Women's Press Research Articles

Within the Confines: Women and the Law in Canada, edited by Jennifer M Kilty

Within the Confines: Women and the Law in Canada, edited by Jennifer M Kilty

“We Tell the Stories of the People”

This piece explores how racial integration within the professional sphere broadened opportunities for black women reporters in Pittsburgh and influenced white women's perceptions of their black colleagues during the 1960s and 1970s. Through archival research and an examination of Johnson's and Garland's published writing, this article explores the lives and work of the Women's Press Club of Pittsburgh's first two black members, Toki Schalk Johnson and Hazel Garland. The black members of the WPCP saw themselves as leaders and their own writing shows that they considered their work at integrating the city's segregated organizations, such as the WPCP, as a way to create lasting change for their successors. Johnson's and Garland's published work shows women who were not afraid to both upbraid and encourage the black community while challenging racial inequality in white-dominated spaces, including the WPCP and the women's liberation movement

Book Review: The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey that Inspired the Canadian Women’s Press Club, by Linda Kay

The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey that Inspired the Canadian Women's Press Club. Linda Kay. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012. 228 pp. $34.95 hbk.In June 1904, sixteen Canadian journalists boarded a luxurious train car bound for the St. Louis World's Fair. It was a newsworthy trip for more than one reason: they were female and about to report on a global exposition, undoubtedly the biggest story of the year. At the turn of the century, the few dozen women who worked as journalists in Canada typically penned articles on etiquette and social events for women's pages, and they rarely traveled for assignments. That was about to change.In this enjoyable road-trip narrative, Linda Kay, associate professor and chair of Concordia University's Department of Journalism, describes a journey that helped Canada's female journalists achieve professional legitimacy and led to the formation of the Canadian Women's Press Club (CWPC). As the first women's press club in the world to claim a national membership, the CWPC would endure 100 years.But the sixteen women traveling in the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) car could not know any of this. Dressed in the day's fashion of floor-length tweed skirts, shirt- waists, and large-brimmed hats, the women were excited and a little nervous. For some, the assignment marked their first reporting venture. The novices also were awe- struck by the few stars among them, such as Kathleen Blake Coleman of the Mail and Empire, one of Canada's largest newspapers. Known by her readers as Kit Coleman, she had become famous for covering the 1898 Spanish American War from Cuba.CPR sponsored the journalists' ten-day trip. The railway wanted to entice immi- grants to western Canada and thus ensure the transcontinental line it had completed in 1885 would enjoy brisk traffic. Its publicity-savvy officials knew a group of women traveling alone to the World's Fair would garner a great deal of press coverage about Canada and their company, and they were right. The railway's public relations appara- tus, although not a focus of this book, is an interesting side note.The author deftly places the women's stories within the political and social context of Canada at the start of the twentieth century. In 1904, women in Canada did not have the right to vote or hold public office. Married women found it difficult to continue professional careers. Kay shows that the cultural differences of the country's dual language citizenry are reflected in this group of journalists, which was evenly split between English- and French-speakers. …

“We Couldn't Get Them Printed,” So We Learned to Print: <em>Ain't I a Woman?</em> and the Iowa City Women's Press

“We Couldn't Get Them Printed,” So We Learned to Print: <em>Ain't I a Woman?</em> and the Iowa City Women's Press

Christmas visits … ‘Don't worry’

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Whitehead, Affidavit, 19 Feb. 1982, Docket 1.47, Record of Inquest. 2. The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) was allied to the African National Congress (ANC). Although not prohibited, it was effectively crushed by its leaders being banned, imprisoned or forced into exile. 3. Breytenbach, Affidavit, 18 June 1982, Docket 2.1021, Record of Inquest. 4. Six Christmas cards – six in and six out – were negotiated two weeks earlier by the Detainee Parents’ Support Committee with Col. Muller, along with weekly (Friday morning) acceptance of food parcels and clothing, plus books, games and puzzles approved by the commanding officer. Dirty washing could also be returned. See Minutes meeting DPSC & Col. Muller, 10 Dec. 1981 in Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life, London: The Women's Press, 1989: 139. 5. Whitehead, Affidavit, Record of Inquest. 6. Whitehead, Affidavit. 7. After a ‘near-death’ experience of torture, Auret van Heerden has made a statement and is now being allowed to recover. Neil's close friend and comrade, Gavin Andersson, who was detained and released, escaped to Botswana before the security police came to re-arrest him. 8. This is the same Special Branch interrogator who, in 1964, claimed that the detainee Babla Salojee had deliberately jumped to his death out of a seventh storey window in The Grays, Johannesburg's former police headquarters. Those who survived Swanepoel's ‘standing torture’ included my husband Nandha, whom he threatened with having his body dumped down a mine. One of their people would investigate, he added, and that would be ‘end of story’. By 1966, Major Swanepoel commanded the new security police camp in South West Africa's far north and the counter-insurgency squad that became the notorious ‘Koevoet’. Death was integral to Swanepoel's repertoire. He is said to have commanded the policemen who, in 1976, open fired on black school children in Soweto and Alexandra. 9. Van Heerden Statement, 16 Sept. 1982, Docket 4.1B, Record of Inquest. 10. Van Heerden Statement, 16 Sept. 1982, Docket 4.1B, Record of Inquest.

