Lesser Known Indian Women Educators and Reformers

India can presently be called a leading nation while considering the field of women education. But the scenario was not always the same. Women had to struggle to reach this summit. The path was not easy and smooth. Interestingly enough, eminent women themselves played a crucial role in not only establishing themselves, but also in promoting women’s education, health, shelter homes, care for the orphans etc. They established schools and other institutes to promote education to not only the women but also to the weaker section of the society and fight against the injustice. This paper is an attempt to remember few of these eminent women, like Tarabai Modak, Durgabai Deshmukh, Anutai Wagh, Pandita Ramabai, Pandita Brahmacharini Chandbai, Nawab Begum Sultan Kaikhusrau Jahan, who were path breakers in their attempt to transcend the homely domain and set a new milestone. This paper also attempts to credit these noteworthy women for their extraordinary contribution to social services. Keywords: Women Educators, Women Reformers, Female Education, Indian Women.

Land Rights and Women’s Rights in Morocco

Over the last two decades, women leaders known as sulāliyāt from various parts of rural and semiurban Morocco, have been in the vanguard of local contestations over the privatization of communally held land. The stand taken by these rural women against neoliberal privatization policies sometimes puts them in direct confrontation with urban women reformers, whose claims in favor of a universal feminism reveal a value system outside local customary understandings of morality, gender, and land. This article aims to account for the emerging female leadership of the sulāliyāt that operates outside urban centers, but also beyond the universalist language of feminism related to abstract notions of female autonomy and gender equality. Deeply rooted in socioeconomic issues, including land expropriation and the displacement of local peasant populations in the name of reform, development, and a public common good, sulāliyāt tie gender dynamics to the intersectional structural inequalities produced and reproduced by land privatization and by the alliance between the open-market economy and patriarchal political authoritarianism. This article explores the subaltern agency of the sulāliyāt through an interdisciplinary examination of their leadership. The sulāliyāt challenge to official narratives of development and universalist human rights signals their capacity to formulate alternative local meanings of land ownership.

Academic Activism

Chapter 4 examines Breckinridge’s participation in social reform in the Progressive era. In conjunction with Jane Addams and other women reformers associated with Hull House, Breckinridge advocated for a wide range of reforms and formulated the doctrine of a national minimum standard of living that would inform her later participation in the creation of the welfare state. She also fused her participation in social reform circles with her leadership in the emerging social work profession by using social science as the basis for social reform. Through her teaching and research first at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and then at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, Breckinridge established a niche for herself in Progressive-era reform that relied upon her professional status and her scholarly expertise to legitimize political protest and advance social reform.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of single-sex protective laws. The longevity of protective laws rests in part on reformers' bifocal defense. The goal of such laws, their proponents claimed, was to compensate for women's disadvantages in the labor market and to serve as the linchpin of a larger plan to achieve wage-and-hour standards for all employees. This double-planked rationale—though contradictory—proved versatile and enduring; it suited constituents with varied priorities. Protective laws' longevity also rested on effective social feminist organization and, after 1920, on the federal Women's Bureau. In retrospect, single-sex protective laws were an unwieldy means to achieve egalitarian ends—or what women reformers of the 1920s called “industrial equality.” However, critics charged that the laws failed to redress disadvantage and even compounded it. Protection's supporters also confronted developments they could not anticipate and shifts in attitude they could not foresee.

“Jobs and Homes … Freedom”

Chapter 6 uncovers the links between jobs and public housing. From the vantage point of overlooked historical actors, the chapter examines the massive urban renewal programs that razed black working-class neighborhoods and constructed massive public-housing structures throughout the city. The dignity for which black working-class women struggled pointed to a cluster of trenchant urban problems that St. Louis began encountering in the prewar period and later experienced in much more concentrated fashion. This chapter highlights the lives of public housing tenants and the labor activism of Ora Lee Malone to examine black women’s struggles against urban inequality. It also shows how black middle-class women reformers used their platforms to advance black working-class women’s causes. The work of the women featured in this chapter directly led to the 1969 rent strike, in which public-housing tenants struck against the St. Louis Housing Authority. In one of the first and largest rent stoppages in the nation, strike participants made tenant control a centerpiece of their platform.

Gateway to Equality

Gateway to Equality demonstrates that from the 1930s to the 1960s, a critical mass of black working-class women forged a most expansive social justice struggle for economic dignity in St. Louis. Women mobilized and resisted as they sought jobs, a living wage, decent working conditions, affordable housing, and economic projection. Their community-based economic politics drew public attention to their status as key members of the urban working class and disrupted mainstream conceptualizations such as “worker,” “the working class,” and “the labor movement.” With support from black middle-class women reformers, black working-class women summoned the broader public sphere to embrace concern and responsibility for black women’s survival Merging women’s rights, labor, and civil rights agendas, black working-class women forged struggles that challenged and disrupted political discourses and practices as they questioned the role of the state, the limits and possibilities of American citizenship and democracy, and the reach and uses of economic power.

Urban Politics in the United States before 1940

The convergence of mass politics and the growth of cities in 19th-century America produced sharp debates over the character of politics in urban settings. The development of what came to be called machine politics, primarily in the industrial cities of the East and Midwest, generated sharp criticism of its reliance on the distribution of patronage and favor trading, its emphatic partisanship, and the plebian character of the “bosses” who practiced it. Initially, upper- and middle-class businessmen spearheaded opposition to this kind of politics, but during the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, labor activists, women reformers, and even some ethnic spokespersons confronted “boss rule” as well. These challenges did not succeed in bringing an end to machine politics where it was well established, but the reforms they generated during the Progressive Era reshaped local government in most cities. In the West and Southwest, where cities were younger and partisan organizations less entrenched, business leaders implemented Progressive municipal reforms to consolidate their power. Whether dominated by reform regime or a party machine, urban politics and governance became more centralized by 1940 and less responsive to the concerns and demands of workers and immigrants.

"Building Today for the Womanhood of Tomorrow": Businessmen, Boosters, and the YWCA, 1890-1930

Women's organizations played an active part in the Progressive movement for the reform of North American cities in the early twentieth century. Women reformers could and did cooperate with men but had their own distinct perception of the city and their own definition of urban reform. Lacking capital and political power, however, women were forced to depend on the support of male reformers and had to address themselves to the men's concerns. This study examines the relationship between the Young Women's Christian Association and Canadian businessmen as it was manifested in a number of successful fund-raising campaigns for YWCA buildings in Canadian cities between 1890 and 1930. YWCA women "sold" their building to the business community as a sound investment and an asset that would reflect well on the reputations of enterprising business leaders and a modern progressive community.