Achievements Of Women Research Articles

Justice at Last?: The Temporary Teachers Club and the Teaching Service (Married Women) Act 1956

In 1956, the Victorian parliament passed the Teaching Service (Married Women) Act, removing the marriage bar in the Victorian Education Department. Introduced under the 1889 Public Service Amendment Act by liberal reformers with a profoundly gendered vision for the state, the marriage bar excluded married women from teaching, deeming them temporary 'outsiders'. During World War II, married women temporary teachers returned to teaching in considerable numbers. In 1955, their lobbying in the Victorian Teachers Union led to the formation of the Temporary Teachers Club (TTC) and the waging of a 'cooperative campaign' forcing the Department's hand on the matter of reinstatement, but at a cost: the denial of their superannuation entitlements. The TTC's campaign is not only an important and overlooked episode of feminist activism in an era renowned for conservatism; it is testament to the claim that women's achievements were hard won - a struggle, not a gift.

Women and the Media in the Middle East: Power through Self-Expression (review)

Reviewed by: Women and the Media in the Middle East: Power through Self-Expression Christa Salamandra Women and the Media in the Middle East: Power through Self-ExpressionNaomi Sakr, editor. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004. viii+248 pp. including chapter notes, bibliography and index. £45.00 hardback, 15.99 paperback. Like the best work in media studies, Naomi Sakr's ambitious volume focuses on social relations, on how Middle Eastern women shape and are shaped by the press, television, and internet. Chapters span the region from Morocco to Iran, incorporate a variety of disciplinary approaches, and examine a range of media topics from early twentieth-century Egyptian journalists to early twenty-first-century cyber-savvy professionals. Contributors include both academics and practitioners. As its title promises, Women and Media in the Middle East serves as a valuable overview of women's involvement in and with a range of media. But it does much more. Rather than attempting to formulate theories about how media works, this book consistently links media to broader social, political, and historical processes. Sakr's helpful introduction situates Middle Eastern women in a context of general media studies concerns. She identifies a series of key issues—representation, democratization, participation—that frame discussions of media's empowering potential. The theme linking diverse contributions is clearly articulated: how media in different times and places have expanded or restricted women's possibilities. All essays emphasize the relationship of media to both physical and social space. Some women use media to become visible, as in the case of journalists and activists, others to limit visibility, as in the case of professionals seeking to mask appearances, and students in the conservative Gulf states to subvert restrictions on interaction with the opposite sex. Women's centrality to anticolonial struggles, and their subsequent [End Page 107] marginalization in newly independent nations, links chapters exploring women's activism in Iran, Egypt, and North Africa. Gholam Khiabany and Annabelle Sreberny examine the challenges facing women's publications in Iran, arguing that an overemphasis on Islam and its relationship to feminism has distracted many observers from other factors influencing women's involvement in the public sphere. They attribute women's achievements to nationalist, secular, and progressive strains in Iranian culture and women's continued difficulties to the oppressive social relations legitimized by the Iranian political system. Sonia Dabbous's discussion of early twentieth-century journalists—Egypt's first women professionals—demonstrates the press' crucial role in opening up avenues of public participation. A portrait of a vibrant, early feminist press emerges. The role Palestinian women journalists play in the continuing struggle against Israeli occupation is explored in Benaz Somiry-Batrawi's contribution. She notes the small triumphs of local media producers operating under duress. The Oslo agreement paved the way for private media outlets, and these have employed women and addressed their concerns. Their efforts proceed under periodic disruption and constant threat. Kuwaiti women activists lobbying for suffrage face a different challenge. As Haya al-Mughni and Mary Ann Tétreault demonstrate, the Kuwaiti press reduced a complex array of women's groups and positions to a two-sided debate that worked to support conservative forces. Yet they find promising the growing number of women working in both the media itself and the Ministry of Information. Magda Abu-Fadil's portrait of prominent journalists such as CNN's Octavia Nasr provides an inside, personal glimpse of successful career trajectories. The "retributive peace" of postwar Lebanon maintains and exacerbates sectarian divisions and class hierarchies. Victoria Firmo-Fontan argues that women's nongovernmental organizations in Lebanon tend to reinforce rather than challenge existing power structures and fail to foster social responsibility. The Hezbollah Women's Association, which spreads its message through the party's television station, al-Manar, stands as an exception. The HWA, unlike its sister organizations, does not promote the use of imported domestic servants as an instrument of women's emancipation. It also eschews objectified representations of women. Two chapters on visual media content show how depictions of women serve as metaphors of nation in both colonial and nationalist [End Page 108] constructs. Zahia Smail Salhi explores stereotypic depictions of Maghrebi women in colonial imagery...

