In 1939 a law was passed in Sweden which forbade employers to dismiss female employees because of marriage or pregnancy. In Germany a law had been introduced already in 1932, which gave employers the right to dismiss a woman when she married. It also gave women right to end their employment for the same reason. The political decisions behind these legal changes were in both cases the result of an extended debate on the right of employment of married women. This debate occurred in most industrialised European countries in the interwar period. The increasing participation of women on the labour market was by some groups interpreted as a cause of mass unemployment. Economic crisis contributed to a crisis of masculinity, which then led to attacks on the rights of married women to paid employment. In Sweden there was a state commission set up in 1936 with the task of investigating women’s employment. This commission, kvinnoarbetskommittén, managed to demonstrate that dismissing women would not lead to a lowering of the unemployment figures for men, a task they accomplished through detailed studies of several labour market areas. The report of the commission guided the decision of parliament, a decision taken when the economic depression had already turned to a boom period. The composition of the commission as well as its work was a consequence of the strong influence of the Swedish women’s movement. In Germany the rights of women to paid employment was limited already in 1923 as the result of the financial crisis of the state. During the depression the attacks on married women’s right to employment became a political tool, which could be used both in foreign and domestic policy. Dismissing married women employed as civil servants was aimed to quash the demands of unemployed men. A prime target in the foreign policy was to convince the victors of World War I that reparations exceeded the ability of the German nation, a nation which had been badly stricken by economic crisis and unemployment. With this argument a solution of the unemployment issue was given second priority.

This thesis has analysed the relations among the women’s movement, the state and the labour market policy during and shortly after the Second World War and to what extent this period can be characterised as a formative phase as regards gender relations. The aim has been to study women’s strategic actions in order to influence the Swedish Government’s labour market policy in the period from 1939 to 1947. The thesis shows the conflicts of interest that manifested themselves between Statens arbetsmarknadskommission (SAK, ‘the National Swedish Labour Market Commission’) and its advisory women’s group, experts on women’s issues, concerning the planning and utilisation of female labour. SAK thought that the work of the experts on female issues should only focus on the short-term labour problems caused by the national crisis situation, while the experts on women’s issues were of the opinion that they should also work with long-term labour-market issues for women. These different ways of thinking and understanding the problem originated in different views on women’s work. The experts on women’s issues wanted to strengthen women’s position on the labour market by abolishing the wage differences between the genders, breaking the gender segregation in education, and broadening the occupational choices of girls. They had three strategies for achieving this: a strategy of professionalisation, a strategy of change, and a strategy of state feminism. The strategy of professionalisation was aimed at raising the value of traditional female work, in terms of both status and wages. The strategy of change was aimed at creating new opportunities for women to leave typical low-wage jobs and gain access to better paid jobs in male-dominated areas. The strategy of state feminism was aimed at paving the way for women in new and expanding occupational areas beside the traditional male occupations. Can the period during and shortly after the war be characterised as a formative phase of the issue of gender relations? It is evident that this period did not involve a revolution of the societal gender order. The idea of women as reserve labour did not disappear. The post-war planners considered that, in the transition to peace, the women who had replaced men who were called up should be redeployed or retrained for employment in household work, in hotels, restaurants and cafés, in shops and in health care. In spite of the great shortage of labour in the post-war period, leading politicians and economists stuck to old ways of thinking. A clear indication on the part of the Government was that the women’s movement’s demand for long-term planning in order to utilise female labour was turned down. One important difference from the First World War was that the Government produced peace plans for women’s work during the Second World War. The period also led to ideological and institutional consequences that could be the beginning of a change of the societal gender order. From her central position in Kommissionen för ekonomisk efterkrigsplanering (‘the Commission for economic post-war planning’), Karin Kock could see to it that women’s demands for greater occupational mobility and a loosening up of the gender division of labour had an impact on the post-war planning of the war years. The experiences of women in male industries in the Second World War, both in Sweden and abroad, showed to some extent that it was possible to change the gender division of labour. The modern welfare state also came to correspond to a great extent to the state feminist strategy of the experts on women’s issues. With the historical formation of the welfare state a new type of occupational groups developed, the so-called welfare state professionals.

