And the Rest is History: Measuring the Scope and Recall of Wikipedia’s Coverage of Three Women’s Movement Subgroups

Narrating history is perpetually contested, shaping and reshaping how nations and people understand both their pasts and the current moment. Measuring and evaluating the scope of histories is methodologically challenging. In this paper we provide a general approach and a specific method to measure historical recall. Operationalizing historical information as one or more word phrases, we use the phrase-mining RAKE algorithm on a collection of primary historical documents to extract first-person historical evidence, and then measure recall via phrases present on contemporary Wikipedia, taken to represent a publicly-accessible summary of existing knowledge on virtually any historical topic. We demonstrate this method using women's movements in the United States as a case study of a debated historical field. We found that issues important to working-class elements of the movement were less likely to be covered on Wikipedia compared to other subsections of the movement. Combining this method with a qualitative analysis of select articles, we identified a typology of mechanisms leading to historical omissions: paucity, restrictive paradigms, and categorical narrowness. Our approach, we conclude, can be used to both evaluate the recall of a body of history and to actively intervene in enlarging the scope of our histories and historical knowledge.

Gendered Glissandos

Chapter 7 explores how worldwide women writers have adopted new approaches to feminist concerns. They find inspiration in their own heterogeneity, their diverse backgrounds and proclivities, as well as their familiarity with the experiences of many others to create literary compositions that weigh questions of undeniable importance to women, ranging from professional fulfillment to sexual harassment. Gendered requirements for women in various countries and cultures are evoked in literary compositions that portray the complexity of choices that women who have come to France from elsewhere often face on a regular basis. These authors explore in vivid terms the pressures to conform that so many women experience in this country, regardless of their origin, with a special focus on the seemingly inflexible expectation that women will become mothers. They also delve into conceptions of femininity in a variety of contexts, and extol malleable, multiple, even musical models of behavior that transcend gender-based stereotypes. While they give voice to a wide range of viewpoints in their texts, in my interviews they exhibit an almost unanimous reluctance to accept the label “feminist,” due in large part to the pejorative connotations the term took acquired in many circles in France in the years following the women’s movements of the 1970s. Just as their spoken comments reveal judicious reconsiderations of the term, their written work hints that it isn’t wise to dismiss it altogether; they urge instead the creation of expressions that promote women’s human rights in ways that vary according to context.

Inner-city possibilities: using place and space to facilitate inter-ethnic dating and romance in 1960s–1980s Leicester

Applying a spatial lens to the oral histories of heterosexual women who had intercultural romantic relationships in Leicester from the 1960s to the 1980s provides an alternative perspective on their experiences. This article examines these women's movements into and around the inner city, eliciting discussion about the concept of ‘safe’ places and spaces and the factors that determined the transient nature of these spaces. It illustrates opportunities created for intercultural mixing, away from familial gaze and public hostility. Utilizing such spaces to develop and sustain their relationships reveals a previously unacknowledged female agency that also enabled an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ in the British city.

The Long-Term Struggle for Violence against Women Legislation: The Guatemalan Women's Movement and the Politics of Patience

A scholarly consensus depicts strong, autonomous domestic women's movements as critical for the passage of gender equality reforms, alongside openings in domestic and international political contexts. What, then, is a nascent women's movement seeking gender equality reforms to do if it lacks strength or a history of autonomous organizing? A long-term analysis of the Guatemalan women's movement's push for reforms to address violence against women demonstrates that one potential road forward is through a “politics of patience,” rooted in the pursuit of cumulative, incremental victories. Adopting a politics of patience allows nascent domestic movements in developing and post-transition contexts to achieve incremental victories that create future political openings while simultaneously building movement strength and autonomy over time. This finding highlights the temporal and strategic power of women's movements, as well as the iterative and potentially reinforcing nature of social mobilization and political reform.

THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION OF TURKISH WOMEN IN POLITICS (1980S TO THE PRESENT)

In Turkish modernization, important steps were taken under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk so that women could reach the level of contemporary civilized peoples. For this purpose, women who have lagged behind the society in education, training and social life, especially gender equality, have been granted political rights before some European countries. Turkish women, who obtained the right to vote and be elected in 1934, were included in the political life, and they went to the polls for the first time in the elections held in 1935. For many years, the place of women in political life has decreased due to many reasons such as the fact that political parties do not allow quotas for female deputies, democracy cannot be fully ensured within political parties, sexism, politics are seen as men’s work, women’s education problem, while the women’s movements have increased in the period from the 1980s to the present. Its power has increased due to reasons such as quota implementation based on changes in electoral systems. Although the number of women in politics has not reached a sufficient level even today, as the sexist approach in society and the obstacles placed in front of women are overcome, the effectiveness and success of Turkish women in political life will increase. Although it is difficult for women to take part in the male-dominated structure in politics, it is seen that women are not willing enough and they struggle less. It is possible to say that women have made important strides in the political arena in the Turkish society led by a female prime minister, Professor Tansu Çiller.

Unsettling Memories of Japanese Migrant Sex Workers: Carceral Mobilities of the Transpacific Underground at the Turn of the 20th Century

Between 1908 and 1909 and in 1912, Vancouver-based journalist Shohei Osada published a two-part series entitled “Exploration of Devil Caves” in a local Japanese language newspaper, detailing the lives of Japanese migrants involved in the sex trade in Canada. The series showcases the presence of underground networks that extended across the continent and the Pacific, or what I call the “transpacific underground.” Many characters in Osada’s series are transient migrants, who did not settle in any one specific nation but continued moving on across multiple borders seeking new opportunities, or sometimes, last resort for survival. By reading Osada’s writing closely, this article develops the notion of the transpacific underground as method to engage the history of migrant sex workers and understand it from a carceral space of migration regulated by multiple imperial and colonial forces, gendered nationalist ideologies, and human trafficking, making migrant women’s movements forced but also transgressive and open-ended.

Between Sexual Violence and Autonomy: Rethinking the Engagement of the Indian Women’s Movement with Criminal Law

The aftermath of protests triggered by a brutal gang-rape in New Delhi in December 2012 was archetypal of the broader women’s movement in post-independence India. The primary demands of the social movement to address sexual violence against women were wrapped in the language of rights-based reforms in criminal law provisions. The state responded to the social mobilization in the form of criminal law amendments, while blindsiding key recommendations from feminist groups. This Article revisits pertinent Law Commission reports, subsequent criminal law reforms, and case law on sexual violence against women to analyze how the negotiations between the women’s movement and the State on the seemingly irreconcilable demands of sexual autonomy and punishment for sexual violence. We take account of the intended and unintended consequences of this reliance on criminal law as one of the primary tools in the arsenal of Indian women’s movements. We argue that engagement on the plane of criminal law to address sexual violence against women is a case of limited imagination at best and counter-productive at its worst. This approach of the movement and feminist groups is to react to the “crime” of sexual violence after the fact, leading to distraction from much warranted structural responses. We argue that this approach makes it harder to conceptualize and implement more forward-looking relational models of responsibility that are necessary to address the structural injustice of systemic sexual violence against women.