This focus piece explores how the notion of the transnational was mapped and mobilised in the publications of the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) that were printed and published in the 1960s and ...1970s, particularly in their quest to articulate the 'Women's Question' in Ethiopia. Reading from the large corpus of ESM publications, I more specifically engage those publications which covered discussions, opinion pieces, and debates on the Women's Question from my interest in demonstrating how ESM activist publications were already engaged in discussions of the transnational in the 1960s and 1970s. Pertinent to formulating the Ethiopian Women's Question, I map how the notion of transnational was mobilised as part and parcel of activist praxis within ESM. A genealogical reading of the evolution of the Women's Question in the writings of the ESM showed that discussions on the subject were sporadic, especially between the late 1960s and early 1970s, when this question was more explicitly configured as journals committed to address women's issues, such as Tanash Ityopyawit Rise up Ethiopian Women!, and Tagia Ityopyawit Struggle Ethiopian Woman, emerged.
Sweden is arguably one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, and the historical development of that equality has been studied in detail. However, less is known about how the idea of gender ...equality was adopted in different professional spheres. In this article, I focus on this topic by using one profession, journalism, to analyse how gender equality was placed on the trade union agenda and negotiated in Sweden between 1961 and 1989. Drawing on a framing analysis of the discussion of gender equality in the trade union newspaper Journalisten, I argue that the Swedish Union of Journalists and its members took a somewhat moderate position in the struggle for gender equality, which, during the decades in question, was mostly framed as a women's question. For the most active advocates of gender equality, it was nevertheless a deeply felt issue, and their work can be defined as trade union feminism.
This article will concentrate on the discourses that circulated around the literary genre of the Bengali fairy tale as it developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century India, ...especially regarding its ownership and genesis, and the interaction of this with the political/social debates/discourses surrounding the position and role of women. The discourses generated through the various prefaces and commentaries that accompanied the story collections, constructed a certain idea of the national woman as the bearer of tradition. They posit a theory of the sustenance of indigenous cultural traditions (which included story telling traditions) in her tremendous capacity for all-consuming love. At the same time, the story texts presented and focused on self-sacrificing heroines who fit into the model of indigenous womanhood that was being constructed during this period. This article will argue that these discourses were built on a series of erasures of women’s voices, life stages and emotional spectrums but were serving the purpose of proving the superiority of indigenous traditions over that of the British imperialists. This project of defending Indian tradition, a central aspect of the cultural resistance to British imperialism, was a masculinist project. It reduced women to being mere sites and objects of knowledge.
PDF