A Genuine Civil Society and Its Implications for the Iranian Women's Movement

The emergence of a genuine civil society with its democratic elements is of significant importance in furthering women's rights. This article explores the interrelation between democratization and the women's movement in Iran. In view of the fact that the pursuance of women's rights itself is part of the process of democratization, it is demonstrated that the fulfillment of women's rights cannot be postponed until the emergence of an ideal society, that is, an open society. This article also examines how the women's press, in the absence of a proper political party system, has become a key space wherein the debates about women's issues have been articulated.

Vibhuti Patel, ed., Girls and Girlhoods at Threshold of Youth and Gender—A Vacha Initiative, Delhi, The Women Press, pp. xxv + 480, Price 1595

Vibhuti Patel, ed., <i>Girls and Girlhoods at Threshold of Youth and Gender—A Vacha Initiative</i>, Delhi, The Women Press, pp. xxv + 480, Price 1595

Dissonant Disabilities: Women with Chronic Illnesses Explore their Lives (review)

Diane Driedger and Michelle Owen (eds.), Dissonant Disabilities: Women with Chronic Illnesses Explore their Lives. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press/ Women's Press, 2008. isbn 978-0-88961-464-2 pbk 258pp cdn$36.95/us$36.95 The development of the contemporary disability-rights movement has been both driven and shaped by the refusal of the medical model of disability. In seeking to define ourselves and claim our rights to political and personal selfdetermination, disability advocates and scholars have had to deconstruct, dispute, and displace illness-based views of our bodies. Unfortunately, rejecting the medical model has too often meant rejecting the views and stories of people with ongoing medical needs, and even minimizing our own health concerns. The disability-rights movement's repeated assertion that 'we're not sick' contributes to the alienation of people who are sick but still require access to society and their human rights, writes Julie Devaney in Diane Driedger and Michelle Owen's collection of essays, Dissonant Disabilities (There Always Seems to Be Excuses: A Grad Student's Narrative of Autoimmunity, 124). As a result, disability-related texts-scholarly, theoretical, and literary-have often left out the perspectives of people with chronic illnesses. As its subtitle indicates, this volume brings forward some of those voices- particularly the voices of women with chronic illnesses. The authors and subjects of these essays must navigate both gender-based and health-based social expectations and constraints. They illuminate, to a greater or lesser extent, the experience of living with a wide range of conditions, including multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, cancer, depression, and anorexia. The essays vary in approach, scope, focus, and quality. Several present sociological studies involving questionnaires and interviews, while others are primarily personal narratives. The editors and many of the authors are Canadian, and Canada's legal and cultural environment is the book's primary contextual framework. Women of colour are underrepresented, as are working-class women. The editors acknowledge this, pointing out that writing our lives and our illnesses demands a certain amount of privilege ... time to think, the ability to write, the confidence to submit an abstract, and the energy to produce an edited final submission (Introduction, 10). There is more diversity in terms of disease type, age, and sexual orientation (both heterosexual and lesbian women appear, though no transgendered women). A common theme is the way that women's experiences of chronic illness set them apart from their well peers, from conventional workplaces, and from the medical practitioners whose care they need. Many speak of being judged for their failure to keep up with their personal, professional, and political obligations. Susan Wendell, for instance, probes her sense of guilt about not being a Good Feminist, as defined by enthusiastic participation in meetings, parties, phone calls, and marches in the streets (Notes from Bed: Learning from Chronic Illness, 213), when she both needed and preferred to stay in bed, reading, writing, and resting. Other authors and informants describe how friends, fellow students, and even family members have disbelieved the reality of the limitations arising from chronic illness, regarding the ill woman as lazy or hypochondriacal. …

