The New ‘Woman Question’: Gender, Nation, and Citizenship in the First Czechoslovak Republic

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Politically Active

This chapter discusses the question of women's citizenship in the new Czechoslovakia and how the ‘Woman Question’ evolved after 1918. The strong women's movement from pre-war days was largely satisfied by the 1918 ‘revolution’: Czech feminism fitted closely with Masarykian notions of democracy. The events of October 1918 fundamentally changed the debate over women's rights in the Bohemian lands. Within weeks, many Czechs had acknowledged that both men and women would be politically active in the new Czechoslovak Republic, treating universal suffrage as a given of the new political climate. Czech feminism linked an unswerving belief in gender equality with an equally unshakeable faith in liberal democracy, not only as the guarantor of women's rights, but as the essence of the Czech nation. This philosophy had many roots, but was perhaps most closely tied to the work of Tomáš Masaryk.

Protecting Women’s Rights and Ensuring Gender Equality

De Jure ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Valcheva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
International Community ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Member States ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Eu

In recent decades, the international community and the European Union have paid increasing attention to ensuring a sufficiently good level of protection of women’s rights. To achieve this level, international and European bodies and institutions should draw up and adopt various acts and instruments aimed at ensuring the fundamental principle of gender equality. For example, in European Union law, the principle of equality between men and women is reflected in Articles 2 and 3 (3) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). These provisions explicitly state that the EU is based on certain values, including equality, and specifically promote equality between men and women. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) also provides for a separate provision which entrusts the Community with the task, in all its activities, of striving to eliminate inequalities and to promote equality between men and women (Article 8 of the TFEU). Next, Article 21 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights prohibits all forms of discrimination, including on the grounds of sex. In addition to the provisions of primary law, the EU seeks to ensure the principle under analysis by adopting strategies and programs of different scope and content. The Member States of the European Union, including the Republic of Bulgaria, also actively promote respect for the principle of gender equality. Explicit guarantees for its provision are contained in the legislation of the Member States, including at the constitutional level. Despite the measures taken on a global, European and national scale, the unequal treatment of women around the world persists. Most often, differences in the treatment of men and women are observed in the social sphere, employment and pay, healthcare, access to education, political, economic and social activities. The existence of these differences leads to the conclusion that it is necessary for the international community, the European Union and its Member States to adopt and implement even more targeted actions, policies and measures to ensure adequate protection of women’s rights.

The Soviet Legacy and Women's Rights in Central Asia

2016 ◽  
Vol 115 (783) ◽  
pp. 270-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Kamp
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Promote Gender Equality ◽  
The Law ◽  
Soviet Legacy

While Soviet efforts to promote gender equality are not openly celebrated, the idea planted in the region during that now-disdained era—that men and women should be equal under the law—is still holding fast.

Gender Equality in the Egyptian Constitution: From 1923 to 2014

2018 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-165
Author(s):  
Serena Tolino
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Social Contracts ◽  
Constitutional Level ◽  
Longue Duree

Abstract In this article I analyse how the political changes that were triggered by the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 affected women’s rights on the constitutional level. Through a longue durée perspective, I look at women’s rights starting from the 1923 Constitution. I then focus particularly on the two post-revolutionary constitutions (2012 and 2014) and on what they meant for gender equality. Even though the different constitutional texts represent the main source of this article, constitutions are social contracts and, as such, cannot be analysed without taking into account the historical context in which they were drafted and enacted. For this reason, I will also offer some input on the woman question and Egyptian feminism during the same period.

Islam, Gender, and Democracy in Comparative Perspective

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Shed Light

This volume reframes the debate around Islam and women’s rights within a broader comparative literature. It examines the complex and contingent historical relationships between religion, secularism, democracy, law, and gender equality. Part I addresses the nexus of religion, law, gender, and democracy through different disciplinary perspectives (sociology, anthropology, political science, law). Part II localizes the implementation of this nexus between law, gender, and democracy, and provides contextualized responses to questions raised in Part I. The contributors explore the situation of Muslim women’s rights vis-à-vis human rights to shed light on gender politics in the modernization of the nation and to ponder over the role of Islam in gender inequality across different Muslim countries.

