“Passing a looped and knotted string between their hands”. The Bible, the Women’s Liberation Movement and Women’s Bonds in Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl

This paper claims that through a feminist rewriting of the Bible, Michèle Roberts’s novel The Wild Girl (1984) articulates the ambivalences and insecurities that emerged in the British Women’s Liberation movement after its initial period of great energy, hopefulness and enthusiasm of the 1970s. By rewriting the biblical insistence on female rivalry and competition, and revising biblical “gynotypes” and “fragmented women”, the novel not only exposes the patriarchal discourses of the Bible, but also critically revisits the WLM’s utopian visions of unity, and re-imagines the ways in which women can cooperate while preserving their differences. When juxtaposed with more recent women’s rewritings, often driven by (and catering to) market economy and consumer culture, Roberts’s novel is a useful remainder of the still consequential need to “look back in order to move forward” (Plate 406). The novel’s small-scale, grass-roots level sisterhood, never altogether free from tensions, is a quietly optimistic vision of women’s bonds, a “secret gospel” proclaiming the good news about the precarious and changeable relationship among women, and about the need of its incessant reworking.

The Anti-Rape and Battered Women’s Movements of the 1970s and 1980s

The anti-rape and battered women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s grew out of the women’s liberation movement. Early grassroots organizing around responding to rape and domestic violence relied heavily on community-based strategies including the creation of shelters and safe houses and feminist self-defense classes. Using the new vocabulary of the women’s liberation movement, feminist advocates soon began to critique existing rape and domestic violence law. Some advocates moved away from the grassroots community-based strategies to push for greater state intervention in rape and domestic violence via the criminal legal system. But the movement was not united in embracing such strategies. Feminist organizing reflected the tensions between competing visions of the role of the state in addressing gender-based violence., With the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, feminists favoring state intervention had successfully implemented their carceral agenda—a policy choice that is being reexamined today.

'Every generation has to make its own women's movement'

In this interview Sheila Rowbotham talks to Jo Littler about her involvement in feminism and politics over several decades. This ranges across her role in the Women's Liberation Movement, left activism, historical scholarship, work with in the Greater London Council (GLC), involvement in the international homeworking movement and her secret life as a poet.

Wychowanie mężczyzn (Taʾdib al-redżāl): przekład z perskiego z komentarzem tłumacza

Artykuł zawiera przekład z języka perskiego utworu Taʾdib al-redżāl, czyli Wychowania mężczyzn − satyrycznego traktatu, napisanego prawdopodobnie w 1886/1887 roku przez anonimową irańską arystokratkę związaną z dynastią Kadżarów − wraz z komentarzem tłumacza, interpretującym tekst jako dowód przemian społeczno-kulturowych w okresie późnokadżarskim, a także zwiastun dyskursu nowoczesności i ruchu wyzwolenia kobiet w Iranie. The Education of Men (Ta’dib al-Rejāl): The Translator’s Commentary This paper contains a translation, from Persian into Polish, of Taʾdib al-Rejāl or The Education of Men − a satirical treatise written probably in 1886/1887 by an anonymous woman associated with the Iranian Qajar dynasty – complemented with the translator’s commentary interpreting the text as evidence of the socio-cultural changes in the late Qajar era as well as the prelude of the discourse of modernity and women’s liberation movement in Iran.