CHANGES in SKIN TANNING ATTITUDES Fashion Articles and Advertisements in the Early 20th Century

Historical reviews suggest that tanning first became fashionable in the 1920s or 1930s. To quantitatively and qualitatively examine changes in tanning attitudes portrayed in the popular women's press during the early 20th century, we reviewed summer issues of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar for the years 1920, 1927, 1928, and 1929. We examined these issues for articles and advertisements promoting skin tanning or skin bleaching and protection. We found that articles and advertisements promoting the fashionable aspects of tanned skin were more numerous in 1928 and 1929 than in 1927 and 1920, whereas those promoting pale skin (by bleaching or protection) were less numerous. These findings demonstrate a clear shift in attitudes toward tanned skin during this period.

Beyond psychopathology: Interrogating (dis)orders of body weight and body management

As David Smail and Janet Bostock (1999: p. 78) noted a decade ago ‘[c]larifying the role ofideology and culture as ‘‘distal’’ influences on subjective experience is at once one of themost important and one of the most difficult tasks facing community psychology.’ Itremains equally important and, perhaps, just as difficult today. This special issue comprisesa series of critical explorations of the ways in which subjectivities and subjectiveexperiences are discursively constituted, regulated and resisted in relation to normalisedand pathologised body weights and weight management practices.Traditionally, psychological research has focused on the body image of individuals, byfor example, quantitatively measuring body image dissatisfaction in young women (e.g.Grogan, 2006; Tiggemann, 2004). However, the focus on deconstructing hegemonicnotions of body weight and weight management practices is undoubtedly of particularimportance for community psychology today most obviously because, against a backdropin which Westernised cultural ideas constitute the slender body as healthy, attractive,morally virtuous and ‘normal’ (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Malson, 1998, Malson and Burns, 2009),the World Health Organisation has declared that the Western world is in the grip of an‘obesity epidemic’ (e.g. Branca, Nikogosian & Lobstein, 2007).The now highly familiar and culturally entrenched constructions that equate thin/slimbodies with all things good and fatness with all that is aesthetically and morallyreprehensible are now over-written and further consolidated by a neo-liberal discourse ofhealthism.Framed withinneo-liberal ideology, one’shealthbecomesanindividual concernand solutions to health problems are seen to ‘lie in the realm of individual choice’(Crawford, 1980), so that body size is constructed as a personal attribute free of social,cultural, physical and economic constraints (Rich & Evans, 2008). Within this discoursethe thin/slender body is read as a sign of health and ‘excess’ body weight is constructed asunhealthy and a consequence of irresponsible lifestyle choices.Journal of Community & Applied Social PsychologyJ. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol., 19: 331–335 (2009)

Contesting the Culture of Silence in Muslim Women's Writing: Women, Sex and Marriage in Alifa Rifaat's Distant View of a Minaret

Muslim women's writing has been noted for foregrounding the many ways in which society operates to the disadvantage of women, creating ‘nervous conditions’ (Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions.1988. London: The Women's Press) intended to keep women outside the realms of power. Matters relating to women's choices in marriage as well as sexual intimacy are often suppressed in public discourses. The Egyptian writer, Alifa Rifaat, challenges this silence through fictional writing that is quite clearly an indictment of the gendered conventions that characterize relations between the sexes. Contrary to Western feminist discourse, however, Rifaat shows that Islam in itself does not marginalize women; rather, the fuel that keeps the flames of patriarchy burning is man-made. Using selected stories from Distant View of a Minaret (1983. London: Heinemann), this article looks at the silencing of women and the strategies of self-preservation women adopt in the face of overpowering patriarchal values.

&lt;em&gt;Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Women's Press on the Development of the Novel&lt;/em&gt;, by Molly Youngkin

