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The article contributes to a forum that discusses how publics can be studied within a global framework, specifically mobilizing. The author discusses state socialist media and its relationship with second-wave feminism through women's magazines of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

The public and political discussion on women's position in society and gender equality was initiated in the Nordic countries in the 1960s in the form of the so-called sex role debate. Previous studies have characterized sex role ideology as narrower in its goals than the radical feminist ideology of the late 1960s and 1970s. Sex role ideology has also been criticized for understanding equality on male terms, whereas feminist ideology has been thought to aim at radically reform gender roles and society. In this article, I argue that the Finnish sex role association called Association 9 had a much broader vision of gender equality than has been previously claimed. The starting point of the sex role ideology that the Association 9 represented and aimed at to promote was, similarly to feminist ideology, to reconstruct society by re-evaluating gender roles, particularly by demonstrating that they are socially constructed. In addition, they both aimed to deconstruct the gendered division of society into the masculine public sphere and the feminine private sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Common stories of second‐wave feminism equate the period either explicitly or by reference to its presumed biological essentialism, with trans‐exclusionary feminism. This article deep‐dives into issues published between 1977 and 1979 of the Journal of Male Feminism, an underground newsletter for a predominantly North American‐based male‐to‐female (M‐T‐F) cross‐dressing community. It argues that these texts contain a rich set of theoretical resources and nuanced perspectives on sex and gender developed by trans people in the 1970s and therefore deserve to be read as part of an expanded canon of second‐wave feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ÖZ: Uzun bir süre cinsiyetçi terimlerle tanımlanıp eril yazarlık ve okuyucu kitlesi ile ilişkilendirilen tarihsel kurgudaki kadın bakış açısı, giderek daha popüler hale geliyor olmasına rağmen, edebiyat eleştirisi açısından ihmal edilmiştir. Kadın yazarlar tarafından yazılan ve yeniden yazım pratiği ile şekillenmiş tarihsel kurgu romanlarının sayısının ve bu romanlara olan ilginin son yıllarda giderek arttığı yadsınamaz bir gerçektir. Bu çalışma, kadın yazarların yeniden yazım pratiği ile şekillenmiş çağdaş tarihsel kurgu eserleri temelinde, ‘yeniden yazım’ kavramının postmodernist ve feminist bir eylem olarak kuramsal temellerini ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır. Tarihsel kurgunun ataerkil kalıplarla şekillenen tanımı ve aynı zamanda yakın zamana dek resmî ideolojilerin tekilci yönlendirmelerine maruz kalan kısıtlayıcı tarihi incelendikten sonra, postmodernizmin ve ikinci dalga feminizmin ‘yeniden yazım’ pratiğine ve bu pratik ile şekillendirilen tarihsel kurgunun yükselişine nasıl ve ne şekilde katkıda bulunduğu tartışılacaktır. Çalışmanın son bölümde ise, çağdaş kadın yazarların ‘yeniden yazım’ bağlamındaki görüşlerinin bu çalışmanın temel savlarını nasıl uyumlu bir şekilde yansıttığı da çeşitli örneklerle gösterilecektir. ABSTRACT: Even though it is becoming increasingly popular, the female perspective in historical fiction, long defined in sexist terms and associated with masculine authorship and readership for centuries, has been neglected in literary criticism. In recent years, it has become apparent that the number of historical novels shaped by rewriting strategies and written by women writers, and the interest in these novels are gradually increasing. This study, therefore, aims to uncover the theoretical underpinnings of ‘rewriting’ based on contemporary historical fiction by women writers as a postmodernist and feminist strategy. After examining the timeline of historical fiction and its relatively narrow definition, which, until recently, was shaped by totalising and patriarchal patterns, the paper will discuss how and in what ways postmodernism and second-wave feminism contribute to the idea of ‘rewriting’ and the rise of women’s historical fiction that capitalises on rewriting. In addition, the authors will present diverse examples to show how contemporary women writers’ views on ‘rewriting’ harmoniously reflect the main arguments of this study.

This essay examines the treatment of women in the Gothic superhero comics of the 1970s through the lens of Michelle Massé's In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (1992). While superhero texts generally neglected women even at the height of second-wave feminism, the Gothic superhero sub-genre goes even further, drawing on the regressive trope of the suffering woman to 'side-kick' female characters and deny their agency and autonomy. Exploring four female characters who share this fate, we examine their different responses to the Freudian beating fantasy enacted in their narrative arcs, delineating the high costs and limited gains of traumatised women who dream of triumph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though it is becoming increasingly popular, the female perspective in historical fiction, long defined in sexist terms and associated with masculine