Women's Section Research Articles

Motherhood and Childcare

The aim of this article is to explore the origins of social and health protection for mothers and children in the first half of the twentieth century in Spain, with particular attention to the continuities and ruptures that occurred in the notions, practices and entanglements between the state and the various collective agents involved in these campaigns. The Civil War (1936-1939) and the origins of Francoism provide an opportunity to analyse the transition from a liberal democratic framework to an authoritarian one. In a context of the dismantling of civil society, the Falange Women's Section played an exceptional role as a collaborating agent in the application and dissemination of Franco's welfare provisions. It imposed a model of political discipline and specialised training for visiting nurses and educators that generated dynamics of female professional promotion and left its mark on welfare practices.

‘The Falange Changed Our Way of Being Completely’: Women and Gender Identity in Spanish Fascism

Women's and gender history has broadened our knowledge of the Franco dictatorship by incorporating new perspectives and categories of analysis. The Women's Section of the Falange, a topic that has attracted progressively greater attention since the 1990s, has been analyzed mainly as a mechanism of female subordination and as a differentiated sphere for women's agency. This dual approach follows to a great extent the ground rules established in ongoing debates on other European experiences of fascism. This article intends to offer ways of surmounting some dichotomies (e.g., subordinated/emancipated, victims/perpetrators) that have underpinned the analysis of women during the dictatorship. Accordingly, an attempt will be made to explore how the Falangists constructed a collective subjectivity from their own notions of their political culture – Spanish fascism – and a specific war experience that had shaped them as subjects. And, from this perspective, the article offers an understanding of their agency in a context in which the ‘victory’ of the military uprising had led to a process of reconstructing political and social power.

The Witch in Flight

The Witch in Flight

The usefulness and practicality of the International Medical Guide for Ships.

The third edition of the International Medical Guide for Ships (IMGS) was published in 2007 and supported a main principle of the newly adopted International Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) 2006: to ensure that seafarers are given health protection and medical care as comparable as possible to that which is available to workers ashore. In 2021, the revisions and drafting of the fourth edition of the IMGS began. Taking the COVID-19 pandemic into consideration, it was decided that a stakeholder study was necessary to ascertain the usefulness and practicality of the guide as well as provide input for which new topics to include. The study applied data triangulation, with respondents from a geographically broad sample of the International Maritime Organization's five regional areas of the world. The data was analysed using thematic analysis. The results show that the IMGS is widely known and used among persons involved in medical care on board ships, but the IMGS is not as practical as stakeholders would wish it to be. For the guide to be useful, it must be ensured that telemedical advice information is included and if possible, ensure there is one single and global medical guide. Also, there is a need for new medical information, and respondents pointed to pandemic information, medicines list, medical chest, mental health issues, a women's section, updated cardiopulmonary resuscitation instructions, human immune defect virus information (human immune defect-virus) and information on how seafarers may self-monitor and be monitored on board in relation to chronic diseases. Respondents understand a medicine chest on board is mandatory according to the MLC 2006, 98% are familiar with its content, and 86% use the IMGS.

A ‘Shining Example of Fascist Womanhood’: Angiola Moretti 1925–1943

This article examines the political career of Angiola Moretti who was, from 1926 to 1930, the National Secretary of the Fasci Femminili – the women's section of the Italian Fascist Party. Despite her prominent role, this female hierarch has never, to date, been studied by historians. The article investigates how she came to be appointed to this high-ranking position and her subsequent role and career in the Fascist Party, including her eventual nomination in the late 1930s to the rank of Ispettrice Nazionale del PNF. The story of Angiola Moretti's somewhat improbable career is used as a lens to explore the murky world of the Fascist ‘court’ in Rome and its gender politics.