Reviewed by: Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Women's Press on the Development of the Novel Diana Maltz (bio) Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Women's Press on the Development of the Novel, by Molly Youngkin; pp. viii + 218. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007, $39.95, $9.95 CD-ROM. Molly Youngkin's monograph is the first comprehensive study to examine and theorize the significance of literary reviews in two feminist periodicals of the fin de siècle, Shafts and The Woman's Herald. Youngkin argues that these journals determined a standard by which to judge New Woman literature while also hastening a modernist aesthetic through their affirmation of characters' inner lives. Youngkin coins the term "feminist realism" to characterize a brand of realist fiction that depicted women's internalized consciousness and valued it as a precondition for their further acts of agency. She builds her study on three avenues to women's freedom—thought, speech, and action—and three correlative narrative strategies that novelists used to express them—internal perspective, dialogue, and description of concrete acts. In chapter 1, Youngkin explores female characters' internal awakenings in fictions by Sarah Grand and Thomas Hardy. Fin-de-siècle theorists believed that feminist consciousness could be disseminated ethereally as "thought influence" (42), and Grand adopted this line of thinking when claiming her role as a medium for ideas already in the air. In nonfiction essays, Grand emphasized the New Woman's intelligence and the necessity for women's continuous self-education. Her novels vary in their delineation of women's consciousness. Although the eponymous protagonist of Ideala (1888) moves from self-realization to activism, a male first-person narrator limits access to her thoughts. Women in The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897) recognize their marginalization, but not all are able to transform this into personal agency. Youngkin then turns to Hardy, arguing that because he refuses to illuminate their internal perspectives, his women lack the conviction borne of "increased consciousness" (55). Instead, they assert agency through action, culminating in Sue Bridehead's semi-comic leap through the window to avoid Phillotson and Tess Durbeyfield's murder of Alec. Youngkin concludes that as speakers both women are unable to navigate and dispute the ideological discourses marshaled against them. Summarily, New Woman critics such as Dora Montefiore and Mary Eliza Haweis recognized inconsistencies in Hardy's character development but praised his representation of women's struggles against cultural conditions. Chapter 2 focuses on the spoken word, juxtaposing George Gissing's techniques in representing Rhoda Nunn and Nancy Lord against Mona Caird's more measured attribution of internal perspective and dialogue to female characters in The Daughters of Danaus (1894). One reviewer asserted that Rhoda Nunn forfeits intellect by recoiling from Everard's alleged adultery, but Youngkin rightly qualifies this claim, tracing scenes of Rhoda in contemplation, albeit late in the book. Gissing's development of Nancy Lord betrays a similar unevenness, for, after showing promise, Nancy compromises her feminist resistance by the novel's conclusion. By contrast, the women's press lauded Caird's protagonist Hadria Fullerton for exercising thought, speech, and action in her efforts to negotiate a balance between liberty and duty. Youngkin contextualizes Caird's investments by referencing her nonfiction and public debates on marriage and suffrage in women's clubs and the press. As chapter 3 reveals, the feminist press charged novelists with envisioning [End Page 734] vigorous, assertive role models. George Meredith's plots, however baroque and obscure, pivoted on women's acts of resistance; his Diana of the Crossways (1885) was particularly praised in the women's press. More complexly, Ménie Muriel Dowie's writings on female adventure offer a self-contradictory slant on the action-oriented woman. The impulsive heroine of A Girl in the Karpathians (1891) frequently acts without any clear political intent, but upon observing Eastern practices is compelled to question Western constructs of female propriety. Dowie's later Women Adventurers (1893) celebrates historical women who disguised themselves as soldiers by following their husbands to war, yet in the preface...

Walking to Greenham: How the Peace-Camp Began and the Cold War Ended by Ann Pettitt (review)