Women’s Rights, Suffrage, and Citizenship, 1789–1920

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Carol DuBois
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Antebellum Politics ◽  
Early National

The United States was a pioneer in the development of women’s rights ideas and activism. Far-seeing women, determined to find an active and equal place in the nation’s political affairs, pushed long and hard to realize America’s democratic promise. Over three-quarters of a century, women’s rights and suffrage leaders steadily agitated their cause through a shifting American political landscape, from the careful innovations of the early national period, through the expansive involvements of antebellum politics, into the dramatic shifts of revolution and reaction in the post–Civil War years, up to the modernization of the Progressive Era. The meaning and content of “womanhood,” the sign under which these campaigns were conducted, also shifted. Labor, class, and especially race inclusions and exclusions were contentious dimensions of the American women’s rights movement, as they were of American liberal democracy in general.

Divorce on grounds of discord: Did the Moroccan family law reform bring the guarantee of divorce for women? An ethnographic perspective on the changing landscape of divorce. The Mudawwana a decade on

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-65
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Nössing
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Family Court ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Moroccan Family

AbstractThis article discusses the new divorce on grounds of discord procedure (taṭlīq li-š-šiqāq) within the context of the Moroccan family law reform of 2004. Literature available in English and French has, so far, focused primarily on the improvements the Moroccan family law reform has brought in regard to women’s rights. The reform is considered one of the most progressive legislative projects in the MENA region and a milestone for gender equality, notably the reform of divorce law. Divorce on grounds of discord was seen as the long-awaited divorce guarantee for women. However, legal scholars maintained that case law jeopardised the divorce guarantee. This legal-anthropological study is informed by fieldwork at the family court in Rabat, as well as official statistics, case law and the standard legal commentary. It aims to scrutinise how divorce on grounds of divorce is put into practice by the judiciary, how Moroccan men and women make use of it and how changes on a procedural and institutional level affect the implementation of the new divorce procedure. My empirical findings show that divorce on grounds of discord effectively guarantees Moroccan women’s right to divorce. Well beyond the discussion on women’s rights in divorce, I will demonstrate that, within a decade, divorce on grounds of discord developed into a standard divorce procedure for both men and women across socio-economical milieus and age groups.

Feminism, Pragmatism or Both? Czech Radical Nationalism and the Woman Question, 1898–1914

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-552
Author(s):  
T. Mills Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
National Society ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
The Social

During a debate on the franchise reform bill in the Austrian Reichsrat on 12 September 1906, the Czech National Socialist Party deputy Václav Choc demanded that suffrage be extended to women as well as men. Otherwise, Choc asserted, the women of Austria would be consigned to the same status as “criminals and children.” Choc was certainly not the only Austrian parliamentarian to voice his support for votes for women during the debates on franchise reform. However, his party, the most radical of all the Czech nationalist political factions, was unique in that it not only included women's suffrage in its official program, as the Social Democrats had done a decade earlier, but also worked hard to change the political status of women in the Monarchy while the Social Democrats generally paid only lip service to this goal. Moreover, Choc and his colleagues in the National Socialist Party helped change the terms of the debate about women's rights by explicitly linking the “woman question” to the “national question” in ways entirely different from the prevailing discourse of liberalism infin-de-siècleAustria. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, liberal reformers, whether German or Czech, tried to mold the participation of women in political life to fit the liberal view of a woman's “proper” role in society. By contrast, the radical nationalists who rose to prominence in Czech political culture only after 1900, attempted to recast the debate over women's rights as central to their two-pronged discourse of social and national emancipation, while at the same time pressing for the complete democratization of Czech political life at all levels, not merely in the imperial parliament. In so doing, and with the active but often necessarily covert collaboration of women associated with the party, these radical nationalists helped extend the parameters of the debate over the place Czech women had in the larger national society.

Hina Jilani on her Satyagraha for Women’s Rights in Pakistan

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-253
Author(s):  
Juanita Kakoty
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Military Regime ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
Rights Consciousness

This piece is based on a conversation the author had with lawyer and human rights activist from Pakistan, Hina Jilani, in May 2016. It captures Jilani’s account of the ‘Satyagraha’ she has waged in her lifetime for the rights of women in her country; and as she narrates her story, she interweaves it with the ‘Satyagraha’ that shaped the women’s movement in Pakistan. One can read here about Jilani’s struggle for truth, for a human rights consciousness in a political climate of military regime; and how she challenged courts in the country to step outside the realm of conventional law and extend justice to women and girls. And in the process, learn that her struggle for truth has been intertwined with that of the women’s movement in the country.

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