Publicizing Domestic Piety: The Cultural Work of Religious Texts in the Woman's Building Library

The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 included many texts that could be classified as "religious." In bringing a large body of women's publications together in one place, the Woman's Building's organizers called attention to women's past achievements in order to carve out a larger space for women's public participation. Yet the project of expanding women's sphere coincided imperfectly with the domestic model of piety that most religious publications embodied. This essay explores tensions between the Woman's Building's goals of advancing women's power to shape the public sphere and the library's religious contents.

Cicely Hamilton's warriors: dramatic reinventions of militancy in the British women's suffrage movement

The campaigns for women's enfranchisement in Britain have been associated with public spectacle, metropolitan activity and sensational acts of militant law-breaking. The circumstances of the development, adaptation and performance of Cicely Hamilton's play, A Pageant of Great Women, provide an insight into the dynamics of local suffrage activism. This forgotten play reached several thousand spectators at a time all over Britain, promoting the activity of women's history-making as much as women's suffrage. It normalised the idea of women's achievements, and the cross-dressing warriors especially, drawn from several countries, unsettled a dominant anglocentric perspective, normalising militancy as national heroism.

Cicely hamilton's warriors: dramatic reinventions of militancy in the british women's suffrage movement

Abstract The campaigns for women's enfranchisement in Britain have been associated with public spectacle, metropolitan activity and sensational acts of militant law-breaking. The circumstances of the development, adaptation and performance of Cicely Hamilton's play, A Pageant of Great Women, provide an insight into the dynamics of local suffrage activism. This forgotten play reached several thousand spectators at a time all over Britain, promoting the activity of women's history-making as much as women's suffrage. It normalised the idea of women's achievements, and the cross-dressing warriors especially, drawn from several countries, unsettled a dominant anglocentric perspective, normalising militancy as national heroism.

Women's Participation and Employment in Iran: A Critical Examination

This article discusses female labor force participation and employment in Iran. The objective is to show whether women's educational and social achievements over the last 30 years have improved the...

How the jilt triumphed over the slut: the evolution of an epithet, 1660-1780

This essay is a historical-linguistic examination of sexual epithets for women. Women authors of drama and fiction were able to change the meanings of two words, jilt and slut, in just eighty years. This article nuances literary-critical understanding of linguistics, which has too often meant wholesale adoption of the arbitrary nature of the signifier, without reasoned consideration of sound symbolism. It also seeks to broaden the definition of women's literary achievement by including anonymous texts and popular works like canting dictionaries as a viable part of the literary record.

Voices About Choices: The Role of Female Networks in Affirming Life Choices in the Academy

This essay addresses the topic of women's professional development in the academy, noting the critical roles fulfilled by support networks. Research and personal narratives explore the diverse choices women make, the resistance they sometimes face, and the need to find validation for those choices. Recognizing the importance of women's achievement of tenure and publication, the authors also challenge the notion that those traditional measures of academic success are the only, or the best, way to assess women's professional development.

Bold spirit: Helga Estby's forgotten walk across Victorian America

In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America. Hoping to win the wager and save her family' s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara' s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington. Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each. As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders, they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb. Their treacherous and inspirational journey to New York challenged contemporary notions of femininity and captured the public imagination. But their trip had such devastating consequences that the Estby women's achievement was blanketed in silence until, nearly a century later, Linda Lawrence Hunt encountered their extraordinary story.