REVIEWS 75I Islam developed at theNizhnii Novgorod Centre forStrategic Research seems too much of a top-down Kremlin project designed to channel and control Muslim radicalism, broadly and perhaps over-freely defined. Helen Faller contrasts Tatars tan with Ukraine, emphasizing the 'emerging social distance between Kazan's two primary language communities' (p. 330), and examining a reality of increasing linguistic reconquest of public space fromRussian. Mikhail Alexseev, on the other hand, looks at a dormant issue inRussia's Far East. Chinese settlement in Primorskii krai has simply not yet been extensive enough to trigger any large-scale counter-movement. In a similar vein, Elise Giuliano provides an illuminating approach to 'theorizing nationalist separatism in Russia'. Historical-institutional and economic structural approaches often tend to over-predict nationalist mobilization, whereas Giuliano is also interested in movements that don't happen. Nationalism 'can come and go within a given population' (p. 55). Giulliano agrees with Mark Beissinger that it is better analysed as a form of 'mass behaviour'. UCL SSEES Andrew Wilson Pettitt,Ann. Walking toGreenhorn: How the Peace-Camp Began and theCold War Ended. Honno Welsh Women's Press, Aberystwyth, 2006. 310 pp. Illustrations. ?8.99 (paperback). In the spring of 1981,Ann Pettitt decided to organize a march ofwomen from Cardiff to the US air base at Greenham Common, Berkshire, to protest against the planned deployment there of Cruise missiles. The march took place from 26 August to 5 September of that year under the aegis of the newly formedWomen forLife on Earth and led to the establishment of the Women's Peace Camp. This, however, is not the story of the Greenham movement as a whole. For that we have David Fairhall's Common Ground: The Story of Greenham (London, 2006). It isAnn's story of what she personally did, thought and experienced (plus, for historical background, the story of her parents' lives before and duringWorld War Two). Ann played a crucial role right at the beginning of themovement, but later itdeveloped inways ofwhich she did not fully approve. Walking to Greenham will be of interest to students of Russia primarily because about half of the book (PartThree: 'The Duck of Peace Flies East') is devoted to her May 1983 visit, togetherwith fellow activist Karmen and specialist in Soviet ecological issuesJean McCollister, to theUSSR. Unlike many Western anti-nuclear campaigners, Ann and her friends were far from naive about theUSSR. Both sides, in theirview, shared blame for the arms race and theCold War, neither ofwhich could be ended without change on both sides. Such change had to include the building of trustat all levels; that required open and authentic communication; and that in turn required the liftingof totalitarian controls in the East. 752 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 This line of thinking led toan alliance with the independentMoscow Group forTrust, towhom theywere introduced by Jean. Attempting to use their status as heroines of the struggle forpeace towin official recognition for the Trust Group, they brought a member of the group along with them to a meeting with the Soviet Peace Committee, provoking an outraged reaction from SPC deputy chairman (andKGB colonel) Oleg Kharkhardin. Neverthe less, their solidarity ? and that of themany otherWestern activists who visitedMoscow in theirwake ? did enable theTrust Group to continue its work and protect it from further repression. And it is significant thatwhile Kharkhardin's mind was tightlyclosed other Soviet participants in themeet ing did not conceal an intense and sympathetic interest inwhat thewomen fromGreenham Common had to say. Readers should not be overhasty in dismissing Ann's claim that shemade an important contribution to opening up Soviet society and ending theCold War. Her testimony serves as further confirmation of the thesis so cogently argued byMatthew Evangelista ? namely, that the Cold War was brought to an end through cooperative interaction between Soviet reformers and Western disarmament activists (UnarmedForces: The TransnationalMovement to End the ColdWar, Ithaca, NY, 1999; see, also, the account ofmy collaboration with Viktor Girshfeld at ). The 'new thinking'was a product precisely of this interaction. To be sure, our effortswould hardly have borne such rapid fruitwere itnot for the rise to power ofMikhail Gorbachev. Ann Pettitt has made a few errors of detail concerning...

Gender, Candidate Portrayals and Election Campaigns: A Comparative Perspective

In the United States, research suggests that men and women candidates are covered differently by the press. However, few studies compare press coverage of candidates cross-nationally. Systematic comparison of newspaper coverage of male and female candidates during election campaigns in Australia, Canada, and the United States may help illuminate the conditions that exacerbate or dampen gender differences in candidate portrayals. Given the sharp focus on candidates in American campaigns and the relatively lower percentage of women in the Congress, we expect to find the greatest disparities in men's and women's press coverage in the United States. Our findings suggest that across these three democracies, candidates are often portrayed in terms of long-standing gender stereotypes. These gender differences have important implications for voters' perceptions of candidates and may shape widely shared attitudes toward women's role in the political arena.

