartum, less attention has been directed to fathers' experiences in modifying their smoking. Using narrative methods, interviews with 29 new fathers were examined to identify different ways in which men approached reducing or quitting smoking. Four storylines were identified: the cold turkey storyline framed quitting smoking as a snap decision with no need for support or smoking cessation aids; the planned reduction storyline focused on building up reasons to quit and developing detailed strategies to enhance the likelihood of success; the baby as the patch storyline dramatised how the baby displaced the need to smoke, increased motivation for cessation and enhanced success; and, finally, a story of forced reduction that highlighted difficulties with smoking cessation for a highly addicted smoker and the tension and conflict this created in his relationship with his partner. Common to all the storylines was the men's reluctance to rely on smoking cessation resources; instead, self-reliance, willpower, and autonomy figured more prominently in their narratives. The findings from this study support developing gender-sensitive tobacco reduction interventions for fathers who smoke.

Second-Stage Labor Care

Substantial scientific evidence supports spontaneous maternal bearing down for its associated maternal and fetal physiologic benefits. Imposing specific directions for Valsalva pushing does not result in optimal outcomes but continues to be widely used, particularly when labor progress is less than optimal. However, there are numerous evidence-based approaches that can be used to avoid reverting to directed, prolonged Valsalva bearing down. Nursing care challenges may be encountered when using physiologic approaches; therefore, strategies are detailed to alleviate a variety of problems including ways to promote physiological descent and effectively support women's spontaneous efforts. For example, maternal postural interventions are suggested for asynclitic and occiput posterior fetal positions. When fetal heart rate abnormalities present and the fetus may be compromised, modifications to spontaneous bearing down are suggested as alternatives to longer and stronger Valsalva pushing, such as encouraging the women to use short pushes or breath through contractions until the fetus recovers. Open knee-chest maternal positioning can help to diminish a premature urge to push, while the closed knee-chest position may be more useful if cervical edema occurs. Even with clinical challenges, evidence-based care can help achieve the improved outcomes documented from women's spontaneous bearing-down efforts during the second stage.

Good Women, Martyrs, and Survivors

This article analyzes select psychological and social models to provide a new theoretical framework for South Asian women subjected to partner violence. It focuses on women's help-seeking behaviors and efforts to end violence. Analysis of the stress-coping paradigm, the ecological model, and the transtheoretical approach indicates the possibility of integrating their core constructs of cognitive, contextual, and process elements to provide a culturally relevant model for South Asia. Each model is reviewed from a Sri Lankan clinical perspective to discuss its relevance to South Asian women's experience with, and responses to, violence. This initial theoretical framework will need to undergo further comprehensive theorizing and rigorous empirical testing in different South Asian countries to assess its validity.

Why do women have longer durations of unemployment than men in post-restructuring urban China?

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of the reasons why women endure longer unemployment durations than men in post-restructuring urban China. This analysis is based upon data obtained from a national representative household survey. Rejecting the view that women are less earnest than men in their desire for re-employment, this analysis shows that women's job search efforts are handicapped by a lack of access to social networks, unequal entitlement to social re-employment services, higher earnings losses from job separations for women, and unfair treatment of women with respect to mandatory retirement.

Smoking and harm-reduction efforts among postpartum women.

The authors present findings from a qualitative study on postpartum smoking among low-income women ( N = 44) who had been smokers at the onset of pregnancy. Interview data collected after delivery at Months 1, 3, and 6 postpartum are discussed to explore contextual factors contributing to smoking abstinence, relapse, and harm-reduction practices. By 6 months postpartum, 10 women (23%) had completely quit, 21 women (48%) had reduced their smoking by 50% of their prepregnancy levels, and 7 women (16%) had reduced their smoking by one third of their prepregnancy levels. Thus, the majority of the women were engaging in significant harm-reduction efforts despite being entrenched in high-risk smoking environments where they were provided with few messages to quit. Many mothers were concerned about their moral identity as a smoker and expressed concerns that their child might initiate smoking at an early age. Future programs targeting this population should acknowledge women's harm-reduction efforts in environments where smoking is normative.

Community Development: A Veritable Tool for Achieving National Development in Nigeria.

No doubt, no any government world over can be able to provide all necessary needs of life to its communities. The aims and objectives of this paper is to stress the importance of encouraging communities to embark on Community Development projects in other words, self-help projects. Government (Federal, state and Local) seriously mount enlightenment campaign through their various organs to enlighten its communities to embark upon self-help projects in order to enhance or to complement government efforts in providing social amenities to their communities. In this paper, efforts and attempts were made to identify the criteria for selecting community projects and some underlying problems affecting the success of community projects were discussed. Consequently, the efforts of women in community development programmes were also intensified. The writer was also able to analyze the role of community development in the National Planning Policy and suggest the way forward in achieving this strategy.LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research Vol. 5 2008: pp. 320-330

Attitude Of Women In Community Development Associations Towards Participation In Community Development Projects

The study examined attitudes of women in community development associations towards participation in community development projects in Imo State, Nigeria. Data was obtained from 127 randomly selected respondents from the study area. Results showed that women have favourable attitude towards participating in community development association activities that are relevant to community development. It was found that age of respondents, occupation and population of members in association significantly influenced women's attitude towards participation in community development projects. Based on the findings of the study it is recommended that women should be encouraged by Government and Non-Governmental Organizations by assisting rural women in community development associations which embarking on development projects by providing counterpart funds to boost the women's efforts. In order to further make women to show more favourable attitude towards community development, they should be given positions of authority in the community and the local level which will give them the opportunity to mobilize other women for community development. Regular awareness campaign and membership canvassing should be embarked by women in other to make other women know the importance of belonging to community development associations. Keywords : attitude of women, community development associations Global Approaches to Extension Practice Vol. 3 (1) 2007: pp. 72-81

Women's Body Talk: A Feminist Narrative Approach

The cultural discourse of self-management is arguably a significant influence on women's efforts to control and manage their bodies. Within it, self-restraint and control are considered definitive of personal success and are enacted through the body by strict eating and exercise practices. It is argued that these cultural influences not only shape eating disorders, they also paradoxically shape their treatment. This article argues that traditional treatments and theories, which rely upon an individualistic self-management discourse, perpetuate women's existing problematic focus on these behaviors. We propose that feminist and narrative therapy can be combined as an alternative approach to understanding and working with eating disorders. From a feminist approach we emphasize women's conformity and resistance to gender scripts of self-regulation alongside the narrative postmodern sensibility of living storied lives.