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This chapter examines how feminist student activism in UK and US universities is resisting and challenging gender based violence (GBV), as well as the ways that the feminists' work is fostered by community building and connection. Drawing on data from a qualitative study of young women feminists in UK and US universities, the chapter investigates how feminist communities help young feminists to find their voice and to speak out about GBV. The chapter first considers how, in addition to developing effective systems of accountability, student activism is resisting GBV in universities and creating cultures which support freedom, resistance and respect. More specifically, it shows how students are coming together to form feminist communities to challenge the attitudes, behaviours and institutional practices that support GBV, while also developing pragmatic and theoretical approaches to GBV. It argues that feminist communities play a vital role in the struggle against GBV in universities.

Three ingredients underpin feminist campaigns against violence against women in universities: research, public activism, and political lobbying. Often discussed as if they are separate activities, this chapter demonstrates that conducting research constitutes activism resulting in and/or requiring lobbying and other activist activities. The chapter analyzes qualitative data collected in a UK national multimethod study exploring barriers and facilitators to implementing the recommendations of the 2016 Universities UK report on violence against women. Interviews with academics reveal how, in becoming cognizant of the power structures within their universities, participants identified how power operated to stall or block the gender-based violence agenda and pointed to transformative measures to circumvent barriers. These measures involve the three ingredients listed here. Collective action is apparent throughout their accounts with alliances being developed with students, external partners, and key individuals, as well as committees and services within their institutions. Cumulatively, the activism of these participants can be seen as transformative.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on the national television news narratives about the second wave of feminism that proliferated in 1970, a year in which the networks' eagerness to make sense of the movement for their viewers was accompanied by feminists' efforts to use national media for their own purposes. The interaction of these efforts produced coverage that was distinguished by its contradictions—it ranged from sympathetic to patronizing, from thoughtful to sensationalistic, and from evenhanded to overtly dismissive. The effects of the movement's heightened public profile proved to be equally unpredictable. Even negative coverage had positive outcomes for movement growth; at the same time, some feminist media activism that proved surprisingly successful had an adverse effect on movement cohesion.

This chapter summarizes our key findings and case studies and outlines directions for future scholarly inquiry. The Conclusion reiterates the importance of not only asking questions about what digital feminism does, or how it is manifested, but how it is felt and experienced amongst participants. In particular, we draw out the implications of our findings to explore affective and material changes in the lives of our participants. We discuss how our research has revealed a range of new connectivities among girls and women and show the main aspects of what digital feminism can do including educating and transforming lives, and ask what it can achieve, especially considering its demanding nature. We consider these potentialities in light of recent surges of victims speaking out against sexual violence in #MeToo and #TimesUp.

The chapter assesses the contribution of the Hindu Code Bill in the construction of the modern Indian nation. Contrary to the existing perception that the Hindu Code Bill in its diluted form failed to create a significant impact on modern Indian society, the analysis tries to capture the lasting imprints of the Hindu Code Bill on the modern Indian mind. With the help of theoretical tools and empirical analysis, the section locates the significance of the Hindu Code Bill controversy in independent India. It attempts to demonstrate that not only did the Hindu Code Bill provide the benchmark for the second wave of feminist activism in India in the 1970s and 1980s, it also shaped much of the subsequent legal debates surrounding the proper implementation of Hindu laws. The chapter argues that even in its truncated form, the passage of the Hindu Code Bill was important in shaping the gender consciousness in independent India and thereby influencing the process of law formation over the longer term.

This chapter focuses on the ‘concentrationary legacies’ of state totalitarianism in Europe in the context of institutionalised anti-Semitism in contemporary Romania. It argues that anti-Semitism in present-day Romania does not yet approximate the anti-Semitism of the 1930s, when it prospered as a direct result of Nazi propaganda, but continues to be a major problem which is difficult to contain within mainstream Romanian society. The chapter looks at attempts, with a particular emphasis on feminist activism, to fight residual or emergent anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Romania, for example by introducing educational programs designed to tackle the everyday problems facing Jews, especially Jewish women, in Romanian society. It considers Romania's admission to the European Union as an opportunity to contain institutionalised racism in accordance with imposed political and economic agendas, but contends that it may take years, even decades, before the status quo can be altered due to the deep-rooted sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic discourses in today's Romanian society.