Церковь и партия в годы первого франкизма (1939‒1957)

During the first Francoism, the party and the church became the key institutions of the regime. They were largely responsible for social con-trol over the population. In the first years after the civil war, the "Spanish Traditionalist Falange and JONS", a result of the forcible unification of various political forces, took the leading role. The party carried out the task of familiarizing the Spaniards with the ideology of the new state. For this purpose, an extensive network of organizations was created, which was supposed to cover all the Spaniards. The adult male population was part of vertical trade unions, women were in the "Women's Section", children – in the "Youth Front". Nevertheless, the Party's success in indoctrinating the population was very modest and was reduced to an obligatory routine that had little effect on everyday life. The church had a much greater influence. The new authorities, in exchange for the support of the majority of Catholic prelates, gave the church broad powers to control the private lives of the Spaniards. Mar-riage was exclusively in the competence of the church. Divorce has almost completely disappeared from the life of the country. The church also gained wide influence on the education system, which resulted in conflicts with the Falange. After the World War II, the regime began to favor the church and organizations associated with it. Their representa-tives occupied a number of key positions in the government. Despite the fact that the party faded into the background, it retained all of its original functions.

Janet L. Langlois (1946–2021)

Janet L. Langlois (1946–2021)

Falangist women at Franco’s Universities

This paper analyses the Women's Section of the Sindicato Español Universitario (Spanish University Union SEU) during Franco's regime. Led by an elitist group of falangist women from the Sección Femenina (Women's Section) of the FET-JONS, and under the male SEU as well, the activity of this group of SEU falangist women has been barely studied until now However, the Sección Femenina of the Sindicato Español Universitario (SF-SEU) was a space of power, sensitive both to the agitated life of Franco's universities, to the development of a political falangist culture and, also, to the transformations of the Sección Femenina. Thus, it must be analysed in order to shed light on issues regarding gender and class identity promoted by Pilar Primo de Rivera's organisation.

Cuca García (1889–1973): Por las causas de las mujeres y la revolución

María del Refugio García Martínez, or Cuca García, was a central figure in Mexican activist circles; she played a pivotal role in the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and the women's movement. Born to a middle-class family in Taretan, Michoacán, García's father was a socially minded doctor who served and advocated for rural laborers on local sugar haciendas. He also supported the education of his daughter, an increasingly widespread practice, especially among liberals. When she was 19 years old, García's father died, leaving his widow alone to raise her children in difficult economic circumstances. These early experiences informed García's subsequent trajectory. García was an early member of the Michoacán Socialist Party (established in 1917) and the PCM (established in 1919), and she was a founding member of the Mexican Feminist Advisory Board (established in 1919) and the Sole Front for Women's Rights (FUPDM, established in 1935). García's name has appeared repeatedly in histories of the women's movement in Mexico, such as those authored by Esperanza Tuñón Pablos, Gabriela Cano, and Ana Lau. Building on these works, Verónica Oikión Solano's biography significantly deepens our knowledge of García and of important processes in early twentieth-century Mexican history.Oikión Solano's biography provides a fuller understanding of the overlapping worlds of leftist politics, the labor movement, and the women's movement. The warp and weft of García's trajectory is instructive, for it demonstrates how her grassroots work evolved, from Michoacán to Mexico City, Yucatán, and Veracruz and then back to the national scene in Mexico City. Furthermore, her trajectory sheds light on the practical challenges of maneuvering shifting political contexts. During the 1920s, some state governments supported activists like García, who worked in promoting rural education in Michoacán. However, as political winds shifted, García found herself unemployed. José Vasconcelos, minister of public education, then appointed García to work in Yucatán, where she promoted her vision of education as community development, with women centered in that process. In efforts to organize workingwomen, García also inserted herself in meetings organized by state-allied labor unions and by feminists whom she opposed ideologically. And as the 1940 and 1952 presidential elections heated up, she joined other committed feminists in lining up behind the relatively moderate presidential candidate General Miguel Henríquez Guzmán, who promised women suffrage.Oikión Solano draws on her deep knowledge of leftist politics to enrich our understanding of the opportunities and limits for women within the PCM. That the PCM was resistant to taking up the cause of women has been documented; however, Oikión Solano plumbs the depth of that resistance. When García traveled to the Soviet Union in 1929–30, she attempted to leverage her conversations with Comintern leaders, as well as the women's section and Latin American section of the Executive Committee, to convince the PCM that women should, and could, be brought into the party. Invoking Vladimir Lenin, García insisted that there would be no revolution without women. Upon return to Mexico, García gave speeches, wrote letters, and made repeated pleas that the PCM make women's issues a priority, even if only for the sake of the party's survival. While she made few inroads in convincing her comrades, she built on her organizational experiences to cofound the FUPDM and to make a successful bid for the Mexican Chamber of Deputies in 1937. In the midst of debates over how to interpret the constitution, the government barred García from taking office.Oikión Solano reminds us of the importance of attending to the silences in archives and historical narratives. For example, personal disputes among historical actors have obscured the central role that García played in producing the PCM newspaper El Machete. Oikión Solano has gathered together myriad archival fragments and reads against the grain of histories of the Left to piece together a picture of García's contributions not only to producing El Machete but to party strategy and making working women's needs more visible. García's work in rural communities, factories, and government offices informed her insistence on the need for, among other things, an eight-hour workday, equal pay for equal work, and day care for working mothers. Oikión Solano has so immersed herself in the content and style of García's writing as to be able to assess silences and unsigned documents to suggest García's influence on the direction of the FUPDM.A biography of this caliber opens doors for others. Historians interested in the circles in which García moved will be happy to find reference to other important historical figures whose biographies have yet to be written. Historians of labor, the Left, and women's movements will find rich material for comparisons to other national contexts. Assembled of short and pithy chapters, the book also serves as a captivating new model for writing historical biography.