Gender, Bourdieu, and the Anomaly of Women's Achievement Redux

Pourquoi, en depit de moins bonnes gratifications sur le plan professionnel (discriminations de statuts et de salaires) les femmes continuent-elles de s'investir dans les etudes et a obtenir de meilleurs resultats que les hommes ? Faisant reference aux travaux de Bourdieu, l'A. tente de repondre a cette question en termes d'habitus

Women and music technology: pioneers, precedents and issues in the United States

The origins of women's pioneering contributions to the repertoire and history of electroacoustic music can often be linked to the growth of academic and commercial electronic and computer music studios in North America. A signific ant number of early female composers in the medium received their initial training and experience in the United States and their accomplishments begin in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. Women's achievements in the educational and entertainment sectors have laid the foundation for subsequent generations who have influenced the aesthetic and technical path of electroacoustic music.Excerpted from several chapters of the author's historical series on women composers and music technology, the article outlines the contributions of several of the earliest women in the United States to the utilisation of music technology in creative work. Also discussed are research precedents in this area and issues regarding women and music technology in the United States today. With the creation of her book series outlining the achievements of women working with music technology, the author hopes to offer a valuable contribution to research on the history of electroacoustic music in general and women's representation in the genre in particular.

Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (review)

The word "flapper" often brings to mind a stereotypical image of women in the 1920s: short hair, short dress, and carefree attitude. Although there were certainly some flappers who fit this description, there were others who did not, or who simply did not identify with or support the flapper lifestyle. Through analysis of different kinds of "performances" as women in the 1920s, Angela Latham seeks to show that women of this decade were more than flappers, and that this fuller picture not only adds to women's history but also to our understanding of how these women are and were discussed. For example, Latham states, "Popular mythology holds that the 1920s were a historical milestone in American women's achievement of political and personal autonomy. . . . [f]reed at last from the fetters of American Victorianism, she was unrestrained by trailing skirts, corsets, or old-fashioned notions of sex" (7). This is the stereotypical image of the 1920's woman Latham seeks to dispel.

The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England

The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. By Talia Schaffer. (Victorian Literature and Culture) Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 2000. x + 298 pp. $55 (paperbound $19.50). Until quite recently Victorian aestheticism has been seen as the preserve of male writers with Wilde, Pater, Beardsley, and the poets of the 1890s as chief actors, but new scholarship has begun to recover the important part played by women. Following on from the illuminating collection Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000) which she edited with Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Talia Schaffer recovers a number of women writers, highly celebrated in their day, and considers their diverse contributions to aesthetic literature and culture. In an excellent first chapter Schaffer considers the loose meaning of the term `aestheticism' and gives careful consideration to why female aesthetes have been excluded from the canon. One reason for this is that the first historians of aesthetic culture were male aesthetes who `constructed a story of aestheticism that centered on their own and their friends' achievements'; another that aestheticism has been too easily conflated with decadence, `a brief defensive reaction of embattled elite male writers' (p. 6). Schaffer usefully points out that various of the women she examines such as Ouida, Lucas Malet, and Alice Meynell were considered the equals of Wilde, Hardy, James, and Beerbohm. She argues that because male aesthetes tended to work on poetry, essays, and drama, this promoted the notion that there were few `aesthetic' novels, whereas in fact the novel was a form favoured by female aesthetes. Unsurprisingly, women's achievements in this field went unremarked by subsequent historians of male aesthetic culture. Schaffer also devotes some time to explaining the differences between female aesthetes and the (now) better known New Woman writers and shows that we cannot simply judge the aesthetes' lack of apparent political commitment to causes such as female suffrage as antifeminist. One of her major arguments is that women used the artifice of highly mannered aesthetic style to camouflage treatment of subjects that would otherwise be taboo. Schaffer's second chapter explores how the female aesthetes `wrote in a particular context: a crisis of realism' and suggests that `the extensive body of experimental women's writing of the late nineteenth century' (p. 34) is a result of women's attraction to aestheticism, which offered subject matters other than the traditional marriage-plot. …