En tant qu'acteur important de la vie politique québécoise, le mouvement des femmes a réussi à garantir de nouveaux droits pour les femmes et a fortement contribué à améliorer leurs conditions de vie. Cependant, son incapacité à reconnaître et à prendre en compte les expériences particulières des femmes qui vivent de multiple discriminations a été critiquée entre autres par les femmes autochtones, les femmes de couleur, les femmes immigrantes, les lesbiennes et les femmes handicapées. Par exemple, dans les 40 dernières années, un nombre croissant de femmes immigrantes et racisées se sont organisées en parallèle au mouvement pour défendre leurs intérêts spécifiques. Dans ce mémoire, je me penche sur la façon dont le mouvement des femmes québécois a répondu à leurs demandes de reconnaissance et adapté ses pratiques pour inclure les femmes de groupes ethniques et raciaux minoritaires. Bien que la littérature sur l'intersectionalité ait fourni de nombreuses critiques des tentatives des mouvements sociaux d'inclure la diversité, seulement quelques recherches se sont penchées sur la façon dont les organisations tiennent compte, dans leurs pratiques et discours, des identités et intérêts particuliers des groupes qui sont intersectionnellement marginalisés. En me basant sur la littérature sur l'instersectionnalité et les mouvements sociaux, j'analyse un corpus de 24 entretiens effectués auprès d'activistes travaillant dans des associations de femmes au Québec afin d'observer comment elles comprennent et conceptualisent les différences ethniques et raciales et comment cela influence en retour leurs stratégies d'inclusion. Je constate que la façon dont les activistes conceptualisent l'interconnexion des rapports de genre et de race/ethnicité en tant qu'axes d'oppression des femmes a un impact sur les plateformes politiques des organisations, sur les stratégies qu'elles mettent de l'avant pour favoriser l'inclusion et l'intégration des femmes immigrantes et racisées et sur leur capacité à travailler en coalition. / As an important actor in Québécois political life, the women's movement has been successful at obtaining new rights for women and ameliorating their life conditions. However, its inability to recognize and take into account the particular experiences of women who are discriminated on more than one basis has been criticized by Aboriginal women, women of color, immigrant women, lesbians and women with disabilities, among others. For instance, in the last decades, an increasing number of immigrant and racialized women have organized separately to defend their specific interests. In this thesis, I explore the way in which the Québécois women's movement has responded to their struggles for recognition and adapted its practices to include women from ethnic and racial minority groups. Although intersectionality theory has provided numerous critiques of social movements' attempts at being inclusive of diversity, only a few researches have examined how organizations take into account the specific identities and interests of intersectionally marginalized groups in their practices and discourses. Drawing on intersectionality theory and social movements literature, I analyze a set of 24 interviews conducted with activists working in women's organizations in Quebec to look at how they understand and conceptualize ethnic and racial differences and how this shapes their strategies for inclusion. I find that the way in which activists conceptualize the interconnected character of gender and race/ethnicity as axes that create women's experiences of oppression shapes organizations' political platforms, the strategies they put forth to foster the inclusion and integration of immigrant and racialized women and their capacity to engage in coalition work.

Graves discusses the important role that women played in the anti-ERA campaign in Georgia during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a controversial and divisive piece of legislation that polarized both legislators and constituents throughout the United States. Graves uses the anti-ERA campaign in Georgia as a model for studying the women who opposed the ERA on a national level. She writes about the differences between the feminist movement and the conservative grassroots movement, the role that anti-ERA women played in the rise of the New Right, and the legacy of the ERA’s failure in contemporary political context. Graves uses interviews and primary resource documents of the women involved in the campaign as well as a plethora of scholarly materials previously written about the ERA.

