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Along with the suffrage campaign, women's liberation activism is one of the most renowned aspects of women's political history. The women's liberation movement (WLM) has often been linked with the 'big city'. This is the first book-length account of the women's liberation movement in Scotland, which charts the origins and development of this important social movement of the post-1945 period. In doing so, it reveals the inventiveness and fearlessness of feminist activism, while also pointing towards the importance of considering the movement from the local and grassroots perspectives. This book has two central arguments. First, it presses for a more representative historiography in which material from other places outside of the large women's liberation centres are included. Second, it highlights that case studies not only enrich our knowledge about women's liberation but they also challenge the way the British movement has been portrayed by both participants and historians. The book commences with contextualising the subject and summarising recent research into the movement in the United Kingdom. It looks at the roots of the movement by offering portrayals of the women who went on to form women's liberation groups in Scotland. The book then analyses the phenomenon of 'consciousness-raising' (CR) and the part it had to play in the WLM's development. The focus then moves to exploring where, when and why women's liberation groups emerged. The campaigns taken up by the WLM were to defend abortion rights and campaign against violence against women.
–82 was less successful in having its demands recognised by the wider radical nationalist movement than it was in campaigning around broader feminist issues – most notably abortion rights and violence against women. But the interviews suggest that the legacy of feminism went beyond its failures or successes as a political movement to its broader influence on understanding of gender identities and relations. In her oral history of lesbian AIDS activists in New York City, Ann Cvetkovich suggests that political activism can be understood as traumatic ‘because of its
these campaigns. Of the twenty-nine women interviewed for this research, all but two were involved in the groups and protests focused on violence against women and abortion rights. Moreover these campaigns accentuated the feelings of difference which feminists in Scotland felt within the context of the British WLM, encouraging them to consider women’s liberation from the perspective of women in Scotland and in doing so illustrating that women north of the border often had different issues to face. Abortion in Scotland before 1967 As Drude Dahlerup has contended, ‘the
. Later the same day, supporters of abortion rights also gathered at the Supreme Court as part of the Roe v. Wade Anniversary Rally and Celebration. The passionate rival demonstrations are a powerful sign that the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision remains fiercely contested and in the balance. In the ensuing years, pro-life politicians have succeeded in passing many State laws that have sought to undermine abortion rights. There has also been some success at the federal level. For example, soon after Roe Congress passed the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of
campaigns taken up by the WLM in Scotland: to defend abortion rights (Chapter 6) and to campaign against violence against women (Chapter 7). Previous accounts of the WLM in Britain have attempted to grapple with the issues of division, single-issue campaigns and fragmentation. For example, David Bouchier in his book The Feminist Challenge appears to portray the WLM as divided, sectarian and weak and also diverse, creative and full of energy before concluding that fragmentation led to a weakening of the movement.26 The final two chapters of this book revise this view
constituents who mount a counter-campaign to defend its decision. If we examine the aftermath of the Court’s great abortion rights decision, we can see how rival campaigns can determine the degree of compliance with, and impact of, a controversial Court policy. Abortion: a case study of compliance and impact Roe v. Wade (1973) created an apparent revolution in abortion rights. Before the Court stepped in, States had always been considered sovereign over the issue. And even after the liberalising campaigns of the 1960s, most still had very strict controls over abortion
The book explores the relationship between violence against women on one hand, and the rights to health and reproductive health on the other. It argues that violation of the right to health is a consequence of violence, and that (state) health policies might be a cause of – or create the conditions for – violence against women. It significantly contributes to feminist and international human rights legal scholarship by conceptualising a new ground-breaking idea, violence against women’s health (VAWH), using the Hippocratic paradigm as the backbone of the analysis. The two dimensions of violence at the core of the book – the horizontal, ‘interpersonal’ dimension and the vertical ‘state policies’ dimension – are investigated through around 70 decisions of domestic, regional and international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies (the anamnesis). The concept of VAWH, drawn from the anamnesis, enriches the traditional concept of violence against women with a human rights-based approach to autonomy and a reflection on the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination (diagnosis). VAWH as theorised in the book allows the reconceptualisation of states’ obligations in an innovative way, by identifying for both dimensions obligations of result, due diligence obligations, and obligations to progressively take steps (treatment). The book eventually asks whether it is not international law itself that is the ultimate cause of VAWH (prognosis).
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
Irish Catholic women, for the first time, at the centre of public discussion and analysis. As always, lay Catholic women responded to the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century transformations in myriad ways and, as they had done for over a century, made significant contributions to the new Ireland that was emerging. The Irish feminist movement flourished in the 1960s and 1970s and has become more visible again in recent decades, particularly in the fight for abortion rights. Through it, an unprecedented number of Irish women activists have called for
accessible to all Irish women and women living in Ireland has prompted women’s movements to join the austerity critiques expressed by anti-bailout, water and now housing movements ( Abortion Rights Campaign 2018 ; Kennedy 2018 ). They highlight that EU institutions and Irish political elites had acted jointly in hollowing out the necessary material conditions for safe access