Women's Branch Research Articles

Shaping Women: National Identity Through the Use of Language in Franco's Spain

In my article I show how a very particular identity was created for women during the period of Franco's Spain. I will draw upon a varied range of materials from official discourses, particularly the Sección Femenina (the women's branch of Falange); the Álvarez Enciclopedia and other texts such as songs, poems and the popular press.Following Foucault (1980: 30) I analyse an identity based on oppressive discourses whose power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process and everyday life’. The nationalistic stress of this discourse is one that encourages women to create a new image of Spanish femininity that should be ‘different’ from the liberated portrayal of women coming from Europe, mainly through the path of growing tourism.The language of these discourses is somehow baroque, elaborated, energetic and highly dramatic. It tries to seek attention through an unnecessary and badly misorientated dramatism. It is cryptic and manipulative and claims to be poetical, but its main intention is to confine women indoors and to make them look at the world through the curtains or from a closed window. On the other hand it made women feel they were the representation of a unique matriarchal nationalism making them appear as the heroines of an essentialist national metaphor: women mothers of the nation.Inherent in Franco's equation of women = femininity = nation is a contradiction that defines women as ‘indoor heroines’ and bases nationalism in a naturalised representation of gender where women are a gendered representation of this nationalism.

Are the Interests of Men and Women Identical?

One of the most influential attempts to organize working-class women in the United States was that of the Socialist party in its period of great strength between 1901 and 1912. By 1908, when party membership had climbed to over twenty thousand, Socialist women began a successful campaign of autonomous organization within the party and within two years had created women's branches in 156 Socialist party locals.' Socialist women's agitation, like Socialist politics in general, reached well beyond actual party members. In the early twentieth century the Socialist party was the only political party to allow women's participation and to endorse women's suffrage and other equal rights issues. Among radical groups, the Socialist party was the only organization that directed its women's organizing program to the whole working class, not just to employed women-at that time a small minority among their sex. The three selections printed here, from Socialist publications, reflect the efforts of women activists in the party to encompass the needs of all working-class women and to seek out their fundamental unity of experience in workplace and family. Many socialist women, in and out of the party, were developing at this time an analysis of women's problems based on this sense of unified experience. They avoided a primary loyalty either to the existing corpus

The Women's Trade Union League and American Feminism

The Women's Trade Union League provides an illuminating historical case study of the response of a certain group of women in the early twentieth century to the issues of feminism and class consciousness. As a mixed-class organization of women concerned about the problems of female workers during a period of an active male-dominated labor movement and a middle-class-dominated feminist movement, the WTUL was structurally in an extremely interesting position. As an organization it was not concerned with theoretical issues of feminism and class identity, but it did explicitly and consistently define itself as the women's branch of the labor movement and the industrial branch of the women's movement.

What Comes of Training Women for War

This volume will be source material for all time on the facts of the women's branches of the Army, the Navy, the Air Forces, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard. This book contains a concise statement of how many women served, how they were trained and their response to military life. The wartime women's military services were the Women's Army Corps (WAC), the Women's Reserve of the Naval Reserve (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, abbreviated as WAVES), the Women's Reserve of the Coast Guard Reserve (SPAR), the Marine Corps Women's Reserve (MCWR), the Army Nurse Corps, and the Navy Nurse Corps. The Women Airforces Service Pilots (WASP) and the Cadet Nurse Corps of the United States Public Health Service should not, strictly speaking, be included, because these two services were not militarized. However, the WASP was like the women's military services in all other respects, and the work

THE PUBLIC HEALTH NURSE, THE PHYSICIAN'S ALLY

When schools for nurses were established in 1879 at Bellevue,New Haven and Massachusetts General Hospitals, the nursing profession was finally recognized in America as an important adjunct to the medical profession. Prior to that time nursing care of the sick was largely in the hands of incompetent and untrained women who were not highly regarded by physicians or the laity. During the first decade after the three training schools were opened the majority of the trained nurses were engaged in private practice in homes, usually in the homes of the rich. Later some were employed as private duty nurses in hospitals. It was not until 1877 that the Women's Branch of the New York City Mission first sent trained visiting nurses into the homes of the sick poor to do bedside nursing; four years later the New York Ethical Society placed four nurses in the New York dispensaries to do not sick nursing but health nursing. The first visiting nurse association, founded for the purpose of sending trained nurses into homes, was started in Buffalo in 1885; and in 1886 similar associations were established in Boston and Philadelphia. Relatively few trained nurses devoted their energies to the public health field during the next two decades. However, private or non-official agencies interested in the control of tuberculosis, syphilis, acute communicable disease and maternal and child care played a strategic role in the development of professional public health nursing. These agencies, usually organized on a local basis, worked dosely with private