Le mouvement des femmes québécois a connu des transformations importantes au cours des dernières décennies. Plusieurs causes ont été mises de l’avant pour expliquer ces changements, telles que la mondialisation, le néolibéralisme ou des causes internes. Dans les années 1980, nous observons une montée de l’antiféminisme au Québec et l’émergence de sa forme masculiniste. Ce phénomène a modifié le contexte dans lequel évolue le mouvement des femmes. L’objectif de ce mémoire est d’analyser les répercussions de l’antiféminisme sur les transformations du mouvement des femmes. Afin d’analyser les interactions entre le mouvement des femmes et le masculinisme, nous étudions les discours antiféministes dans les médias de 1985 à 2009. Plus précisément, nous analysons les thématiques masculinistes contenues dans La Presse et Le Soleil durant cette période. Par la suite, nous analysons diverses publications (rapports d’activités, la Petite Presse et le Féminisme en bref) de la Fédération des femmes du Québec dans le but de voir si le mouvement des femmes a modifié ses analyses, ses stratégies et ses actions en réaction à cette montée de l’antiféminisme. Finalement, à l’aide de la théorie de la mobilisation des ressources et de l’approche des contre-mouvements, nous étudions les interactions entre le mouvement des femmes et son contre-mouvement, soit l’antiféminisme. Nous arrivons à la conclusion qu’il existe véritablement des interactions entre ceux-ci et que la montée de l’antiféminisme a eu des répercussions sur le mouvement des femmes, qui ont modifié ses analyses, ses stratégies et ses actions. / The women’s movement in Quebec has known significant transformations during the last decades. Several causes have been put forward to explain these changes, such as globalization, neoliberalism or internal causes. In the 1980s, there has been a backlash against the women’s movement in the province of Quebec and a specific form of anti-feminism emerged, masculinism. This backlash has changed the context in which the women’s movement has evolved. The objective of this thesis is to analyze the impact of anti-feminism on the transformations of the women’s movement. In order to analyze the interactions between the women’s movement and anti-feminism, we study the anti-feminist discourse in the media from 1985 to 2009. First, we analyze the masculinist’s thematics contained in the newspapers La Presse and Le Soleil during this period. Second, we analyze various publications (annual reports, la Petite Presse and le Féminisme en bref) of the Fédération des femmes du Québec in order to see if the women’s movement has changed its analysis, strategies and actions in response to this backlash. Finally, using the theory of resource mobilization and the countermovements’ approach, we study the interactions between the women’s movement and masculinism. We come to the conclusion that there are interactions between the women’s movement and the countermovement (anti-feminism). Furthermore, we see that the emergence of anti-feminism has changed the analysis, strategies and actions of the women’s movement in response to this backlash.

This thesis examines “autonomy” as a political goal of the West German women’s movement from its beginning in 1968 to 1978. As the central concept of the movement, autonomy was interpreted and applied in women’s groups and projects through a variety of organizational principles. The thesis takes case studies of different feminist projects. Successive chapters examine the Berlin Women’s Centre; Verena Stefan’s novel Shedding, the women’s press Frauenoffensive, and the women’s bookstore Labrys; and the periodicals Frauenzeitung, Courage, and Emma. These studies show that autonomously organized projects were characterized by the expression of an anti-hierarchical ethos. The Berlin Women’s Centre organized itself around collective decision making and self sustainability. Women’s writing and publishing projects established an alternative literary space. National feminist periodicals created journalistic spaces capable of coordinating the movement while subverting a dominant viewpoint. These examples illustrate how networks of autonomous projects established an autonomous cultural counter-sphere both separate and different from the established public sphere.

Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts Department of Political Science Political Science, PhD. Program Andrea Baršová The Emancipation of Women, the First World War and the Czechoslovak National Revolution of 1918/1919 PhD. Thesis Supervisor: Doc. PhDr. Ing. Ondřej Císař, PhD. 2015 Abstract This thesis deals with the enfranchisement of women during the Czechoslovak national revolution of 1918/1919, a topic that has so far remained little researched. It explores most important contexts and conditions which framed the process. These are the Czech, Austrian and international female suffrage movements, the mutual relations of the Czech women's emancipation movement with political parties, including the progressive incorporation of women's rights and agendas in party programmes, and the profound impacts of the First World War on gender relations both in private and public spheres. This paper defends the following theses. 1) The women's protest movement, which demanded peace, justice and national self-determination and also called for female suffrage and the equality of women, formed a specific aspect of the social protest movement and the Czechoslovak national revolution of 1918/1919. Through the protest, Czech women's activists and suffragists took a part in the factual enfranchisement of women during...

