Women's Studies Commons^™

Aesop's Fables And George Eliot's Brother And Sisters Sonnets, Margaret Wolfit

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is always exciting to discover something new and to come upon it unexpectedly. That was my happy experience a few years ago. I had decided to try my hand at devising a biographical programme on George Eliot and to attempt to portray her at the end of her life, reminiscing on past events. I wanted to absorb as much as I could about her, starting with her early days. What were the influences that shaped her life and writing? What books had she read as a child?

She tells us: 'I could not be satisfied with the things around …

Book Review, Minna J. Kotkin

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Stop The Presses: Representations Of Women's Progress In Corporate America Reported Through Popular News Media., Suzanne Marie Cloyd

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the following key areas: women in the public sphere, women in the private sphere, and how media portrayals in these areas portray women's progress in obtaining executive positions in corporate America.

Topics of interest include wage differences between genders, executive placement, and attainment in board positions throughout Corporate America.

The Americanization Of Tsuru Aoki: Orientalism, Melodrama, Star Image, And The New Woman, Sara Ross

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

This article contextualizes issues of race and Orientalism in the career of Japanese actress Tsuru Aoki within changing representational strategies and ongoing cultural struggles over the public and domestic roles of women in the modern age. According to the author, Aoki's persona blurred the boundaries between Japanese and U.S. identities.

Ua68/18/1 Endeavors, Vol. 9, No. 2, Wku Women's Studies & Support Program

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter created by the Women's Studies & Support Program for students and alumni.

Challenges Documenting Early Era Regional Leaders, Danelle L. Moon

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Women And Homelessness In Massachusetts, Michelle Kahan

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

Ninety percent of the 1,100 families who utilize the state's shelter system annually are headed by women, as are approximately 20% of the 19,000-29,000 individuals who stay in Massachusetts emergency shelters each year. In total, a minimum of 5,000 women and 2,000 children annually stay in Massachusetts homeless shelters.

These figures do not include over 3,000 women in domestic violence shelter (60% of whom enter shelter with their children), not the 50% of families seeking emergency shelter who are turned away each year. Over a period of three years, women also make up a quarter of Boston's 1,400 street dwellers: …

Macro Promises Of Microcredit: A Case Of A Local Esusu In Rural Ghana, Carolette Norwood

Journal of International Women's Studies

Microcredit’s three big promises are one, to reduce poverty; two, to empower women; and three, to enhance family planning knowledge, attitudes and practices. Using a mixed-method approach, this study examines 204 women members and non-members of local eSusus in rural Ghana. Quantitative chi square analysis indicates no associations between membership in an eSusu and relative wealth; women’s autonomy family planning practices, knowledge or use and reproductive control. Meanwhile, the qualitative data shows that women members believe that eSusu are extremely useful for acquiring working capital to be reinvested in their small market ventures, and are helpful with school fee and …

Mainstreaming Gender In Hiv/Aids Programs: Ongoing Challenges And New Opportunities In Malawi, Rebecca Tiessen

Journal of International Women's Studies

Numerous efforts are in place in Malawi to address the high rates of HIV/AIDS in the country. Furthermore, several successes in HIV/AIDS prevention and mitigation (including free anti-retroviral drugs to people living with AIDS) have been documented. Fewer successes, however, have been achieved in integrating gender issues into HIV/AIDS programs. In this article I begin by defining gender mainstreaming and why it is central to HIV/AIDS programming. The second objective of this paper is to summarize the existing initiatives to mainstream gender in HIV/AIDS programs. The final objective is to uncover the ongoing needs, gaps and challenges for gender mainstreaming …

“Nowadays Who Wants Many Children?”: Balancing Tradition And Modernity In Narratives Surrounding Contraception Use Among Poorer Women In West Bengal, India, Devalina Mookerjee

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper investigates how poorer women in West Bengal, India balance the ideas of modernization and tradition in their choices to use birth control. Ideologically, Indian women have traditionally been placed within the context of the home and valued principally as wives and mothers. Children, therefore, are tremendously important for women within this framework. In contrast, the ideology of the relatively well structured and very large family planning program asks especially poorer women to have fewer children for the good of the family and the nation.