Women, Motivation, and Achievement

Women's educational and occupational achievements are crucial to the economic productivity and prosperity of the nation, as well as to the mental health of women and their families. In this article we review psychological research on motivation and on educational achievement, focusing on gender and the contributions that have been made by feminist researchers. Feminist psychologists noted the sex bias and methodological flaws in traditional research on achievement motivation and proposed vastly improved models, such as Eccles's expectancy x value model of achievement behavior. Contrary to stereotypes, gender similarities are typically found in areas such as mathematics performance. Policymakers should be concerned about gender bias in the SAT and about the Female Underprediction Effect. Additional threats to girls' and women's achievements include stereotype threat and peer sexual harassment in the schools.

Omitted, Devalued, Ignored: Reevaluating the Historical Interpretation of Women in the Interior Design Profession

This paper seeks to determine whether or not current history of interior design publications are flawed by embedded gender discrimination, thus devaluing the role of women in the develop ment of the interior design profession. In order to reveal the extent to which women's achievements are marginalized, devalued or ignored, five texts that incorporate information on the history of the interior design profession will be analyzed using methods structured in feminist scholarship. According to DuBois et al. (1985), the most common methods by which an author reveals gender discrimination include (1) the omission of women from the narrative, (2) the different value assigned to women's accomplishments as a result of being viewed under masculine criteria, (3) the perpetuation of gender stereotyping, and (4) the language by which the subjects are described. The current literature on the history of the interior design profession is replete with evidence of gender discrimination. Women in the discipline of interior design are presented as being insignificant in the development of the profession. Instead, a masculine narrative of architects identifies a field dominated by women in number, but by men in perceived significance. In order to establish and understand the roots of interior design, the profession must add a feminine perspective on research. This in turn should assist interior design scholars in the development of a theoretical framework that acknowledges and disseminates the contributions of the early decorators. Otherwise, female interior design pioneers will continue to fall into anonymity.

The change process of sex-role attitudes in female high school students

The present study examined how changes would occur in sex-role attitudes of female high school students. Six hundred (600) randomly sampled female high school students from a metropolitan area completed a questionnaire. Partial Order Scalogram Analysis (POSA) was conducted for three variables: complaint against sex discrimination, interest in women's independence, and attitude toward women's achievement in the public arena. POSA found two separate change routes for sex-role attitudes. In the first, the complaint process, increasing complaint against sex discrimination led to positive attitude toward women's achievement in the public arena, which in turn to heightened interest in women's independence. For the second, the interest process, heightened interest in women's independence was followed by positive attitude toward women's achievement, and then by more complaint against sex discrimination. Results also suggested not only that the complaint process was facilitated by external factors like discrimination, and that the interest process by increasing interest in self. But students in the last stage of both processes experience sex-role conflict.

Gendered Perspectives on Detroit History

When Detroit celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1951 the city's women put on a pageant. On 21 June four hundred participants acted out thirty-three scenes from Courage Was the Fashion, a theatrical extravaganza that depicted the women of Detroit's contributions to the city from its earliest days to the birthday celebration. To create this event a Women's Achievement Committee wrote three thousand letters to

EXXcellence in science.

