‘Intercrossings’ between Spanish women’s groups and their German, British and Portuguese counterparts (1914–32)

Author(s):  
Marta del Moral Vargas

This article contends that the movement in favour of the rights of women in Spain during the first third of the twentieth century was integrated into several international networks. Three exchanges are analysed between, on the one hand, the women socialists and suffragists in Spain, and, on the other, the international networks built up by the German socialist Clara Zetkin, the suffragists of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and the Portuguese feminist Ana de Castro Osório. Scrutiny of these ‘intercrossings’ reveals that, despite their ‘asymmetrical’ outcomes, the demand for the social and political rights of women surpassed national boundaries and had a transformative impact on all the parties involved.

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 927-960 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD WESTERMAN

For European literati of the early twentieth century, Fyodor Dostoevsky represented a mythically Russian spirituality in contrast to a soulless, rationalized West. One such enthusiast was Georg Lukács, who in 1915 began a never-completed book about Dostoevsky's work, a model of spiritual community that could redeem a fallen world. Though framing his analysis in the language and themes of broader Dostoevsky reception, Lukács used this idiom innovatively to go beyond the reactionary implications this model might connote. Highlighting similarities with Max Weber's account of political ethics, I argue that Lukács developed an ethic derived from his reading of Dostoevsky, which focused on the idea of a hero defined by an ability to resolve the specific ethical dilemma of adherence to duty and moral law on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to restore spontaneous human community at a time when the social institutions embodying such laws had fallen into decay. Crucially, he deployed the same framework after his conversion to Marxism to justify revolutionary terror. However different his position from Dostoevsky's, it was through engagement with these novels that Lukács not only clarified his thought but also came to identify Lenin as a Dostoevskyan hero figure.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 268-291
Author(s):  
Tom Sintobin ◽  
Marguérite Corporaal

Abstract ‘After all peat is a fertile soil for the imagination’. The literary representation of bog and peat cutting in Dutch literature, 1909-1940 Novels about peat lands and turf-cutting were immensely popular in the Netherlands during the first decades of the twentieth century. This article traces recurring narratives and tropes in four such novels written by H.H.J.Maas, Antoon Coolen, Anne de Vries, and Theun de Vries, illustrating the ambivalent role that peat lands play in these texts. They function as sites of communality, future opportunity, and disorder on the one hand, and as places of exploitation and alienation on the other. These four novels do not downright reject the introduction of industrial innovations, but some among them are critical of the class divisions that may result. Others seem to acknowledge the hard labour that turf production involves, but do not criticize the social status of the peat-cutters.


Author(s):  
Hilary Charlesworth

This chapter offers an overview of UN approaches to women’s lives in legal instruments. It begins by describing the engagement of women’s organizations with international institutions from the start of the twentieth century, particularly the League of Nations. It then moves to UN treaties dealing with women. Its focus is the major UN treaty in this area, the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the work of its monitoring body, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (. The chapter also describes the extensive reservations states parties have entered to the Convention. It discusses the different accounts of nondiscrimination and equality that emerge in UN treaties. The international sphere illustrates the paradox for feminists of, on the one hand, insisting that differences between women and men should be irrelevant in claiming political rights; while, on the other hand, acting in the name of the category of women, thus bolstering the idea of difference. One strand of provisions in UN treaties aims to eradicate differences in the treatment of women, compared to men. Another strand has sought to recognize the particularity of women’s lives, calling for special treatment and often endorsing a rather limited notion of womanhood in the process. These two strands coexist and are regularly included in the same treaty, even though they can be in normative tension.


wisdom ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-113
Author(s):  
Armen HARUTYUNYAN

The contemporary democratic states consider the concept of political rights, especially the right to vote as a fundamental pillar above all other rights. The political rights are dominant only due to their implementation: people have an opportunity to exercise their power on the one hand, and transfer their power without any political upheavals on the other. In this regard, it is worth highlighting that the political rights are one of the corner-stone rights for modern democratic rule of law. According to this thesis, we can persist that the problems of the realization of political rights are decisive and highly important even for the declared and transitional democratic states. In this respect, the Republic of Armenia is no exception as the problems of the implementation of political rights are definitely the electoral rights. These rights are among the most acute social problems that young Armenian democracy has faced after the independence. The issues in implementation of the political rights are steadily coupled with the problems of imposing punishments for crimes directed against political rights. As the experience of the Republic of Armenia has shown, the number of crimes directed against political rights has increased over the years. The tendency of the growth of the above-mentioned crimes has objective and subjective reasons. Among the objective reasons, we can note the transitional character of Armenian democracy. As for justice, it should be noted that such problems are inherent in almost all transitional states and especially, for modern countries. It is easier to understand, when we observe the experience of communities, which try to pass from the totalitarian rails of state governance to democratic ones. From the other side, the social and economic reasons of the state, poverty of the population can be considered as an objective reason. In terms of subjective reasons, firstly, the disproportionate punishment for crimes directed against political rights should be pointed out, which are the central obstacles for the implementation of political rights.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 140
Author(s):  
Hilla Peled-Shapira

