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The article explores the hypothesis that anarchist, activist and writer Emma Goldman secretly gave birth to a child whom she arranged to be raised as another woman's child. Topics discussed the possibility that Goldman suffered from endometriosis and infertility based on her autobiography, the recollection of Goldman's lover and speaking tour manager Ben Reitman about her pregnancy and miscarriage, and Moses Irving Ginsberg's claim that he was the son of Goldman.

This article discusses the entanglement of an international women's NGO, the International Council of Women (ICW), the Pahlavi state and Iranian female elite activists. Beginning in the late 1960s, the Iranian court started financially supporting this western NGO and subsequently its discourse regarding 'modern women'. By doing so, the Shah strengthened his own image as a modern ruler. The ICW was financially unstable and accepted money from the autocratic regime without any reluctance. The discourse the Shah invested in, ICW's discourse, was adopted by Iranian elite activists, whose activities were supported and controlled by the state. This study shows that this three-sided collaboration enforced a notion of modernity that failed to take class inequalities into consideration, thereby ignoring subaltern women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a systematic and localized analysis of how female anti-slavery activity in the North-East of England influenced and impacted the transatlantic campaign to abolish slavery in the West Indies and then the United States. Female anti-slavery societies in Newcastle and Darlington organized local meetings with prominent African American anti-slavery campaigners, leading regional and national conversations about abolition and wider discussions about race and slavery. This article argues that regional conceptions of race and identity were shaped by local religious dissenting cultures and the unique professional relationships formed between African American abolitionists and North-East women's societies. This study is nonetheless critical of the way white female anti-slavery activism often envisioned emancipation as a fulfilment of maternal and imperialistic duties, arguing that the notion of a 'transatlantic sisterhood' espoused by British and American female abolitionists only served to further subjugate those who had previously been enslaved, delaying any unified political response from women on both sides of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the political and social events that significantly influenced the societal ambiance was the 2022 protests. This study aims to examine the social underpinnings of the presence of women in the protests of the fall of 2022 and to demonstrate the repercussions on society and the government. This study concentrates on the civil layer of the 2022 protest uprising, despite the fact that it encompassed various layers of protest. For this purpose, 28 interviews were conducted with female political and social activists using the qualitative study and grounded theory method and theoretical sampling. The collected data were coded and analysed based on open, central and selective coding. The categories and themes that were extracted from the interviews demonstrated the significance of the disparity between the “women’s mentality” and their “legal and social objectivity” in the protests of 2022. The political system has been further exacerbated by the non-acceptance of women by the government, as well as the control of women’s attire and lifestyle, which has been linked to the political identity of the government for decades. This has resulted in a shift in value and attitude. These protests have had significant societal, social, and cultural repercussions, and they have also elevated the government’s concern regarding women’s attire. This protest layer was a women’s protest that was centered on the reclamation of the lifestyle and the type of new social movements. It is related to those who experience “control” and “humiliation” in their lived experience. The movement’s reiteration of the slogan “woman, life, freedom” is a protest against the directive character of orderly and governmental life and a demand for “social and cultural freedom.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Wang Ruqi's contribution to the drafting of the 1950 Marriage Law, the first codified law promulgated by the People's Republic of China (PRC). It argues that Wang—who had been a legal specialist and a female political activist dating back to the 1930s and 1940s—was the actual author of the law's first draft. In rehabilitating Wang's long-forgotten contribution to the making of the Marriage Law, this study highlights that, first of all, lawmaking in the early years of the PRC was characterized by legal "professionalism," rather than the "vernacularism" that scholars in recent years have tended to ascribe to this period. Second, Wang was an exemplary figure of a new breed of "state feminists" in the PRC, which we term "state-legal feminists." State-legal feminists, like state feminists in general, were brought into the PRC state apparatus and took advantage of their role in the state to advance sociopolitical agendas. However, they differed from their fellow state feminists because they firmly believed that the state's will and intent could be best articulated and exercised through codified laws and legal institutions. The making of the Marriage Law thus exemplifies the state-legal feminist approach insofar as it resorted to a codified law to push for the political agendas of women's emancipation and restructuring families in China. While recent scholarship highlights the politicization of the law in the 1953 campaign to promote the Marriage Law, this study inverts this by addressing the legalization of political and social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how girls' education developed in Norway and Prussia (and later North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW) during the first and second wave of women's political mobilisation. It analyses how organisations and activists of the women's movement were included in different cross-interest coalitions in education politics. The cases are interpreted in light of Rokkanian cleavage theory. In Germany, the women's movement was split along class lines but also along denominational lines. The Catholic women's movement became a part of the Catholic and later the Christian democratic political alliance. In Norway, influential sections of the women's movement were linked first to the liberal movement and later to the social democratic movement. In both cases, women's rights activists left a mark on education policy, but Norwegian women's rights activists enjoyed successes earlier and more consistently. This is a result of the Norwegian women's movement's comparatively greater unity and related to the different cleavage structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some scholars have looked to the daughters of Zelophehad as 'proto-feminists', the first women to take an active role in suing for women's rights. (1) But as Jacob Milgrom expresses [...]