The National Science Foundation reports that twice as many full-time academic men as women are full professors (Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering; NSF, 1998). But this is not just a problem for women — it’s a problem for the future of research and for society.Determined to do something about this inequality, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health, sponsored a workshop last year called ‘AXXs’99: Achieving EXXcellence in Science’ (see http://www.ascb.org/ascb). The aim was to explore how scientific societies can contribute to science by promoting the careers of women in research. Why societies? Because they have the potential to reach those at all levels in a given scientific field, to inspire and organize social change.An unusual feature of the workshop was that it invited participation from more than 50 scientific societies, representing a wide variety of disciplines, from mathematics to physics, thoracic surgery and genetics. One of the outcomes for the cell biologists was that they quickly realized that, for all their difficulties, they were much better off than many other women scientists. The biological sciences attract many more women than do the physical sciences; more than half of undergraduate biology majors in the US are women, and the membership of the ASCB reflects this, with half the society’s members being women. Furthermore, the ASCB enjoys a solid tradition of female leadership: of the 10 most recent elected presidents, five are women. We're lucky to be able to build on the momentum that comes from having prominent top women in cell biology.But even in biology, women don't seem to progress as readily as their male contemporaries. The percentage of active women biologists declines steadily as one proceeds up the ranks from undergraduate through to department chair, and beyond. An ASCB membership survey indicates that men with tenure outnumber women with tenure by 3:1 (Mol Biol Cell 1998, 9:3003-3006).So what has come out of AXXs’99 (and its successor workshop this year)? The obstacles women face in career advancement have been identified, and solutions refined into four practical aims: increasing the number of women in leadership roles within the societies; implementing effective mentorship, career development programs and support mechanisms for scientists at all levels; promoting women's achievements within scientific societies and to the general public; disseminating information about existing programs that work, in order to change scientific organizational culture.How can these aims, or any real change for women, be achieved by scientific societies? The ASCB has found that several factors have contributed to progress. The first was to recruit a women’s committee that includes highly respected researchers and intellectuals — women to whom men assign credibility. These distinguished women are balanced with younger women who have energy to invest in committee activities, and whose careers may be enhanced by their participation.The committee has created an agenda that is both positive and achievable; too often, when groups who may feel aggrieved come together to share concerns, the environment can degenerate into a gripe session, which poisons the atmosphere, interferes with progress and disaffects the larger organisation. It's important to ensure that most, if not all, of the activities of the women's committee are gender-neutral, or are of some interest to men. For example, the main career networking activity of the ASCB is sponsored by the society's women's committee. So, although the activities are for members of both sexes, the status of women as majority participants is subtly empowering to the hundreds of women present.One way of ensuring that the interests of the women's committee cannot be easily disregarded is to encourage overlapping membership between the society's women's committee and its leadership.The difference between meaning well and doing well is follow-through. When push comes to shove, volunteers must give a higher priority to their careers than to their society contributions. It's therefore vitally important to hire staff for the project, whose own careers depend on seeing intentions become realities.Whatever the ebb and flow within specific career paths, it is clear that a scientifically prepared workforce is essential to continued growth of the global economy. If women continue to be under-represented in the senior ranks of science, young women who may be considering a scientific career will be justifiably discouraged from it. It is incumbent upon scientific societies to serve the interests of their constituencies by identifying and combating the barriers to advancement for all sections of their membership.

Taking Women Seriously: Lessons and Legacies for Educating the Majority (review)

When I worked at Skidmore College during its transition to coeducation in the 1970s, my colleagues and I followed Elizabeth (Lee) Tidball's work on educational environments with interest and benefitted from her generous consultations as we strove to create a new, gender-equitable model of coeducation. Lee Tidball, professor emerita of physiology at the George Washington University, has pursued a second research agenda since 1969, bringing her careful empirical lens to the study of the impact of women's colleges on women's achievement. It is difficult to understate the impact of this research, summarized and significantly expanded upon in this [End Page 206] volume, on the re-articulation of the missions of many contemporary women's colleges and on the transition of many formerly single-sex colleges to coeducation.

German women in chemistry, 1925-1945 (part II).

The paper traces the role of German women into the chemistry profession from 1925 to 1945, examining their relative numbers and experience in higher education, in academic and industrial careers as well as in professional organizations such as the Verein Deutscher Chemikerinnen. The paper examines the effect of the 1930s Depression, National Socialism, and World War II on women chemists, considering both general trends as well as the experiences and achievements of several individual women in a variety of situations. Finally, it considers the longterm consequences of these developments, such as the Nazi expulsion of Jewish women, destruction of women's organizations and devaluing of women's achievements, in limiting the recognition and participation of German women chemists after 1945.