How do poorer, predominantly illiterate women balance these two oppositional ideas in an area …

Planting The Seeds Of Change: Im/Migrant Life Writings, Michelle Johnson Vela

Journal of International Women's Studies

The subject of land, working it and owning it, is an inherent part of Chicano/a autobiography, as exemplified by the life writings of Elva Treviño Hart. The term “im/migrant” connotes transition and mobility, crossing borders, shifting parameters, all of which are fundamental facts of life for Chicano/a authors. A collective sense of community proves to be the only stasis in the narrators’ young lives, and the migrant camps become a microcosm in which societal and cultural rituals are conducted, despite the lack of control over the constantly shifting spaces they occupy. Being Mexican American, however, signifies a precarious existence in …

An International Perspective Of Privatization And Women Workers, Ross Prizzia

Journal of International Women's Studies

Authors provide a comparative international perspective of the relationship of privatization and women in the context of the work force. The methodology is a synthesis and critical evaluation of the impact of privatization on women from an international perspective utilizing a comparative analysis of international case studies and survey data from prominent scholars and international agencies and research firms to explain the adverse effects on women of privatization of the work force. Comparative data on women in the work force collected from 1999-2004 in the privatizing economies of Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Bulgaria, the United States, Canada, China, Hong Kong, …

Women’S Role In The German Democratic Republic And The State’S Policy Toward Women, Susanne Kranz

Journal of International Women's Studies

According to the theories of Marx, Engels, Bebel, and the political leaders of the GDR, the emancipation of women would be accomplished when the emancipation of the working class was realized. They further clarify the general view toward women in a socialist society; these ideas characterized the GDR and the general perception of women. The women’s question was incorporated into the social question and the class struggle, and not distinguished as an individual aspect of gender relations. The question is how much equality women in the GDR had achieved and how emancipated the society, truly, was. My main focus is …

‘Starving Children In Africa’: Who Cares?, Lisa Cassidy

Journal of International Women's Studies

The current state of global poverty presents citizens in the Global North with a moral crisis: Do we care? In this essay, I examine two competing moral accounts of why those in the North should or should not give care (in the form of charity) to impoverished peoples in the Global South. Nineteen years ago feminist philosopher Nel Noddings wrote in Caring that “we are not obliged to care for starving children in Africa” (1986, p. 86). Noddings’s work belongs to the arena of care ethics – the feminist philosophical view that morality is about responding to, caring for, and …

Book Review: Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler, Dolores Lehr

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler, edited by Marjorie Agosín

Book Review: Gender In The Hindu Nation: Rss Women As Ideologues, Anu Sabhlok

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS women as Ideologues by Paola Bacchetta

Book Review: Children Of The Eagle, Osita C. Ezenwanebe

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Children of the Eagle by Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo

Book Review: Critical Chatter: Women And Human Rights In South East Asia, Alison Aggarwal

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Critical Chatter: Women and Human Rights in South East Asia by Caroline Lambert, Sharon Pickering and Christine Alder

Three Poems, Mary Kennan Herbert

Journal of International Women's Studies

Poems by Mary Kennan Herbert:

• Trying To Make Sense of Motherhood
• Weekend In The Woods
• Hot Dog

Domesticity Transformed, Lori A. Brown

Journal of International Women's Studies

This project begins with an interest in the female space as active within the domestic sphere. It involves issues of place-making and hopes to understand both the processes leading to and consequences following the alteration and eventual elimination of such places within the home. Through the passage of time I began to decipher difference – differences of my childhood home. The temporality of these spaces fascinate me, how they have changed from a place created by my mother to one by my father, the spatial consequences of these changes, and ultimately how these alterations have affected my brother and my …

Women, Migration, And The Body-Less Spirit Of Capitalist Patriarchy, Mechthild Hart

Journal of International Women's Studies

The continuously expanding global free trade in domestic and sex workers intensifies old capitalist-patriarchal forms of extracting women’s emotional, physical, and sexual labor. The patriarchal dream of seizing control of impure, unruly life has now entered its neoliberal stage, exemplified by money begetting money in the virtual sphere of financial speculation, and by biotechnology’s promise to create a world that is no longer in need of impure female mothering bodies. The very nature of the work associated with unruly life delivers, however, a major blow to the patriarchal vision of a totally controlled, purified, body-less world. Imported female ‘servants of …

“Of Course They Claim They Were Coerced”: On Voluntary Prostitution, Contingent Consent, And The Modified Whore Stigma, Yenwen Peng

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper starts with a reflection on the main tactic adopted during the Taipei prostitutes’ movement, namely, the “poverty as force” rationale, and argues that a campaign strategy that focuses on the justification of prostitutes’ consent to their job does not help them much; instead, it reinforces the stigma on “voluntary” prostitutes. I suggest that sex workers’ activism abandons the now dominant “voluntary vs. forced” division of prostitution and, emphasizes the working conditions of sex workers rather than the reasons that underlie those workers’ consent. This suggestion by no means implies that we neglect the critical moral value of consent. …

Configurations: Encountering Ancient Athenian Spaces Of Rhetoric, Democracy, And Woman, Mari Lee Mifsud, Jane S. Sutton, Lindsey Fox

