Political Mobilization Of Women Research Articles

Breaking Barriers: Women's Political Mobilization in Rural Village Head Elections

This article describes the victory of female village head candidates in village head elections as a rare occurrence, mainly due to the lack of access for women to leadership positions due to a solid patriarchal culture. However, after being elected, women proved to have the competence to lead, showing that women can become leaders at the village level. Cultural shifts, especially in Javanese culture, have allowed women to be involved in the public sphere, including in organizations such as the the Pemberdayaan dan Kesejahteraan Keluarga (PKK), Dasawisma, and others. This paper uses a qualitative approach and case studies to examine the phenomenon. Data were obtained through observation, dialogue, and in-depth interviews. The results show that women can gather and mobilize political power from multiple sources to influence voters and dominate the dynamics of village democracy. Habitus of leadership, symbolic dominance, hegemony of social institutions, and kinship became the main instruments utilized by female village head candidates. They draw on leadership experience in social solid and kinship institutions to win village head elections.

Gendered Politics in Post-Independence Kenya: The Case of Lower Eastern Region

Women make up a significant proportion of the population, accounting for over half of the global population. Despite this, their participation in politics has always been lower than that of men. In Kenya, women constitute more than half of the entire population and form a sizable part of the electorate, yet they still face political exclusion. Political participation of women in politics is of great significance. This is because it is within the political realm that resource allocation and conflict resolution takes place. People join politics to individually or collectively pursue their interests and if women as a category are not equitably represented, it would mean that key policy and decisions are made without considering their aspirations. The objective of the study was to examine patterns of women's political mobilization in Kenya between 1963-2022. The study was guided by Social Relations Gender Approach. This theory is underpinned by the following assumptions: 
 
 Human well-being is the primary goal of development, 
 Social relations determine people's roles, rights as well as their power over others and 
 Societal institutions play an integral role in perpetuating social inequality. 
 
 The research employed an exploratory research design. It is held here that the Jomo Kenyatta regime perpetuated the colonial patriarchal ideology anchored on gender bias. The independence regime conceptualized the role of women’s organizations as mainly useful to improve the nation’s economy but deliberately muzzled their political aspirations. The Moi regime opened political space for women and it is the Kibaki administration through the promulgation of the 2010 Constituion that gave women the requisite platform towards achieving gender equity in politics.

The Paradox of the Female Participation in Fundamentalist Movements

Throughout the world, religiously-oriented conservative political movements are well known for their defence of ‘traditional models’ in terms of both family conception and gender roles. Therefore, one should expect to find a limited social and political mobilization of women within them as well as in right-wing religiously conservative parties. However, many significant movements have built strong female branches in which militants usually perform roles apparently contradicting the religious conservative ideologies the movements support. This paper will show these dynamics in three case studies: the US Christian Right in the USA, the Hindu national religious movement (sangh parivar) in India, and the Islamist movement in Turkey. Its final section will compare the three cases, trying to find common patterns and to understand the reasons behind this apparent paradox.

Women-friendly Funding? Conditions for Women's Organizations to Engage in Critical Advocacy in Norway

The main focus of this article is government funding for women's organizations and the ways in which funding affect majority and minority women's organizations' ability to perform critical advocacy in Norway. State feminism, as a descriptive model of a political process in which women's political mobilization “from below” meets political integration “from above”, is the point of departure, and the article discusses women's organizations' opportunities for political participation. The site of empirical inquiry is governmental support for both majority and majority women's organizations. The article explores the Norwegian state's reasons for funding women's organizations, as described in White Papers and funding guidelines, and the women activists' lived experiences of state funding. Norway is known for being a “women-friendly” society with an emphasis on political citizenship for women. State funding has been one way in which the Norwegian state has encouraged women's organizations' critical advocacy. This article suggests that state funding of women's organizations in Norway is one indication of a move from state feminism towards market feminism: minority women activists have to rely on project funding, which encourages an implementation role and leaves little room for minority women's own agendas; majority women activists are ambivalent about state funding because of low funding levels and increased professionalization. This article claims that advocacy pertaining to women's issues framed within a rights and justice discourse is weakened for minority and majority women, and that the structure of funding prevents a forceful advocacy role, in particular for minority women's organizations in contemporary Norway.