authorship and readership for centuries, has been neglected in literary criticism. In recent years, it has become apparent that the number of historical novels shaped by rewriting strategies and written by women writers, and the interest in these novels are gradually increasing. This study, therefore, aims to uncover the theoretical underpinnings of 'rewriting' based on contemporary historical fiction by women writers as a postmodernist and feminist strategy. After examining the timeline of historical fiction and its relatively narrow definition, which, until recently, was shaped by totalising and patriarchal patterns, the paper will discuss how and in what ways postmodernism and second-wave feminism contribute to the idea of 'rewriting' and the rise of women's historical fiction that capitalises on rewriting. In addition, the authors will present diverse examples to show how contemporary women writers' views on 'rewriting' harmoniously reflect the main arguments of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s, women in Toronto created the Waitresses Action Committee to protest the introduction of a "differential" or lower minimum wage for wait staff serving alcohol. Their campaign was part of their broader feminist critique of women's exploitation and the gendered and sexualized nature of waitressing. Influenced by their origins in the Wages for Housework campaign, they stressed the linkages between women's unpaid work in the home and the workplace. Their campaign eschewed worksite organizing for an occupational mobilization outside of the established unions; they used petitions, publicity, and alliances with sympathizers to try to stop the rollback in their wages. They were successful in mobilizing support but not in altering the government's decision. Nonetheless, their spirited campaign publicized new feminist perspectives on women's gendered and sexualized labour, and it contributed to the ongoing labour feminist project of enhancing working-class women's equality, dignity, and economic autonomy. An analysis of their mobilization also helps to enrich and complicate our understanding of labour and socialist feminism in this period. Dans les années 1970, les femmes de Toronto ont créé le Waitresses Action Committee pour protester contre l'introduction d'un salaire minimum « différentiel » ou inférieur pour les serveurs servant de l'alcool. Leur campagne faisait partie de leur critique féministe plus large de l'exploitation des femmes et de la nature genrée et sexualisée de la serveuse. Influencées par leurs origines dans la campagne Wages for Housework, elles ont souligné les liens entre le travail non rémunéré des femmes à la maison et sur le lieu de travail. Leur campagne a évité l'organisation des chantiers pour une mobilisation professionnelle en dehors des syndicats établis; elles ont utilisé des pétitions, de la publicité et des alliances avec des sympathisants pour tenter d'arrêter la baisse de leurs salaires. Elles ont réussi à mobiliser un soutien, mais pas à modifier la décision du gouvernement. Néanmoins, leur campagne animée a fait connaître de nouvelles perspectives féministes sur le travail sexué et sexualisé des femmes, et elle a contribué au projet féministe syndical en cours visant à renforcer l'égalité, la dignité et l'autonomie économique des femmes de la classe ouvrière. L'analyse de leur mobilisation contribue également à enrichir et à compliquer notre compréhension du féminisme ouvrier et socialiste de cette période. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Carla Lonzi's collective self-portrait Autoritratto (1969) through the interpretive lens of interruption. I identify interruption as a critical and unexplored stylistic feature and formal strategy that is fundamental to the text's nascent feminist sensibilities and praxis, and to the alternate personal history it imagines. Interruption functions as a structuring principle and mode of critique that is generative rather than destructive: by interrupting the content of audio interviews and re-staging her experiences textually, Lonzi creates a space where the acts of listening and dialoguing are revealed as essential to creative expression and auto-narration. Although the text predates Lonzi's radical feminist writings, it engages with gestures central to Italian second-wave feminist discourses: namely, the personal and communicative goals of autocoscienza. In part, this article addresses how the social and historical critiques within Lonzi's feminism find earlier expression in the narrative techniques and ambivalent self-assertion in Autoritratto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, unmarried mothers have suffered greatly in Irish society. Advocacy for unmarried mothers began in the 1970s with the emergence of the women's movement in Ireland. 