A burgeoning body of research examines how women's inclusion influences civil war peace processes. While scholars note that women's inclusion can positively affect peace, the theoretical mechanisms remain underexamined. This article begins to address this lacuna by examining how female rebels affect the probability of peace talks. We propose that women's inclusion directly affects the likelihood a rebel group participates in negotiations with the state by increasing its propensity to cooperate and compromise. Our analysis of 112 African rebel groups fighting in civil wars between 1989 and 2014 finds that women's participation in rebel groups affects the likelihood of negotiation onset. We analyze the mechanism driving this relationship and find that rebel groups with women members are more likely to issue negotiation requests to the government. These findings offer nuance to the women-and-peace hypothesis and demonstrate that even women with higher propensities toward violence can be a force for peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This obituary recalls the life of the feminist activist and academic Jalna Hanmer (1931–2023) who campaigned to end male violence against women and to improve the attitude of the police when dealing with domestic abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present qualitative study, we used self-presentation theory to examine how women from marginalized communities in India engage in self-presentation. Using semi-structured interviews of 18 Dalit women, including two Dalit transwomen, we explore factors shaping their self-presentation motivations and behavior. While most self-presentation research has focused on audience-pleasing motives, the current study is focused on self-construction motives. Using a grounded theory approach, we identify and explicate four themes: independent voices and bold choices, building solidarity through empathy and social capital, discriminatory practices and labeling, and mental wellbeing and self-care under discrimination. The narratives highlight the strategies these Dalit women and Dalit transwomen adopt to construct and present an authentic self in a complex and negotiated Dalit and Dalit trans activism space. Findings have implications for creating diversity awareness where a narrow understanding of intersectionality prevails, ensuring recognition of independent political expression and visibility of Dalit women and Dalit transwomen and the challenges thereof. These findings can inform policymakers, activists, and social workers on the changing psychosocial dynamics in the activism space and re-examine its structure and process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews a series of photographs by South African photographer Omar Badsha exhibited as part of Sharjah Biennial 15 (SB15). Collectively entitled Once We Were Warriors: Women and Resistance in the South African Liberation Struggle (1981–1999), the thirty-one images selected for SB15 highlight the role of women as political activists during the 1980s and 1990s across South Africa. The essay discusses Badsha's biography and approach to photography, in addition to appraising the images themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ummath, written by Sharmila Seyyid, navigates the sensitive topic of the precarious lives of three separate women amid the chaos of war-torn Sri Lanka. The stories of main characters Yoga and Theivanai demonstrate women's challenges in and out of militancy. Their struggles led them to Thawakkul, a Muslim social worker devoted to the cause of rehabilitating disabled and widowed women who once served the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam). Ummath provides a powerful social critique of the conditions that aggravated the separatist conflict, the stigmatization of women who become part of the LTTE, the inexorable violence perpetrated by all sides in a chaotic and prolonged internal conflict, and the failure of rehabilitating the militants into the community. The present article investigates the precarity faced by women in the anarchic context of civil violence and internal conflicts. The article discusses the disruption of education, militancy experience, the social stigma of being an ex-militant, and the challenges faced by reformers working to build peace in post-war society. The study employs Judith Butler's theory on precarity to investigate the social life of women militants and activists in the separatist war. Butler's concept of precarity addresses how people's vulnerability is politically induced, and hence different groups of people are exposed in different degrees to violence and death. In Butler's work, she argues that those who are not considered living in the first place, or whose lives are precarious and are not ascribed great value, are not mourned when they pass away. This article analyzes the problems that women militants and social workers face as well as the social ostracization they encounter daily through the focal points of Yoga, Theivanai, and Thawakkul's lives as narrated in Ummath. The exploration of the microcosmic experiences of the three women's lives highlights the need to study women's issues in the unstable context of a social uprising and the vulnerabilities they are exposed to in the context of human rights. Keywords: War, Women militants, Sharmila Sayyed, Ummath, Violence, Judith Butler, Precarity, Introduction The world we live in has seen many political conflicts and wars, and one common factor in the representation of such organized violence is the erasure of women's experiences [...]