‘Negotiating New Roles'

Based on in-depth interviews, this article critically assesses the current roles that Republican women occupy as the North of Ireland continues to emerge from conflict. In doing so, it argues that women's political mobilization during the conflict period can be carried forward into post-war scenarios; however, it is the nature of that activism that proves problematic. The conflict transformation period witnessed a more highly formalized role for Republicans that contrasts sharply with radical spaces opened up during the conflict; in particular, the re-emergence of rigid state institutions coupled with formal political parties appears to severely restrict women's sense of political mobility. As Republicans move away from ‘revolutionary agitation’ into more formalized politics, many Republican women are encountering cultural and structural barriers to their involvement within that realm. This research finds that while some women are participating within the sphere of formal politics, many are continuing their political activities within the community and voluntary sector, which they view as a far more effective mechanism for exerting political agency.

Women, War, and World Order: Gender Difference in Security Attitudes in Europe and the United States, 2002-2011

This paper focuses on a change in the politics of democratic societies with important implications for national security policy: the increasing political mobilization of women. This change takes several forms, including an increase in the political interest and engagement of women, a growing gender differentiation in policy preferences, and an increasing tendency of women to identify with parties of the left. Despite the importance of these changes, they have been neglected by scholars of national security. In this paper, I examine cross-national evidence on gender difference for a number of security policy issues. I draw on survey measures on a wide variety of issues, including support for international involvement, multilateral institutions, the NATO Alliance, opinions of military power and balance of power, international threats, defense spending, and the use of military force. The study covers up to 14 nations. The most important cross-national finding is that overall gender polarization on security policy issues is strongly correlated with the level of the political mobilization of women. Within nations, gender difference is most prominent on issues of military power, the cost of defense, the acceptability of war, and the use of military force. Gender difference toward international involvement and multilateral institutions are smaller. However, gender difference on each of these issues show variation by nation and over time, which suggests that particular contexts condition the degree of gender polarization. Hypotheses that cast gender difference as universal are therefore suspect. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for theories of gender difference and for the politics of Western security.

“You Have Votes and Power”: Women's Political Engagement with the Irish Question in Britain, 1919–23

AbstractThe Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 spurred organized political activity among women in Britain, including former suffragists who campaigned against coercion in Ireland and members of the Irish minority in Britain who supported more radical republican efforts to achieve Irish independence. Their efforts are particularly significant because they occurred immediately after the granting of partial suffrage to women in 1918. This article argues that the advent of female suffrage changed the landscape of women's political mobilization in distinct ways that were made visible by advocacy on Ireland, including the regendering of the discourse of citizenship and the creation of new opportunities beyond the vote for women to exercise political power. At the same time, the use of women's auxiliary organizations and special meetings and the strategic blurring of the public and private spheres through the political use of domestic spaces all indicate the strength of continuities with nineteenth-century antecedents. The article further situates women's political advocacy on Ireland in an imperial and transnational context, arguing that it was part of the process of reconceptualizing Britain's postwar global role whether through outright anti-imperialism, in the case of Irish republicans, or through humanitarianism and the new internationalism, in the case of most former suffragists. Finally, the article examines the failure of these two groups of women to forge alliances with each other, underscoring the ways in which both class and nationality challenged a notional common interest based on sex.

State Structures and The Politics of Child Care

New and reconfigured structures of policymaking and governance present fresh challenges to gender equality seekers, especially in federal systems. In a world in which policy functions are increasingly being “uploaded” to international or supranational levels, “downloaded” to meso-level units, or “offloaded” to civil society and private enterprises (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003), the links among institutional design, policy activism, and policy outcomes provide fruitful opportunities for empirical research and theory building. This essay asks what impact state architectures have on women's political mobilization around child care. How might we theorize the effects of different types of federation and multilevel governance on child-care activists' political opportunities and achievement of policy outcomes? How adequate are existing frameworks for explaining links among policy actors, state institutions, civil society, and international business? We sketch some preliminary answers and show how recognizing the significance of the multiple scales and layers involved in contemporary governance can expand feminist research agendas and promote gender-sensitive policymaking. Child care is increasingly understood as an essential component of contemporary welfare states (Michel and Mahon 2002). Well-designed child-care programs help time-pressed earner parents reconcile work and family life and make it possible for lone parents to improve their economic situation through paid work. Universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) also lays the foundations for lifelong learning, indispensable for success in knowledge-based, postindustrial economies. Adequate public support for ECEC systems generates good postindustrial jobs for early childhood educators who work in publicly financed, regulated settings instead of in low-paid, informal, caregiving situations (Esping-Andersen 1999). Developing high-quality, universal ECEC in federal systems with divided jurisdictional responsibility, however, faces particular challenges. Most comparative social policy and welfare regime literature ignores state architectures by assuming that unitary state forms are the norm and focusing purely on nation-state governments and policymaking (Esping-Andersen 1999). Advocacy and policy initiatives on international or meso-level scales typically are ignored or underexplored.

