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This introduction to the special issue highlights dominant approaches to the study of women's and gender history in colonial and postcolonial Maghrib. Moreover, it delineates the analytical agenda that frames our inquiry, and reviews the essays in this collection.

In the call for proposals for this special issue, activist networks were defined as virtual or in person communities devoted to social change. The impact for girls active in these networks has been shown to promote identity development and de-marginalization/empowerment/reclamation of political spaces where girls are marginalized, intergenerational collaboration among women, and community building among feminists. In this study, we seek to explore how women at different generational points reflect on and remember their engagement in social activism. Understanding how these generational shifts affect the impact of social capital on the lives of these women and the changes we might see as they mature into leaders will provide a platform to better understand the influence of belonging to such networks during girlhood.

Pockets are a hot topic. A recent spate of online articles and Twitter threads have linked women’s pockets – or lack thereof – with their ongoing disenfranchisement when compared with the roomy poc...

This article is based on an ethnographic study exploring Indigenous women’s experiences of leaving intimate partner violence. Analysis draws attention to the contextual features of Indigenous women’s lives that differentially shaped women’s experiences of “leaving and/or staying” with an abusive partner. Our findings are identified and described across four intersecting thematic areas: (a) the context of state-Indigenous relations; (b) complex trauma, stigma, and discrimination; (c) kinship and ties to communities and the land; and (d) health, healing, and resistance. These findings offer valuable insights into what constitutes appropriate, safe services, and support for the Indigenous women whose lives are shaped by multiple forms of violence.

American involvement in war has historically coincided with and caused large shifts in U.S. society. This is perhaps clearest in the roles that women embody, and the ways in which those roles and e...

International audience; Fair trade is a new form of commercial partnership whereby actors in the North engage with actors in the South on a number of conditions, including setting a minimum price, a development bonus, and so on. But above all, fair trade organizations in the South are implementing mechanisms that more or less facilitate the empowerment of their members. This article analyzes the empowerment effects of two fair trade organizations in South India. It shows that while positive effects can be seen, the prevailing social norms in India are extremely influential for women at the moment, so that women are putting all their hopes on their daughters through their education.

The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the royal harem and its functions during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848–96), on the basis of two independent Persian-language sources written by noble Iranian women at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Naser al-Din's daughter, Taj al-Saltana (1884–1936), who in her famous memoirs vividly rendered her early years spent on her imperial father's court, and ‘Lady from Kerman’ (whose identity remains, for the moment, unclear), who authored a latterly published travelogue of pilgrimage to Mecca and the holy Shi'a places in contemporary Iraq held by her in the early 1890s. The second part of the latter account is entirely dedicated to the sojourn in Tehran, where, upon coming back from the sacred journey, the woman was a frequent guest at the royal harem. Both accounts are unique as they are the only known first-hand sources penned by the female insiders of the harem in nineteenth-century Iran. Furthermore, both authors, who ac...

This article is aimed at challenging gender stereotypes portraying men as a powerful species that can either destroy or build the lives of women. Using the critical approach to literature called feminist literary criticism, which embraces pluralism of feminist ideologies, this investigation depicts how gender stereotypes and the abuse of women nearly destroyed the life of a young girl in an isiZulu novel titled Uthando Lungumanqoba [Love Conquers All], by Maphili Shange. This woman author allows the character of Phindile, a young girl who lost both her parents at the age of 17, to be rescued from the clutches of poverty and prostitution by a man named Thulani-which shows how gender stereotypes have equally infested the psyches of both men and women.

The following dialogue between Eli PaintedCrow, Cynthia Enloe and Setsu Shigematsu represents one of the conversations generated by the 2006 Feminism and War conference at Syracuse University in Ne...

(2002). Women's Lives and labour on Radnor, a Jamaican Coffee Plantation, 1822–1826. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 27-40.

Reading Women’s Lives in Cookbooks and Other Culinary Writings: A Critical Essay Cet essai examine les points forts et les limites de plusieurs etudes recentes portant sur l’histoire des femmes et de la cuisine aux Etats-Unis. Les auteures de ces etudes s'interessent aux pratiques culinaires par le biais de l'examen de simples collections de recettes et, surtout, de livres de cuisine publies. Si elles demontrent de facon convaincante que ces sources, ignorees jusqu’a recemment, permettent de mieux comprendre l’histoire des femmes et les rapports sociaux de genre, leur analyse des manuels que les reformistes redigerent a la fin du XIXe siecle n’insiste pas suffisamment sur la facon dont ces derniers faconnerent une image normative de la femme au foyer. Toutefois ces auteures soulignent avec pertinence la facon dont la construction politique, sociale et culturelle de la femme fut largement remise en cause dans les annees 1960 et 1970. Leur corpus s'etend en effet, d'une part, aux livres de cuisine "ethnique" ; d'autre part, aux livres de cuisine ecrits par des militants qu'ont influences les mouvements feministe et ecologique ainsi que la contre-culture.