Pregnancy and parental leave among neurosurgeons and neurosurgical trainees.

Despite recently heightened advocacy efforts relating to pregnancy and family leave policies in multiple surgical specialties, no studies to date have described female neurosurgeons' experiences with childbearing. The AANS/CNS Section of Women in Neurosurgery created the Women and Pregnancy Task Force to ascertain female neurosurgeons' experiences with and attitudes toward pregnancy and the role of family leave policies. A voluntary online 28-question survey examined the pregnancy experiences of female neurosurgeons and perceived barriers to childbearing. The survey was developed and electronically distributed to all members of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and Congress of Neurological Surgeons who self-identified as female in February 2016. Responses from female resident physicians, fellows, and current or retired practicing neurosurgeons were analyzed. A total of 126 women (20.3%) responded to the survey; 57 participants (49%) already had children, and 39 (33%) planned to do so. Participants overwhelmingly had or planned to have children during the early practice and senior residency years. The most frequent obstacles experienced or anticipated included insufficient time to care for newborns (47% of women with children, 92% of women planning to have children), discrimination by coworkers (31% and 77%, respectively), and inadequate time for completion of board requirements (18% and 51%, respectively). There was substantial variability in family leave policies, and a minority of participants (35%) endorsed the presence of any formal policy at their institution. Respondents described myriad unique challenges associated with pregnancy and family leave. Pregnancy and family leave pose significant challenges to the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women in neurosurgery. It is thus imperative to promote clear family leave policies for trainees and practitioners, address discrimination surrounding these topics, and encourage forethought and flexibility to tackle obstacles inherent in pregnancy and the early stages of child rearing.

Beyond the Women's Section: Rosa Lebensboym, Female Journalists, and the American Yiddish Press

Beyond the Women's Section: Rosa Lebensboym, Female Journalists, and the American Yiddish Press

Does Non-Quota Strategy Matter? A Comparative Study on Candidate Selection and Women's Representation at the Local Level in Germany

AbstractThe intraparty mechanisms through which parties recruit, motivate, and select their candidates are central explanatory factors for the representation of women. This article analyzes the effects of intraparty factors on women's representation by measuring the impact of (1) parties’ non-quota strategies at the regional level—such as establishing women's sections, mentoring programs, or campaign funding for women—and (2) central party gatekeepers at the local level. Exploiting an original, newly compiled data set consisting of 1,475 electoral lists from the 2014 local council elections in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, this article shows that parties’ non-quota strategies and central gatekeepers play crucial roles in determining the share of women on local party tickets. This means that who runs for office is, in this case, a question of intraparty dynamics. These dynamics are caused by different mechanisms of non-quota strategies and gender-biased candidate selection combined with interparty effects of local party competition and left-party strength. The almost consistent conditions that the subnational level provides show that the parties’ capacities (or lack thereof) for gendered recruitment is one major explanatory factor and should be tested at least in cross-national comparisons.