MY OTHER, MY SELF

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For work that begins to explore the relationship between feminism and popular culture, see also Gamman Gamman , Lorraine , and Margaret Marshment 1988 . The female gaze . London : Women's Press . [Google Scholar] and Marshment's edited collection The Female Gaze (1988). 2. Disturbingly, perhaps, Hermes entertains the possibility that the way magazines are read in the unfocused flurry of everyday life renders them ‘virtually meaningless’. That potentially nihilistic insight for media and cultural studies’ concern with the reception of popular texts has been left hanging on the page. 3. There is no archive of Cleo letters beyond those that were published. Popular magazines rarely consider their own future historical value in the immediacy of deadlines and the continual present of magazine publishing. Nor would the publishing company, Australian Consolidated Press, allow me access to whatever documents may have been kept relating to Cleo. This lack of co-operation with researchers is one that Bridget Griffin-Foley also met when writing The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire (1999). 4. Issues of authenticity, selection and editing letters in magazines demand an article in their own right. Given the popular mythology that readers’ letters to magazines are invented by staff writers, it is probably worth stressing here that this is simply not the case with Cleo and with many (if not all) magazines. I have yet to interview Ita Buttrose and other staff formally, but informal conversation indicates a respect for the editorial function of the letters page to create a public forum, to increase magazine loyalty and ‘brand’ identification, and to allow readers to feel ownership and inclusion in ‘their’ magazine. There is a principle of trust involved with publishing readers’ letters, and it is one that women's magazines like Cleo took seriously. If readers’ letters were written in-house, and if that practice leaked into the public domain, the trust between readers and their magazine would be broken. 5. Here I use the broader definition of consciousness-raising as defined by Meryl Altman: ‘… a belief in the liberating potential of speaking openly about women's lives, starting with one's own and moving outward to connect with others’ (Altman 2003 Altman , Meryl. 2003 . Beyond trashiness: The sexual language of 1970s feminist fiction . Journal of International Women's Studies 4 ( 2 ): 1 – 19 . Available from http://www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/April03/Altman.pdf [cited 10 February 2007] . [Google Scholar], 2). 6. The Australian Women's Weekly was the most-read magazine, reaching 34.1 per cent of Australians. Cosmopolitan, Cleo's most direct niche competitor, and at that point a little over a year old in Australia, was read by 4.9 per cent. 7. Dr Beverly Raphael was Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Sydney in 1975. After an illustrious career in the mental health service sector, she now holds many professorial appointments at a number of Australian universities. 8. Edna Ryan was involved at this time in the Industrial Action group of WEL. It was her submission to the Arbitration Commission in 1974 that succeeded in removing the legal concept of the male family wage, replacing it with the adult minimum wage. 9. By 1976, 36 per cent of the Australian workforce was female and, of that number, 64 per cent were married women (Matthews 1984 Matthews , Jill Julius. 1984 . Good and mad women. The historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia . North Sydney : Allen & Unwin . [Google Scholar], 54). 10. It is pointed that Dasey does not identify as a feminist in her editorial letter, but as part of ‘the women's movement’, a by-word in Cleo for the less militant, more ‘respectably’ mainstream manifestation of women's liberation. 11. There is no space here to explore the mainstreaming of sexual liberation in Cleo and its contentious relationship to second-wave feminism, but that too is part of the meaning of popular feminism and part of its trajectory into the present.

Going public through writing

This article examines the historical emergence of a women's public sphere in early 20th-century China, a time when modernization was at the top of the national agenda, by looking at how some women — who belonged to the scholar-gentry class and had experience of the West — became journalists. These women carved out a distinctively women's public sphere by establishing a press that was both for women and by women. While Chinese male intellectuals envisioned women's press merely as instrument for enlightening and educating women, women journalists promoted women's journalism as a public forum, particularly for women to participate in discussions of modernization. Struggling against the fact that women in China were traditionally perceived as a subordinate and incapable group, these women journalists had to utilize their elite background to claim credit for their writings and secure their place in the public discursive field.

The Essentialist Agenda of the “Woman's Angle” in Cold War Washington

This article explores the paradoxical nature of the woman's angle in journalism in the mid-twentieth century through the prism of Associated Press reporter Ruth Cowan's career. Using her private papers as well as her published work, it analyzes how her reporting in postwar Washington, D.C., reinforced feminine stereotypes that limited women to home and family even as she defied those stereotypes by personal example and by reporting on women's activities in politics and in government. Secondary threads explore how she covered the woman's angle as a World War II correspondent and illuminate the empowering effect of female culture provided by the National Women's Press Club against the backdrop of the male-dominated profession's discriminatory practices and attitudes. The thesis is that the women's angle was an essentialist, male-constructed category intended to keep women journalists and their readers in their place.

The Catholic and the Communist Women's Press in Post-War Italy—An Analysis of Cronache and Noi Donne

This article aims to provide a systematic, comparative analysis of two of the main women's mass publications in order to trace continuities and changes in the development of women's role in the public sphere in Italy. The analysis begins with an elaboration of the social and political context, which is crucial for the understanding of media texts in general. It shows how the existence of only limited political spaces in post-war Italian society due to the polarisation of Catholicism and communism delayed both an open political discourse on women's conditions and the gradual development of an autonomous and lay feminist movement. Noi Donne of Union Donne Italiene (UDI) was closely aligned with and financed by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and lacked any substantial autonomy until the early 1970s, while Cronache of the Catholic women's organisation Centro Italiano Femminile (CIF) was a faithful instrument for the propagation of those Catholic concepts of femininity that were redefined and reinforced by the Vatican in the Catholic publication Civiltà Cattolica.