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay encounters configurations of “woman” in the space of rhetoric and democracy. By “configuration” we mean how a woman is postured and positioned in this space. We deal in ancient Athens recognizing that an ancient conceptual space called rhetoric, an art or techne of civic discourse, is embedded in the contemporary lived space of American civic discourse always constructing the rhetorical figure of woman and continuously under construction. We explore this conceptual space rhetorically, that is, not to articulate the feelings or meanings the space would have had for the ancient Athenians, but rather to articulate how this conceptual …

Women World Leaders: Comparative Analysis And Gender Experiences, Robert P. Watson, Alicia Jencik, Judith A. Selzer

Journal of International Women's Studies

Research suggests that executive political office poses additional and different political challenges for women than legislative office. Yet, a few dozen women have attained their nations’ highest executive office. Surprisingly little research has been devoted to the experiences of these women world leaders. This study builds profiles of the women world leaders in the modern era and analyzes their backgrounds and political experiences in an effort to both identify commonalities among the women leaders and assess the challenges they faced on account of their sex.

Legal Injustices: The Zina Hudood Ordinance Of Pakistan And Its Implications For Women, Rahat Imran

Journal of International Women's Studies

During recent decades the women of Pakistan have been the most vulnerable and convenient targets of social, domestic and sexual violence. This paper will examine the trend of sexual violence against women that emerged in Pakistan with the introduction of the Islamization process through the implementation of the Sharia laws since1979. The paper’s main focus will be on rape and the state legislation that governs it, namely the Zina Hudood Ordinance of 1979 and the Law of Evidence of 1984, and how the gender-discriminatory nature of these laws serves as a powerful weapon in the hands of the patriarchal society …

Gender: Kosova’S Other Challenge, Richard Beilock, Ymer Havolli

Journal of International Women's Studies

The extent of differences in roles between the genders in Kosova is examined. Kosovar men, on average, devote 57 percent of their non-rest time to earned income activities (i.e., agriculture, other self-employed, and hired), and only 4 percent to housekeeping. In very sharp contrast, Kosovar women, on average, devote 14 percent of their time to earned income activities and a staggering 65 percent to housekeeping. There are considerable differences across Kosova’s ethnic groups, with much less rigid gender roles among ethnic Serbians than is true for ethnic Albanians. It is argued that rigidly defined gender roles result in significant inefficiencies …

Prostitution In Bangladesh: An Empirical Profile Of Sex Workers, Akm Ahsan Ullah

Journal of International Women's Studies

The paper explores the profile of the Sex Workers (SW) in Bangladesh; and the ordeals faced by them. 221 randomly selected respondents from three categories of sex workers (Hotel, brothel and floating) were interviewed using both close and open-ended questionnaire. Data show that child prostitution is quite prevalent. A higher percentage of sex workers were married compared with the singles. HSWs (Homosexual Sex Workers), on an average, entertain seven clients and BSWs (Bisexual Sex Workers) 15 clients per day. The highest percentage of child prostitutes was prevalent among the FSWs (Female Sex Workers). Hotel sex working is an emerging direction …

Empowerment Beyond Numbers: Substantiating Women’S Political Participation, Bilkis Vissandjee, Alisha Apale, Saskia Wieringa, Shelly Abdool, Sophie Dupéré

Journal of International Women's Studies

From our households and into our communities, from independent States to international governing bodies, gender operates as a construct of evolving aspects of women’s identities and is a medium through which expectations are prescribed, social norms are formed and power relations are negotiated. Gender constructs that impede women’s access to the public spheres of society diminish the possibility for equitable and empowering life conditions. Of particular emphasis in this paper, facilitating women’s entry into political bodies across the world is also compromised by persistent obstacles in women’s opportunities in both political and private spheres of life.

Our research engages female …

Influences Of Global Human Trafficking Issues On Nigeria: A Gender Perspective, Chineze J. Onyejekwe

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper focuses on the socio-economic conditions that force women and girls into the human trafficking industry. Poverty is shown to be one of the major root causes of this phenomenon. The relationship between poverty and other socio-economic issues such as crime, corruption, illiteracy and HIV/AIDS are discussed. The government’s efforts at tackling these problems are analyzed, and further preventive measures also discussed.

Weight Control Behavior And Women: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Jacqueline A. Walcott-Mcquigg

Journal of International Women's Studies

The objective of this study was to seek directly from culturally diverse women information on their weight control behavior. Specific questions were: What types of weight control behavior are practiced by women? 2) What factors influence participation in weight control behavior? and, 3) what are the cultural influences on women’s motivation and ability to participate in weight control behavior? Face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of 135 middle-income women (African American, Caucasian, Mexican American, Puerto Rican) in their homes, offices, and at other places in their neighborhoods. Additional data collection included measuring body weight and height. The …