Populism and feminist politics: The cases of Finland and Spain.

While populism has been subject to growing scholarly interest, its relationship to feminist politics has remained conspicuously understudied. This article investigates this relationship by analysing two cases of European populism: left populism in Spain (Podemos), and right populism in Finland (the Finns Party). The questions asked, and the challenges posed to feminist politics from populist political forces are intriguing: How is feminist politics articulated in both left and right populism? What differences can be discerned between left and right populism for feminist politics? To explore this, the article analyses three core dimensions: (1) political representation: descriptive representation (numbers of women, men and minority positions) and substantive representation (policy content in relation to gender equality); (2) populist parties’ formal and informal gender institutions such as internal quotas, gender equality plans and institutional culture; and (3) dedicated spaces for feminist politics such as women's sections or feminist groups. It is argued that political ideology matters for feminist politics, and while left parties are more responsive to feminist concerns and populism poses specific problems for feminist politics, it is the gendered culture of political parties that ensures both left and right parties are problematic for feminist politics.

The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist by Laura Beers

Reviewed by: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist by Laura Beers Keith Laybourn Laura Beers, The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) Laura Beers' biography of Ellen Wilkinson, nicknamed "The Mighty Atom" because of her small size and energy, is perceptive, well-informed, and clearly focused upon Wilkinson's vital contribution to the emergence of socialist politics in the early 20th century in both a British and an international context. Beers places Wilkinson's activities firmly within the wider and conflicting politics of her age and provides the impressive associational context. Indeed, her book is a very important addition to the previous biographies. It is decidedly more critical than Betty D. Vernon's Ellen Wilkinson: A Biography (Brighton: Croom Helm, 1982), which presented Ellen as a worthy founding pillar of the Labour Party, and challenges Paula Bartley's more recent biography Ellen Wilkinson: From Red Suffragist to Government Minister (London: Pluto, 2014) by suggesting that Wilkinson was less consistent and more pragmatic in her principles than Bartley assumes. On the other hand, it rather endorses Matt Perry's excellent biography "Red Ellen" Wilkinson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), which sees "Red Ellen," referred to as such because of the colour of her hair and her fiery temperament, as a transnational figure operating in the world of international socialism and greatly affected by the various socialist and Marxists she met, including Robert Blatchford, Keir Hardie, Rajani Palme Dutt, Lenin and Trotsky – the lionesque figures of their day. Famed for her support for the Jarrow march of October and November 1936, when more than 200 men marched from Jarrow to London to present a petition to Parliament for jobs, it is often forgotten how involved Ellen was in myriad other socialist organizations and activities between the eve of World War I and her death in 1947. Though by no means the dominant socialist of her age she was, indeed, one of the ubiquitous figures in the history of the British labour movement. Ellen Wilkinson was indeed a most unusual radicalized woman. She was one of the first women to go to the University of Manchester and was active in the Manchester Independent Labour [End Page 302] Party and the Clarion movement. She was organizer of the women's section of the Amalgamated Union of Cooperative Employees after World War I. A lifelong feminist fighting for women's rights in Britain and throughout the world, she began her work with the Manchester Women's Suffrage League before being active in numerous feminist organizations and campaigns. When World War I displaced suffrage from the agenda, she was a pacifist, although perhaps less directly involved in its activities than many others she was a member of the International Committee for Women for Permanent Peace in 1915. However, the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s led her to support the National Government's move to increase spending on armaments. By that time she had become deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War where she became fervently anti-fascist. As a trade unionist she investigated, with Frank Horrabin, a married man and later member of Parliament for Peterborough with whom she had a relationship, the organization and activities of the General Strike of 1926. Initially Marxist in her thinking, and a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, she left it in 1924, feeling that its leadership was weak and divisive, with more communists out of the party than within it, to focus upon her career in the Labour Party. An inveterate attender of meetings and member of investigative commissions, she also became involved in an examination of the brutalities of the Irish Civil War and of British brutality in India against the Indian independence movement. To these activities might be added a flirtation with Guild Socialism through her association with G.D.H. Cole, Margaret Cole, and the National Guild League. She was deeply concerned and outraged with the social conditions of poor families in Britain, and particularly the high levels of unemployment in inter-war Britain. She was member of Parliament for Middlesbrough (1929–1931) and for Jarrow (1935...