Women making news: gender and journalism in modern Britain

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, female editors and journalists created a new genre of political journal they proclaimed to be both for and by women. Specialized periodicals like Women's Penny Paper and Shafts fostered the proliferation of diverse political agendas aimed at reimagining women's status in society. At the same time, the institutional infrastructure of the women's press provided women with job opportunities in a nontraditional field. Michelle Tusan tells two stories. First, she examines alternative print-based political cultures that women developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, she explores how British female subjects forged a wide range of new political identities through the pages of their press. Tusan employs social and cultural historical analysis in the reading of popular printed texts, as well as rare and previously unpublished personal correspondence and business records from archives throughout Britain. Insightful and filled with fascinating detail, Women Making News uncovers how the relationship between print culture and gender politics provided a vehicle for women's mobilization in the political culture of modern Britain.

Daughters of the Nile: Photographs of Egyptian Women's Movements, 1900-1960 (review)

Reviewed by: Daughters of the Nile: Photographs of Egyptian Women’s Movements, 1900-1960 Laura Bier Daughters of the Nile: Photographs of Egyptian Women’s Movements, 1900-1960Hind and Nadia Wassef, eds. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2001. Had it been written a decade ago, Daughters of the Nile would have been on the cutting edge of research on the history of Egyptian women's political activism. At that time, attempts to write women back into Egypt's [End Page 109] modern history were just beginning to bear fruit, at times complementing and at other times challenging and rewriting conventional historical narratives. Appearing now, Daughters of the Nile, a compilation of photographs celebrating half a century of Egyptian women's activism and participation in political movements, appears a bit old fashioned. It neither draws on the most recent scholarship on women in Egypt, which has attempted to move beyond a focus on notable women to the project of recovering voices by exploring how gender worked as a constitutive element of political and social discourse, nor does it add much to the work by scholars such as Margot Badran and Beth Baron, whose pioneering monographs set the standard for Egyptian women's history in the early 1990s. Still, there are things to recommend this thoughtful compilation of photographs. Editors Hind and Nadia Wassef clearly have exerted an enormous amount of effort in gathering a wide variety of images, some of which are from private collections and never before have appeared in published form, as well as many others that appeared in the popular and women's press. These include formal portraits of prominent women activists and photos chronicling their various activities. These are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, a recognition by the authors that "developments seldom occur in historical narrative's linear terms" (4). Captions are simple and in many cases allow the images to speak for themselves. An introduction does the work of laying out the theoretical and historical context necessary to guide readers. One of the most noteworthy and novel aspects of the book is that it is bilingual: both the introduction and the captions are presented in English and Arabic, making it more accessible to an Egyptian audience. The inclusion of English and Arabic in the same book speaks to the aims of the work itself. The editors, both active in women's issues in Egypt, locate their project as a work of scholarship and a self-conscious feminist attempt to reclaim a very rich heritage of Egyptian women's involvement in politics and social movements for a new generation of women activists, hence the book's emphasis on women's "agency." According to the editors, most scholars have analyzed photographs of Middle Eastern women through the lens of anti-Orientalist critique, "presenting a one-sided view that emphasizes women's subjectivity and denies women agency" (2). This collection is a useful attempt to shift [End Page 110] the focus from how photography portrayed women to how women appropriated photographic technology to serve their own ends. The photos, particularly those that appeared in the women's and popular press, speak to the ways in which politically active Egyptian women began to court the press for its power to disseminate images. This raises some interesting issues, but they are not issues that are, or can be, fully explored without additional analysis of the individual photos themselves, as well as a more extended history of Egyptian photography and photographers in the first half of the twentieth century. Largely missing from the work are photos of non-elite women. The authors, to their credit, are conscious of the "gap between housemaids and hanims" in the collection and make an effort to address the issue in the introduction. But this absence speaks to the wider theoretical and conceptual choices made by the authors. It is not simply that photos of non-elite women are not represented in the collection. It is also the aim of the authors themselves to write women back into an ultimately nationalist narrative of history. This work succeeds, but one wonders if the narrative itself could have been decentered further. How, for example, did the leaders...