This paper deals with the way in which Communist writers in mid-twentieth-century Iraq used literature in order to, on the one hand express their tense relationship with the regime during times of severe political repression, and on the other hand sharply criticize the Iraqi people themselves for not taking responsibility for or caring about their fate—or, for that matter, for failing to internalize the social class discourse to which the Communists aspired.  The paper’s objective is to examine the connection between the writers’ ideology and the rhetorical and conceptual elements with which they expressed their dissatisfaction with the regime, the way Iraqi society was run, and the desires of both—intellectuals and society at large—to undergo change. In addition, this study will survey the esthetic and stylistic devices, which the writers under consideration chose, and consider both the meanings and motives behind their choices. These aspects will be examined in the framework of a proposed model of “circles of criticism.”  


Author(s):  
Johann Sommerville

Social-contract theories flourished in Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, had roots extending far further back, and continue to be influential today. John Rawls revived one type of contract theory in the mid-twentieth century, while another featured in the work of Robert Nozick. One kind of theory centers on a real or hypothetical contract between individuals to establish a political society—a contract of society. Another focuses on a contract between the society or people, on the one hand, and the ruler or government, on the other—a contract of government. In the heyday of theorizing about the social contract, it was the contract of government that received most attention. When people joined together to form political societies, they proceeded, authority must at first have been in the hands of the whole community, since no one had any greater right to exercise it than anyone else. Some contractualists have used the social contract to cast light on what must always and everywhere be true about states. They include Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Rawls.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 162-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Blechman ◽  
Anita Chari ◽  
Rafeeq Hasan

Abstract In seeking to found a ‘new political logic’, Badiou argues that we can only retrieve the political sense of concrete negation through its subordination to a prior field of affirmation: i.e. the opening of a new possibility inside a given historical situation, or ‘the event’, that may be politically realised through the creation of a ‘new subjective body’ consisting in the social affirmation of those new possibilities. Revolutionary politics is therefore said to rest on a synthesis of, on the one hand, democracy in the sense of spontaneous mass-political irruption, and, on the other, a prescriptive elaboration of the ramifications of the event. The discussion then turns to the question of strategy – outside and against the politically moribund State-form – and his reconfiguration of political universality vis-à-vis the formulations of classical Marxism. Badiou counterposes capitalist ideology’s implicit anthropology of self-interested animals to his own of subjects embodied in a generic truth-procedure and its concomitant model of political rights, where what is ultimately at stake is ‘the complete transformation of the form of . . . difference, of the way the difference exists’ rather than a materialist dialectics of antagonistic contradiction. The interview concludes with Badiou clarifying his relationship to Lacanian psychoanalysis as an essential but by no means exhaustive conceptual armoury for understanding the relation between subject and event.


2018 ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
N. Ceramella

The article considers two versions of D. H. Lawrence’s essay The Theatre: the one which appeared in the English Review in September 1913 and the other one which Lawrence published in his first travel book Twilight in Italy (1916). The latter, considerably revised and expanded, contains a number of new observations and gives a more detailed account of Lawrence’s ideas.Lawrence brings to life the atmosphere inside and outside the theatre in Gargnano, presenting vividly the social structure of this small northern Italian town. He depicts the theatre as a multi-storey stage, combining the interpretation of the plays by Shakespeare, D’Annunzio and Ibsen with psychological portraits of the actors and a presentation of the spectators and their responses to the plays as distinct social groups.Lawrence’s views on the theatre are contextualised by his insights into cinema and its growing popularity.What makes this research original is the fact that it offers a new perspective, aiming to illustrate the social situation inside and outside the theatre whichLawrenceobserved. The author uses the material that has never been published or discussed before such as the handwritten lists of box-holders in Gargnano Theatre, which was offered to Lawrence and his wife Frieda by Mr. Pietro Comboni, and the photographs of the box-panels that decorated the theatre inLawrence’s time.


APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.


Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.


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