'Cherish' became one of the first organisation in Ireland to push for rights for unmarried mothers. This article is the first comprehensive study into the organisation exploring its establishment and development throughout the late twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the larger women's movement, this article focuses on the early years of the campaign incorporating the push for unmarried mothers allowance; accommodation assistance offered; advice on legal issues including maintenance; as well as lobbying politicians on legislative change. It incorporates the organisation's connection with the Catholic Church whilst simultaneously and unapologetically challenging Archbishop Dermot Ryan on prejudices against unmarried mothers. In the 1980s, the group faced new challenges as more women with unplanned pregnancies sought information on abortion. The organisations link with the Catholic Church diminished throughout the 1980s as Cherish began to direct women to abortion information helplines and openly supported the Defend the Clinics Campaign, despite their receipt of state funding. The establishment of Cherish and its commitment to advocacy for women in crisis pregnancy has been somewhat overlooked in the historical analysis of the Irish women's movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historiography has extensively examined how the 1973 Chilean coup had a strong emotional impact abroad and how several solidarity activities were set up to garner support for the victims of political repression. In spite of this, less specific attention has been dedicated to the international echo produced by very active social subjects during the dictatorship: women's associations. During the seventies, across the entire region, women engaged in the struggle for human rights overlap in the public sphere with second-wave feminism. These two aspects of women's visibility and agency sometimes yielded cooperations, and other times produced tensions and distances. This article, taking a gendered look at solidarity networks, is a first approach to the intertwined dimensions of exile, political activism, and international solidarity and their related bibliography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s rape became a central focus of second-wave feminist activism, and also, as censorship waned, a frequent narrative event in New Hollywood cinema, often, as a number of critics noted, in strikingly misogynistic forms. A few films, however, reflect and engage with second-wave feminism's new perspectives on sexual assault. Sidney Furie's The Entity (1982) uses its horror premise, a woman repeatedly raped by an invisible, aethereal attacker, as a powerful metaphor for what feminists termed 'rape culture'. The film enlists our identification with, and sympathy for, its protagonist in her struggle against both the invisible rapist and against a medical establishment that denies the truth of her experience. Larry Cohen's God Told Me To will be briefly considered as a film that reimagines the story of Jesus's conception in feminist terms as sexual violation and Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 will be discussed as a representation of women's experience of rape culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Industrial Revolution, world wars, the post-war periods, herewith called the Late Modern period, along with technological advances created a series of social changes in the world. As this transformation became more visible in social life, it has also manifested itself in visual forms such as painting, photography or posters. These social changes, influencing women's lives directly, had also an impact on the manner they were addressed in visual forms. In this regard, this study is centred on the history of visual communication design with a visual cultural approach to observe a connection between the changes that occurred in social life during each period and their effects on the portrayal of women while at the same time it also examines these representations in relation to the development of poster design. Five images produced as advertising and posters ranging from the Industrial Revolution to the Second-Wave Feminism era were selected randomly and examined as illustrative case studies. Zeitgeist approach was used reviewing the periods and countries where these posters were produced. This small study exhibits how the style of women's representation can transform depending on the changing conditions of the era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While historians have explored the links between first‐wave feminism and religion, particularly Christianity, in considerable detail in both Canada and the United States, the nature of the relationship between religion, irreligion and second‐wave feminism has received little scholarly attention. This forum explores the complex and troubled intersections between second‐wave feminism, religion and irreligion among Jewish women, both feminist and non‐feminist, a Christian Pentecostal female politician and nonbelieving women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Jewish feminists in the British Columbia and Ontario women's movements, particularly among radical and socialist feminists. Feminists within these movements saw organised religion as patriarchal, hostile to the interests of women and thus to be rejected. Using archival and oral history sources, we argue that looking more closely at Jewish feminists within second‐wave feminism can help us to more clearly understand the nature of secularism in the women's movement, its implicit contradictions and unspoken Christian bias. Jewish feminists noted, for example, that Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter could be seen as secular celebrations, while any celebration of Jewish heritage, even if it emerged from a very secular Jewish socialist culture, was suspect within secular feminist circles, and indeed could be denounced as an acceptance of patriarchy. We analyse the distinctive experiences