Amy Bailey, Black Ladyhood, and 1950s Jamaica

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 128-142
Author(s):  
Keisha Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Training Centre ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
Jamaican Women ◽  
Patriarchal Narratives ◽  
Newspaper Articles

This essay explores how and with what effect Amy Bailey, a teacher, women’s rights activist, and public intellectual, cofounded the Housecraft Training Centre to educate working-class Jamaican women in cooking, cleaning, childcare, and other “domestic sciences.” Newspaper articles, unpublished interviews, and other texts reveal that Bailey used the center to articulate a vision of working-class black ladyhood that advanced black women’s sense of racial dignity by valorizing elitist, patriarchal narratives at work in 1950s Jamaica. In doing so, Bailey ultimately fostered, as well as stymied, the possibility that Jamaica would come to realize what its national ethos professed—that it was an increasingly plural, prosperous, and egalitarian state well positioned for political independence from Britain.

The point is to change it

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
High Level

Like most organisations of the far left in Britain in the years after 1968, the RCP was small in size and marginal in influence. Starting out with only a few dozen supporters in the mid-1970s, membership peaked at around 200 before its demise in the mid-1990s. Though it emerged out of the left, in many ways it was not of the left and it developed in a struggle against it. In contrast with the spirit of amenable coexistence that prevailed among other factions, the RCP maintained a high level of polemical engagement with the left. Though other far left groups discreetly accepted the RCP’s characterisation of the official labour movement as ‘reformist’, the RCP pointed out that in practice these groups adapted to the reformism of the official movement, reinforcing rather than loosening its grip on militants and activists. The RCP aimed to promote an independent anti-capitalist outlook, thereby to give voice and effect to the interests of the working class and humanity as a whole. It engaged in workplace and trade union struggles and campaigns for women’s rights, and against racism and imperialism, seeking to develop and sustain a creative balance between activities around issues of exploitation and those of oppression.

The Great Life-Long Mistake

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas L. Syrett
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Early Marriage ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Elizabeth Cady Stanton ◽  
Elizabeth Oakes Smith

Focusing on the writings of antebellum women’s rights activist Elizabeth Oakes Smith, this chapter demonstrates that many objected to early marriage for girls, but for a variety of reasons. Some believed that it was physiologically unsound, others that it would be detrimental to “the race,” and others like Smith believed that early marriage curtailed girls’ chances for a meaningful girldhood. Smith and other activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton also pointed out that legally early marriage was flawed because girls were permitted to contract marriage—which itself was disadvantageous for all women because of coverture—when they were not yet legally adults. While Smith and her contemporaries were astute in all these critiques, they rarely paused to consider the ways that early marriage was mostly detrimental for middle-class girls who really did have the opportunity of a protected childhood, unlike working-class children, who were laboring from early ages.

Extra-Parliamentary Reporting: The Under-Reported Life of the Working Class

2020 ◽  
pp. 593-611
Author(s):  
Andrew Calcutt ◽  
Mark Beachill
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Advocacy Journalism ◽  
Overseas Development

This chapter will explore the range of periodical publications that have engaged with politics on a regional or national level without an overemphasis on the workings of the Westminster parliament. These might be serving geographically distinct communities or they may be circulating among politically disaffected with radical aims. Some periodicals have taken advocacy journalism to petition for causes and movements outside the normal mechanics of the Westminster cycle such as the publications fighting for women’s rights from Votes for Women in 1907 to Spare Rib from 1972. Specific campaigns and causes have been facilitated through such as the pacifist Peace News in 1936 and the New Internationalist which started to encourage greater awareness of overseas development issues in 1973. Other peridocials have addressed a particular political community, for example the Socialist Labour Press out of the Red Clydeside era, the left-wing Irish Republican, An Phoblacht from 1906 and other constituencies have more recently drawn upon publications such as Living Marxism, Schnews, Class War.

John Stuart Mill Translated by Siegmund Freud

1999 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Women’S Rights

Freud's translation of J.S. Mill involved an encounter with the traditions of British empirical philosophy and associationist psychology, both of which go back to Locke and Hume. The translation of Mill's essay on Plato also brought Freud into contact with the philosophical controversy between the advocates of intuition and faith and the advocates of perception and reason. A comparison of source and translated texts demonstrates Freud's faithfulness to his author. A few significant deviations may be connected with Freud's ambiguous attitude to women's rights, as advocated in the essay The Enfranchisement of Women. Stylistically Freud had nothing to learn from Mill. His model in English was Macaulay, whom he was also reading at this period.

The Transnational Women's Rights Movement and the World Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi E. Rademacher
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Small Body ◽  
World System ◽  
World Society ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Society Perspective ◽  
The Impact

Promoting the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was a key objective of the transnational women's movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, few studies examine what factors contribute to ratification. The small body of literature on this topic comes from a world-society perspective, which suggests that CEDAW represented a global shift toward women's rights and that ratification increased as international NGOs proliferated. However, this framing fails to consider whether diffusion varies in a stratified world-system. I combine world-society and world-systems approaches, adding to the literature by examining the impact of women's and human rights transnational social movement organizations on CEDAW ratification at varied world-system positions. The findings illustrate the complex strengths and limitations of a global movement, with such organizations having a negative effect on ratification among core nations, a positive effect in the semiperiphery, and no effect among periphery nations. This suggests that the impact of mobilization was neither a universal application of global scripts nor simply representative of the broad domination of core nations, but a complex and diverse result of civil society actors embedded in a politically stratified world.

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