The Islamic revival and women's political subjectivity in Indonesia

Synopsis The global Islamic revival is producing new kinds of Muslim political subjectivities. But what does the revitalization of religion in the public sphere mean for women? This article examines how Islamic piety can be a resource for Muslim women's political mobilization in Indonesia. I argue that the redefinition of Islamic piety as public practice helps to promote women's participation in the Indonesian public sphere. While some activists use Islamic discourses to contest gender inequality, others seek to contribute to the Islamization of Indonesia. Both visions are influenced by the conviction that piety is a public matter, but they reveal deep divisions among Muslims about how the concepts of public and private should be understood. I suggest that the new public piety, influenced by the Islamic revival and neoliberalism, has empowered many women activists, but the political reforms they seek to achieve are diverse and not necessarily egalitarian.

New Patterns of African Women’s Strategic Mobilization

Recently, Karen Beckwith (2000) put forward a call for scholars of women's movements to shift from the well-established practice of in-depth country studies toward developing more general patterns “to advance the comparative study of women's movements and comparative political research more generally” (p. 431). The field of comparative scholarship on women's movements, particularly research on activism in the “third world” (p. 437), has become the forefront of the women and politics research (p. 431). Yet, wary of tendencies to over-generalize or apply ethnocentric biases, most scholars remained isolated within the confines of their limited, albeit rigorous, empirical research. Beckwith charged scholars to be bolder and more confident that their cases could contribute to the identification of new patterns that were emerging in the field, which in turn could create middle-range theories for the discipline. Kathleen Fallon's Democracy and the Rise of Women's Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa answers this call decidedly and effectively. It is precisely the kind of work that moves the field toward this new level of theorizing. Fallon utilizes rigorous empirical case-study research, yet she demonstrates how her case shapes and challenges the larger field. While Ghana is Fallon's focus in the book, she thoroughly grounds the case in both the African context as well as in the broader women and politics literature. Her rich case study goes on to engage theories of women's political mobilization and contributes to the emergence of a general theory of women's participation.

Managing the Woman Issue

Recent international accounts of gender and governance have highlighted complexities surrounding the political mobilization of women on the one hand, and the reconfiguration of the state on the other. The trajectories taken by women's movements have intersected and interacted with a rapidly changing political opportunity structure and with increasingly unfavourable shifts in dominant discourses. In the past, Australia has been heralded as a woman-friendly state, complete with femocrats overseeing gendered policy analysis of mainstream programmes as well as a broad range of women's service. Recent discursive shifts, however, combined with the changing architecture of the state and a women's movement largely in abeyance, have resulted in the ‘fall of the femocrat’ and increasing marginalization of feminist agendas. As observed elsewhere, such shifts position women in ways that only selectively recognize them and their capacities and needs. We extend such critiques by mapping over time the engagement with the state of a particular group of rural women. This case study enables us to identify both the heterogeneity of contemporary governance, and the complex, multi-level responses to farm women's agitation for greater industry recognition.

Seen but Not Heard: The Racial Gap between Feminist Discourse and Practice

The authors were participants in a fifteen-week seminar on epistemology and methodology at a university-based humanities research center. We had approached the seminar with expectations of refining our ideas about epistemology and methodology but, to our disappointment, instead began to question our place within women's studies. The following commentary reflects on our increasing frustration with the substance and direction of that seminar.' At the time of the seminar, Venetria Patton was a doctoral candidate in English completing her dissertation on nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American women writers; Kimberly Nettles was a doctoral candidate in sociology whose research focused on women's political mobilization in Guyana, South America.2 Although came from different disciplines, both thought the seminar would lead to new insights about our work; however, quickly became disillusioned. Rather than coming together to share as diverse scholars, found a closed circle that did not seem to have room for our ideas. According to the memo our research group sent to our invited guest speakers, our purpose was: to examine some of the many and diverse practices of knowledge production that currently constitute feminist research (with an eye towards mapping the shifting curricular terrain and identity of women's studies). Four areas of inquiry loosely structure our investigations: Feminist Jurisprudence, Art, Literature, and Popular Culture, Cultural Studies of Science, and New Ethnographies. Some of the very general questions with which had been wrestling include the following: What are the epistemological claims, assumptions, starting points, or locations of methods that might be regarded as distinctly feminist? What work do we want and expect inquiry to do? How are to proceed, methodologically, in an era of increasingly precise critical

The Candidacy and Election of Women in Japanese SNTV Electoral Systems

ABSTRACT Women are urtderrepresented among candidates and elected officials at all levels of government in Japan. This analysis examines the relative effects of electoral system, district magnitude, candidate opportunity, party nomination, and the political mobilization of women in recent Japanese elections. Empirical findings from tests of hypotheses against district level data from elections to the Upper House and Lower House of the Japanese Diet, Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, and Tokyo Special Ward assemblies are reported. Although the analysis indicates that institutional factors fail to account for the underrepresentation, it also shows that recent elections have been crucial thresholds in increasing women's representation.