of Jewish feminists as a minority community within an ostensibly secular women's movement. We argue that Jewish activist women, because of their liminal position within the movement, as both secular feminists and ethnic/religious other, could challenge and reveal the Christian roots of feminist secularism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a preliminary study into the impact of feminism within the Jewish‐Canadian community in Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s, based on a combination of archival research and oral history. This research reveals that while community, religious elites and ordinary Jewish women in Montreal did engage with feminist ideas right from the beginning, this engagement was limited in the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, questions arose about the compatibility of feminism with Jewish religion and culture, particularly with respect to the devaluation of motherhood and family within the larger movement. As a result, Jewish women in Montreal selectively incorporated second‐wave feminism into their lives in contradictory and inconsistent ways, viewing the role of women in the home and family as a source of pride and strength. This suggests the need to rethink our image of feminism in this period by including new understandings of feminist activism and the possibility that the lack of connection over the subject of motherhood was the norm rather than the exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on newspapers and magazines, statistical sources and oral histories with 42 white, English Canadian women who rejected religious belief in the 1960s–1980s. During that era, organised religious involvement declined sharply in Canada and levels of unbelief gradually increased. This article explores how feminism shaped women's departure from religion in those years. The second‐wave women's movement tended to disregard religious feminisms and to associate religiosity with women's disempowerment; while secularity was endemic to the movement, the focus was on challenging institutional religion rather than belief itself. The secularity of the second wave could be narrow and exclusionary, but it also helped some women to challenge religious constraints. Although few interviewees were active in the women's movement, many recalled that feminism informed their journeys away from religion. Most came to an awareness of the patriarchy of organised religion – and dismissed it as such – in their teens or twenties, but rejected religious belief later in life. Due to persistent religious and gender norms, nonbelieving women were often reticent in voicing their unbelief. Nevertheless, they disseminated irreligion in a range of subtle yet powerful ways, and played a central role in the secularisation of post‐war English Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of Canadian history have been remiss in overlooking conservative religious women, especially when such women claimed to be feminists. Given the commonly shared assumption that second‐wave feminism was tied to secularism, the idea that religious women could be committed feminists seems implausible. However, some conservative Christian women, including evangelicals and Pentecostals, considered themselves to be feminists, even as they actively opposed abortion. The Rev. Bernice Gerard (1923–2008) was a Pentecostal pastor, a media personality and a municipal politician in Vancouver from 1977 to 1980. Researching her life through using her own life writing provides a case study for grappling with larger questions about conservativism and feminism. In 2000, Gerard, the self‐proclaimed feminist, was named as the most significant spiritual figure in British Columbia in the twentieth century. My biographical work about her pays particular attention to her provocative and seemingly contradictory convictions and points to how she resolved the conceptual tensions that framed her religiosity using a process of 'self‐authoring'. Theoretical frameworks from the sociology of religion challenge Western feminism's implicit biases and provide useful ways to frame the complexities and paradoxes that arise in the lives of conservative women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During summer 2019, Dior to Disco: Fashion During the Era of Second Wave Feminism was on display at the Goldstein Museum of Design at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The exhibition explored women's shifting identities, starting with the post-Second World War years through the mid-1970s. Curatorially, we sought out elements and narratives that went beyond popularized tropes of bra burning and disillusionment of upper middle-class white housewives. This article delves into the curatorial process with particular attention to the tension between material objects and the speculative tendencies of curation. Feminism and fashion are highly complex topics, which led to curatorial challenges and opportunities with respect to our exhibition goals, ongoing research and engagement with feminist theory. Additionally, we were working within the scope of the Goldstein Museum of Design's collection and resources, with the goal of avoiding reductive narratives of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The purpose of this research is to identify the female representation depicted in the Disney Renaissance and to investigate why Disney characters struggle