In this article, I outline a framework to examine women’s lives in eastern Guatemala, how multiple forms of violence coalesce in their everyday lives, and how these become normalized so as to become invisible and “natural.” Women in western Guatemala, mostly indigenous, have received the attention of scholars who are interested in unearthing the brutality of state terror and its gendered expressions in Guatemala. My discussion builds on previous research conducted among indigenous groups in Guatemala and renders a depiction of the broad reach of violence, including expressions that are so commonplace as to become invisible. I argue that an examination of multiple forms of violence in the lives of women in eastern Guatemala, who are nonindigenous, exposes the deep and broad manifestations of living in a society engulfed in violence, thus depicting the long arm of violence. Resumen: En este trabajo la autora presenta un marco para examinar la vida de las mujeres en el este de Guatemala y analizar como, en sus vidas cotidianas, multiples formas de violencia se unen en una sola y se vuelven normales, hasta el punto de convertirse en invisibles y “naturales”. Las mujeres en el oeste de Guatemala, indigenas en su mayoria, han recibido (con justas razones) la atencion de academicos interesados en descubrir la brutalidad del terror estatal y sus manifestaciones desde el punto de vista del genero. La discusion se basa en investigaciones previas, conducidas entre grupos indigenas en Guatemala, y da cuenta del amplio alcance de la violencia, incluyendo expresiones tan comunes que se vuelven invisibles. Sostiene que un analisis de las multiples formas de violencia en la vida de las mujeres en el este de Guatemala, quienes no son indigenas, expone las manifestaciones, profundas y amplias, de vivir en una sociedad sumergida en la violencia, lo que evidencia el largo brazo de este fenomeno.

Chris Coulter. Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women's Lives Through War and Peace in Sierra Leone. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8014-7512-2. This is a carefully crafted contrib...

In an idyllic canyon near Santiago, a group of twelve women were electric with emotion from sharing personal stories and experiences, and, of course, from singing. Deep bonds were forged among participants, few of whom knew each other prior to the workshop. They were there to compose women-identified songs in a setting that alternated between individual and group composition.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Goscilo, Helena and Beth Holmgren, eds. Russia-Women-Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. xiv + 386 pp. $45.00 (24.95 paper). Marsh, Rosalind, ed. and trans. Women in Russia and Ukraine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvii + 350 pp. $69.95. Clyman, Toby W. and Judith Vowles, eds. Russia through Women's Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. x + 393 pp. $35.00.

This article takes a critical look at Ina Boudier-Bakker's work in the 1920s and 1930s. It analyses her views on women's role in society as expressed in the political tract De moderne vrouw en haar tekort1 (The modern woman and her failings), and two novels, one contemporary, one historical. It also investigates the notion of love and its function, and attempts to answer the question of how the love-ideal can be reconciled with the women's lives as portrayed in the fiction.

Time is an important underlying concept in life course research and in the use of the “life-line method” an approach that has gained interest among researchers examining women's lives more processually. Notwithstanding, the author argues that time itself is not sufficiently problematised in this context. In the first part of the paper, the question is posed: What do we mean by time? It is argued that the Newtonian mechanical view of time, which is used in social science research and is the basis for the life-line method, limits our ability to capture the complexity of individuals' and especially women's everyday lives. A discussion of theories of time leads to an examination of methodological problems that are inherent in doing and presenting life histories.

This article examines the impact of changing social policies on strategies to balance family responsibilities and employment used by women who were living in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). New life-history data for 4 birth cohorts that cover the different periods of this socialist society's 40-year existence allow comprehensive analyses of women's life courses. In the context of changing levels of support to combine work and family, the article attempts to show what strategies women used and how their chances for upward mobility were influenced by these adjustments. Systematic differences regarding labor force participation, quality of work, and adaptations to family demands are revealed among women who entered the labor force and formed their families at different times. The considerable change in women's employment patterns can only be explained by taking into account the social policies that were embedded in women's opportunity structures.

Using research carried out in a Polish community in England, I argue that recent feminist literature on autobiography raises important epistemological questions for researchers writing about lives using a broad life history approach. Researchers use their own lives (their autobiographies) to understand and interpret the lives of their subjects. That is, they use their subjects' autobiographies as biographies, as information about small slices of people's lives. I consider two important questions arising from this. First is the relationship between the researcher and the account she produces of the research. That is, the textual ways in which the researcher produces an account which is ‘about’ the lives of the subjects she researches. And the second concerns the role of the researcher as a producer of what is actually ‘an’ account rather than incontestably ‘the’ account of people's lives.

This article describes the author's recent visits to four countries in East Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the former East Germany), during which she met with feminist researchers to discuss research methods for studying women's lives during the current upheavals. The focus was primarily on the methods used in the projects undertaken by the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University.

Bringing together the preliminary results of two pilot studies carried out in two fishing towns in Newfoundland, this paper examines some of the questions raised by the studies. In particular, it demonstrates that women interpret their experience of work in different ways than men do, and differently from that expected by the conventional economic interpretations. This, in part, explains women's perennially poor position in the labor market. However, and more important, the paper shows how women's interpretations of the value of their paid and unpaid work in the context of the overall “family project” allows them to see their contributions as positive, essential, and certainly equal to those of men.

This article addresses the importance of integrative treatment for women with psychiatric disabilities and substance issues, particularly those who have histories of abuse, violence, and trauma. Psychiatric rehabilitation, trauma, and cooccurring dimensions of treatment are discussed. Promising programs using consumer-oriented service models are highlighted.