The Sibiriachka Encounters Revolution

In sweeping away the Tsarist political empire, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 also challenged a way of life. It provided opportunities for women in Siberia, the Sibiriachki, and in the rest of Russia, to change their lives. The revolution's democratic and Marxian socialist policies, carried to these women by the zhenotdel, determined officials in the women's department of the Communist Party, created wide possibilities for change. This essay examines Siberian women's responses—both negative and positive—to the revolution's teachings about women's rights and their equality with men. Women's cultural backgrounds—ethnic, educational, urban and rural—influenced their responses to the revolutionary call to claim their rights, their successes and failures in efforts to defend themselves from violence, their efforts to achieve health care and education, and their progress toward greater political and economic equality. This essay also explores conditions on the eve of the revolution, illustrating the variety of strata existing in Siberia's vast lands. It discusses the significant advances in women's self-awareness and their changing activities in the early and mid-1920s. The Party's political mobilization of women expanded into a critique of the social status quo. Subsequently, in the late 1920s and 1930s, the context for their activities was radically altered: political and social criticism were no longer acceptable. For women the gains of the revolution were corrupted and women lost more than they had previously gained. While one can see the throttling of the women's revolution as an indication of its fundamental weakness, one can also see it as the Party's response to a movement that was gaining strength and raising questions about the Party's primacy.

The Gender Gap in Foreign Policy Attitudes

Conventional wisdom holds that women are more peace-loving or more pacific than men. Most of our knowledge about the gender gap in foreign policy attitudes originates from the United States, but it cannot be taken for granted that these results can be generalized to other countries. This article examines gender differences in foreign policy attitudes in Denmark; it discusses the systemic factors behind such gender differences as well as the systemic factors that cause foreign policy attitudes to influence elections. By the 1980s a clear gender gap in foreign policy attitudes had developed in Denmark. Several explanations for this gender gap are examined in the article: the theory about women's greater distance to foreign policy, the theory about specific women's values, and the theory about the political and feminist radicalization of women. The article concludes that Denmark's gender gap in foreign policy attitudes in Denmark in the late 1980s was due primarily to a general left-wing mobilization of women. Paradoxically, however, this development also seems linked to a revitalization of traditional women's values. The discussion of the systemic causes of the gender gap and of its election impact centers around three factors: the salience of foreign policy, the political mobilization of women, and the available political alternatives in a given election.

Si Evita Viviera

are actively participating in that country's struggles for national liberation. Recently Per6n himself asserted that it is important for Argentina to follow the example of China regarding the important role of women in the creation of an independent and developed nation. According to Peron (1973), the Peoples' Republic of China is able to claim great national achievements because of the integral participation of women in industry, science and agriculture, and Argentine women have the right and responsibility to emulate the Chinese example in order to help Argentina realize its potential greatness. This was not the first time that Peron had referred to the significant role that women must play in the future of Argentina. Indeed, it represents complete continuity with the principles established during the period 1946-1955 when his movement ruled Argentina. Peron had always articulated the absolute necessity of integrating women into the process of national liberation, and Peronist ideology had always asserted the equal political, economic and social rights of women. Today, as in the 1940's and 1950's, women are politically organized within Peronism through the Peronist women's movement. In order to understand its contemporary appeal, it is necessary to look at the historical roots of what remains a unique phenomenon in the Americas. The political mobilization of women within Peronism was unprecedented in Argentine history. Coming on the heels of long years of struggle by other feminists and feminist organizations, Peronism distinguished itself from them by its ability to appeal to the masses of Argentine women. It developed partially in response to the integration of women into the paid work force during the thirties and early forties - by 1949, women came to represent 31.37 percent of the capital city's industrial workers - and built a national women's movement which not only improved the living standards of working women, but raised the status of all women in Argentina by giving them political equality with men and providing them with an opportunity to organize themselves politically in a women's party within the general movement. Official ideology eulogized women as equal partners in the struggle to build an industrialized country with a just distribution of wealth.