to claim their equity as women in their society. The research methods used in this study are classified as qualitative and descriptive. The documentation method and taking notes techniques are used to collect data. The research also employs two method concepts to analyze the collected data, including a gender equity approach analysis and Simone de Beauvoir's second-wave feminism theory. The data consists of linguistic units from various Disney Renaissance stories. The writer discovered three parts in the description of female representations based on data analysis of the female representations depicted in Disney Renaissance: rebel, wise, and adventurous women; confident, intelligent, and repellent of domestication women; and masculine, loyal, and ambitious women. Furthermore, data analysis of Disney characters' struggles in claiming their equality as women in their society reveals that they outperform patriarchal expectations, reject domestication, and practice emancipation by appropriating masculine attributes and roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mediterranean Journal of Communication / Revista Mediterránea de Comunicación is the property of Revista Mediterranea de Comunicacion / Mediterranean Journal of Communication and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Study of the cultural discourse around women's paid work in Israel is limited, and until now research has ignored its early periods and dynamics. This paper focuses on Israel's third decade, 1967–1977, when women, including mothers, were for the first time encouraged to work outside the home. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, I examine La'isha (For the woman), Israel's veteran commercial women's magazine, which has self-declared its nationalist role. Mainly dedicated to traditional feminine subjects directed at middle-class women, La'isha has followed the pattern of most popular women's magazines. However, it critically problematized the issue of women's employment in a wide social context, emphasizing gender and class inequality and expressing a complex of hegemonic liberal feminism and socialist feminism. In examining this radical discourse, the paper looks at the cultural and civic roles of popular women's magazines and the characteristics of this journalistic genre, and considers historical macro and micro explanations. The study demonstrates the value of women's magazines as a historical source and highlights the potential of popular women's magazines to take on oppositional power and play a transformative role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Kare International Journal of Comparative Literature is the property of Kare Dergi: International Journal of Comparative Literature, History & Thought and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The #MeToo movement resurfaced tensions between second- and third-wave feminists, who are often framed in media narratives using a paradigm approach that defines them as separate, competing social movements. Using a historical analysis, this study builds upon evidence supporting a continuity approach to social movement scholarship that instead emphasizes ideological connections and spillover effects. An examination of the archives of Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS) members in the 1980s and 1990s illustrates that second-wave feminists played a discursive role in helping shape the priorities of the third wave, creating a continuum of the movement to help ensure its future. This study argues that embracing this theoretical perspective and approach to media framing better serves the feminist social movement by providing a more historically accurate portrayal of the transition between waves and by creating a structure of collaboration rather than competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolving relationship between the women's liberation movement and the underground press in Seattle between 1967 and 1970, arguing that the mixed-sex alternative media belatedly embraced feminist ideals but failed to establish robust feminist institutional cultures. Prior to 1969, the hierarchical work environment and masculine aesthetic of the Helix (1967-1970) proved inhospitable to feminist critiques. Beginning in 1969, the emergence of democratic work collectives and increasing coverage of feminism at the Helix and its successor, the Sabot (1970), provided the print space for radical women to organize and confront Movement men about toxic masculinity. By analyzing the relationship between women's liberation and the underground press in Seattle, this article illuminates the ambivalent role of the underground press in applying feminist ideals to the cultural politics of theMovement in Seattle and nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 1971, American women's magazine McCall's published an extract of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. Myriad unpublished letters to the editor contained in the Greer archive at the University of Melbourne reveal that the magazine's readers were largely dismissive of Greer's feminist vision. These reader-writers, best conceptualised as 'anti-fans', took both author and editor to task for criticising them as wives and mothers. Through an analysis of these letters, this article argues that their authors contested Greer's burgeoning authority as a second-wave celebrity feminist largely by pathologising