GROUP PORTRAIT: THE ISPETTRICI NAZIONALI OF THE ITALIAN FASCIST PARTY, 1937–1943

AbstractThe years of fascist rule in Italy saw an unprecedented mass political mobilization of women, a mobilization that has, to date, been little studied by historians. This article focuses on the role of the ispettrici nazionali – the highest rank that women ever reached in the fascist party hierarchy. It attempts to piece together a ‘group portrait’ of these hitherto unstudied female hierarchs, who were appointed from 1937 onwards to form a group leadership for the fasci femminili – the women's section of the party and the only way that women could join it. The article investigates who these women were, how they managed to rise to this prominent position, their ideas and motivations, and their role in organizing and mobilizing millions of female party members for political campaigns and for the war effort.

The More Things Change…: Exploring Solutions to Persisting Discrimination in Legal Academia

In May 2014, a conversation about gender discrimination among law school faculties exploded on the email listserv for the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section of Women in Legal Education. This conversation drew in dozens of participants from schools all over the United States and included teachers who were just starting out and those nearing retirement, drawing in clinical faculty, legal writing faculty, library faculty, and podium faculty. The topics that were raised ranged from the discriminatory actions of colleagues and students, to the marginalization of particular subject areas in the curriculum, to structural hierarchies in the profession, to the role of class in exacerbating other inequalities. The conversation went on for several weeks, and many of the participants urged that we needed to harness the feelings of anger and frustration expressed by so many and work together to channel that energy into productive change. As one step, a group of faculty members from all over the country, inspired by a suggestion from Professor Meera Deo of Thomas Jefferson School of Law, banded together to propose a at the 2015 meeting of the AALS that would draw from empirical data, legal research, litigation strategy, and personal experience to both further conversations about the persistence of discrimination in the legal academy and activate strategies for addressing continuing problems. The program had a unique structure to permit the inclusion of as many voices as possible in the conversation. The program began with a three-person panel similar to more traditional AALS presentations. The second part of the program was made up of three-minute statements by speakers who were selected in response to a call for circulated by the program organizers. The Articles in this symposium issue represent some of the ideas that emerged from this crosscutting program. The Articles are presented here in the order that the speakers offered their remarks at the AALS program. Several themes run through the Articles included in this Symposium. First, long-standing, but not inherently necessary, law school structures and systems perpetuate race and gender discrimination. Several of the contributions discuss the ways that the skills-doctrine distinction on law school faculty magnifies inequality. Others consider how the tenure standards applied at most schools reinforce the effects of implicit and explicit bias. A second current running through many of the Articles here is the intersectional nature of discrimination. Whether it is because of race, class, or sexual orientation, the discrimination that women in the academy face is often exacerbated by other forms of bias. A third theme that many of the authors touch on is that legal academia is at a pivotal moment to address some of the structures that continue to perpetuate discrimination. Changes in the legal market and in legal education are pushing law schools to reexamine many of their calcified assumptions. We should seize this opportunity to challenge our institutions to make real change that will root out persistent discrimination. I. The Discriminatory Consequences of the Skills-Doctrine Divide Several Articles in this issue consider a topic that has increasingly become the subject of heated debate in the legal academy: the status divide between doctrinal, tenure-track professors and legal writing, clinical, and library faculty members. In Podia and Pens, Kristen Tiscione and Amy Vorenberg highlight the inequities created by the two-track system that exists in law schools, whereby those who teach lawyering skills occupy a second-class status compared with podium teachers. (1) Skills teachers tend to be paid less, have less job security, and have lower status within their institutions. Given that women are over-represented in skills teaching positions and under-represented among tenured and tenure-track faculty, this two-track system significantly exacerbates gender inequality in law schools. …