This thesis looks at the emergence of women's equal rights movement in Czech society and its transformation in the curriculum. It centers on the evolution of female movement and women's emancipation from the initial efforts of informal equality, initiated by Bozena Nemcova, to the achievement of formal liberation and equal rights for women in the society in Czechoslovak republic, in 1920, by achieving an active voting rights, in other words by full and equal citizenship. The theoretical part examines sociological terminology and findings, describes secondary literature by various female writers who focus on the women's movement and gender, and describes women's action in 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The thesis discusses men who played a role in the women's civil rights movement, and also places the topic in the European context. It stresses the importance of women's work, particularly female writers, teachers and politicians. In the practical section the thesis centers on placing the topic within the curriculum reform. It highlights places of remembrance which can be valuable for low secondary school pupils, outlines Czech female emancipation in the context of Framework Educational Programme for Basic Education and summarizes information about gender in educational setting. This is...

This thesis deals with the life of Františka Plamínková (1875-1942) paying special attention to her role as a women's rights activist, politician and journalist. The study maps out Plamínková's journey to becoming one of the principal characters of the Czech women's movement before and after the First World War and her merits regarding the women's suffrage in Czechoslovakia in the appropriate historical context. Furthermore, it describes her politics in the Czechoslovak Senate as well as her other public activities, such as being the chairwoman of the Czech National Women's Council. It highlights Plamínková's fate during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, which ultimately led to her execution. The chapter dedicated to Plamínková's journalistic work analyses her texts published between 1906-1940 primarily in women's magazines, where Plamínková reflected on the period narrative concerning women and aimed to change their limited options within both their public and private lives. The premise of this thesis is that Plamínková projected her own experience and opinions into her journalistic body of work. The study is based in archival materials and sources, texts in period magazines and other studies related to the topic at hand. Enclosed are several period photographs and archival documents.

This thesis is a critical review of educated women’s leadership in their emancipation in Ethiopia. Did they provide leadership and to what extent? It is to be noted that educated women’s leadership has been of great importance to women’s emancipation worldwide. Strong leadership was also the driving force behind women’s movements and feminism everywhere. However, the role of educated women in Ethiopia is hard to discern and their leadership efforts are largely invisible. On the other hand, many among the educated also lack the passion and desire to commit themselves in the fight for women’s emancipation. In this thesis I researched the settings and frameworks of women’s leadership and discussed the factors that function as limitations and/or opportunities. Overall there were more limitations than opportunities. These limitations are often historically rooted in the country’s religious, cultural, economic, political and traditional systems. And, as much as history and religion can be a source of strength and pride for many, they can also be a serious obstacle. The political regime of the Derg also scarred an entire population to the extent that despite the currently proclaimed ‘freedom’ of the EPRDF ruling party, women remain reluctant to step forward and claim their rights. The ruling party appears to appropriate women’s emancipation as a “private” interest and to use it for political gain, in the same manner as the Derg regime had done before it. Nowhere is there any sign of genuine freedom and equality for women in practice. Rhetoric reigns supreme through laws and policy documents, but they are not matched by genuine actions and concrete strategies. The traditional religious base of society is also making it more difficult to challenge autocratic tendencies of the ruling elite. The effect is that civil society is slowly being pushed to extinction, leaving the ruling party in charge as the main actor in all public services. This has serious consequences for the genuine emancipation of women in the country. The thesis finds that women’s leadership is not a luxury or personal demand, but a crucial step for the development of the country at large. It is encouraging to note that there are different sections of active women in the country waiting for strong leadership, leadership that can unite them into a movement and guide them on their unique emancipation paths. After all, it is only women themselves who, with their existing epistemic advantage, can transform their situation and change their status. / Sociology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Sociology)