her, invoking essentialist assumptions about femininity, and mobilising discourses of 'choice' more commonly understood as the product of a 'postfeminist' representational environment. Through their anti-fan practices, they challenge Greer's attempts to deprive housewives of agency, deploying rhetorical strategies that are at once reliant upon and highly critical of second-wave feminism. By complicating dominant ways of framing the feminist past and the postfeminist present, this article demonstrates how celebrity feminists, including 'blockbuster' authors, have historically always elicited complex affective responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of the press coverage given to the first formal and organised mobilisation of women in Spain during the first years of the political transition to a democratic context after decades of dictatorship (1975–1979). This feminism was influenced by the American and European trends of the 1960s and 1970s, while at the same time representing a singular movement. Following recent related analysis and using a descriptive content approach, the study thus aims to contribute new insights on the media coverage of feminism in its most significant phases over the course of the twentieth century and in different social and political contexts. The research reveals an ambiguous coverage that contributed to making the second-wave Spanish feminism visible while, at the same time, keeping its main revolutionary claims hidden, and furthermore depicting it as a whiny and problematic. Thus, in this pre-democratic context, the movement was represented as essential for political and social pressure but as necessarily short-term and only ground-breaking within certain limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives that provide honest portrayals of women's relationships appear to be very popular at the moment. This may seem as nothing new since feminist authors have recast female friendship as a potential site of subversion at least since the seventies. However, as critics have highlighted, it is particularly since the eighties and nineties that representations of ambivalent female relations have become more prominent, mostly as a result of the influence of intersectional and decolonial theories such as those pioneered, respectively, by Audre Lorde and María Lugones. This article contextualizes Elena Ferrante's work within the current transnational tendency of developing an ethics of female relations that does not underplay difference but rather investigates the emancipatory potential of the B-side of female friendships. I will argue that Ferrante both draws upon and expands the theory of intersubjective narrative signification developed by philosopher Adriana Cavarero in works such as Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. In tune with both Lorde's and Lugones's ideas, the Neapolitan novels examine how intersecting differences that challenge the notion of a perfect female relationality, and the form of a "relating narrative" as theorized by Cavarero, can nonetheless be reclaimed as an empowering tool for redefining subjectivity and projecting new forms of collective belonging through the art of storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Julia Timmins use an autobiographical lens to explore her journey in feminism, both theoretically and in practice. Specifically, she discusses how her own experiences have informed her learning about feminism and care. She first considers how her time as a 'mother at home' in the 1970s and 1980s shaped her relationship with second-wave feminism. Focusing attention on the activities and groups she was involved with during those years, she explains how they functioned as spaces which fostered solidarity between women, as well as sites of resistance against the growth of neo-liberalism within Aotearoa/New Zealand politics. Drawing upon the theory of care ethics, Timmins discusses her response to this political climate, particularly her activism against child poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was written in 2013 as the faculty of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) was considering a policy barring prospective rabbinical students from being partnered with non-Jews. Composed by Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Ph.D., prior to her assuming the presidency of Reconstructing Judaism, it recommends that RRC set aside this policy and replace it with a clearly articulated preference that rabbinical students create for themselves homes with rich Jewish practice, and a requirement that children in the home be raised exclusively in the Jewish tradition. The recommendation emerges from a review of classical Reconstructionist positions as articulated by Mordecai M. Kaplan, the 1968 and 1979 Reconstructionist stands on patrilineal descent, the nature of religious authority, the impact of second-wave feminism on American Jewish life, and consideration of universalism versus particularism. The ultimate conclusion is that RRC's mission is to attract Jews to Jewish living and not to police boundaries and that adopting a more inclusive partner status policy is an affirmation of key Reconstructionist principles, including fostering diverse expressions of Jewish identity and inclusive Jewish communities, and an authentic step in an evolving understanding of the Jewish civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]