The spoils of opportunity: Janet Mitchell and Australian internationalism in the interwar Pacific

Janet Mitchell has been recognised previously for her work as a journalist in Harbin, Manchuria, and at the League of Nations as a temporary collaborator in the Traffic in Women section in the 1930s. Mitchell was also a participant in the formative history of Australian internationalism. Her memoir published in 1938 provides unique insight into her experiences as a member of Australian delegations to Institute of Pacific Relations conferences in Honolulu in 1925 and Shanghai in 1931. Her reflections remind us that internationalism was an emotional as well as ?rational? set of ideas and practices involving a range of progressive women and men active in the interwar years.This article has been peer reviewed.

More Than “Rations, Passions, and Fashions”: Re-Examining the Women's Pages in the Milwaukee Journal

The Milwaukee Journal is an example of a Midwestern metropolitan newspaper that featured an unnoticed but progressive women's section in the 1950s and 1960s produced by a group of women who were doing more than giving superficial treatment to food, family, fashion, and furnishings, derisively known as the Four F's. They were focused on a fifth F—feminism—quietly laying the foundation for the women's liberation movement years before marches and demonstrations drew widespread media attention to the cause. A reexamination of the soft news of the women's pages reveals a process of social change and demonstrates how the women of these sections were finding their own ways of redefining women's roles.

Women's Voices, Men's Lives: Masculinity in a North Indian Urdu newspaper

AbstractLiterary journals and newspapers aiming to reform the religious beliefs and domestic habits of women were common in early twentieth-century North India. Although most readings have focused on how these texts reflected male legislation of women's behaviour, we should look at Muslim reformist literature to understand male experiences; this investigation offers new insights into an emergent middle-class identity defined more by manners than birth. Readings of a previously little-researched Urdu newspaper, Madinah, and its women's section offer new insights on male experiences of reformism, characterized by profound ambivalence. Playfulness emerged in some reformist descriptions of women's voices, channelling the influence of rekhti. Ultimately Madinah cultivated pride in Islam's strict division of gender roles and conversely threatened men with shame for failing to regulate uneducated women. Descriptions of powerful, Ottoman women warriors were framed to incite men to acts of bravery, using reports from Europe as cautionary examples of the over-indulgence of women. While the newspaper offered outlets for men to express curiosity about women's experiences, ultimately reformist literature limited expressions of pleasure. Male ambivalence regarding the implications of the reformist project remained embedded in writing about women.

Interview with Mariann Lewinsky, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, July 2, 2015

FIGURE 1. Mariann Lewinsky, curator, II Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna. > victoria duckett:Thank you for agreeing to talk with me today. I would like to start by asking you to explain what you do. > mariann lewinsky:I mainly do silent cinema programs for Il Cinema Ritrovato here in Bologna. Il Cinema Ritrovato is by now the major international festival for films of the past, screening not only silent films, but also [films that go] up to the present. This year, for example, the restoration of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975) was screened here. But I mainly work with silent films. > vd:What do you do with these sections? What is your role? > ml:I decide and propose which sections and films I would like to do. However, there is one section we do every year (since 2003), the “100 Years Ago” [Cento anni fa] section, presenting films from one hundred years ago. This is a very important source of inspiration for other [festival] sections. For example, the first feminist or women's section I did came from viewing films from 1905 and 1906, where I discovered how strong female comedy was in early cinema; it was a real surprise [figures 2–3]. These, of course, were also the years of the suffragette movement. So I decided to do something on comic actresses and suffragettes. With this program, which I curated for the 2008 Il Cinema Ritrovato together with Bryony Dixon and Madeleine Bernstorff, I managed to implement a “women's section.” Since then we have regularly done programs dedicated to a feminist—or let's say a female—subject or figure, like “Fearless and Peerless: Adventurous Women of the Silent Screen” (in 2010, cocurated with Monica Dall'Asta); directors Alice Guy (curated by Kim Tomadjoglu), Germaine Dulac (curated by Tami Williams), and …