In this chapter I discuss performative slurs as a tactic deployed by feminist activists in England in the 19th century. During debates about the Contagious Diseases Acts in England, feminists’ radical and humiliating rhetoric resignified exclusionary political conventions such as prostitution laws and prohibitions against voting. While Josephine Butler chastised upper-class men who were part of the political elite for being hypocrites and sadistic villains, Mill used shaming and humiliation strategically in his articles and public interventions. Humiliating language can be a radical democratic act when it represents a risky intervention that imagines new possibilities of living for sex and gender marginals.

This chapter focuses on the March 18, 1970, sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ), a crucial episode in feminist media activism that had dramatic internal and external consequences for women's liberation. Conceived as a radical action by a small group of women incensed at the demeaning portrayal of women in a publication that touted itself as “the magazine women believe in,” the LHJ protest was an unpredictable success, precipitating significant changes in editorial and employment practices at women's magazines. That outcome was the product of several factors, including the emphases of the print and broadcast coverage of the LHJ events as well as the action's timing among a wave of protests and discrimination complaints launched in 1970 by women employees of major media institutions. Equally important was the recognition of the magazine's editors—and those of their sister publications—that incorporating and commodifying women's liberation was more profitable than resisting it, processes that would soon escalate across all forms of mass media.

This chapter focuses on the time when Billie Jean King alerted readers of women-Sports to be on the lookout for “the largest gathering of tomboys and ex-tomboys in recent history.” She wasn't referring to a sporting event or pre-Olympic competition, but to the National Women's Conference to be held in Houston on November 18–20, 1977, in observance of International Women's Year (IWY). This gathering brought together 2,000 elected delegates from every state in the union, supplemented by almost 20,000 alternates, observers, and members of the press, to debate and eventually pass a national plan of action on women's issues. In many ways the Houston conference was the high point of feminist activism in the 1970s, as women of varying political agendas came together to build common ground.

Challenging the notion that public actions and political lobbying are the women’s movement’s main tactics, this chapter traces the history of an extra-institutional form of feminism—narrative-based consciousness-raising—from its inception in the 1910s through its contemporary online expression today. Rather than a product of second-wave feminism, narrative-based consciousness-raising has always been central to the women’s movement, as the chapter shows. Narrative-based consciousness-raising as a strategy assumes that, in order to change fundamental societal institutions such as marriage, the nuclear family, and the state, men and women must first change their consciousness about themselves and society. This strategy utilizes personal life stories, or life narratives, to reveal the collective roots of personal problems in order to effect this personal change. The persistence of this strategy through three waves of feminist activism demonstrates the value of raising collective awareness for fighting gendered oppression. The author argues that this continuity is a result of institutionalized knowledge and a response to similar historical circumstances, rather than direct connections between waves.

This chapter draws on Digital Storytelling (DS), a process that allows research participants to tell their stories in their own words through a guided creative workshop that includes the use of digital technology, participatory approaches, and co-production of personal stories. As such, it is a method devised for bridging the gap between theory and experience and can be considered a social practice as well as a research method. During a workshop with migrant women, DS enabled all research participants to express personal truths that are worked on using technologies of telling, listening to each other's stories, writing, and giving each other comments and feedback within the group. In this chapter, DS is interpreted as embodied feminist research as it draws on repertoires of co-production that are typical of feminist activism and research.

This chapter focuses on efforts to expand women’s participation in scientific fields amid the second wave of American feminism and changing national security concerns. In addition to addressing how older organizations for women modified their work, it also examines the formation of new women’s scientific societies. The chapter pays particular attention to how many of the activities carried out by this generation of reformers extended, altered, and adapted earlier advocates’ core ideas. While emboldened to take a more explicitly feminist approach, second-wave activists targeted many of the same obstacles to women’s scientific participation. Also important is the fact that both generations periodically resorted to the assumptions and strategies of “technocratic feminism,” thereby illuminating important threads of continuity with the past.

This chapter reflects on the lessons advanced in previous chapters and returns three umbrella themes developed in the introduction. In doing so, the chapter finds that the first two—representations/reproductions and spaces/borders—have endured while morphing in unanticipated directions, but the third—voices/bodies—has dispersed among the others and an unexpected newcomer—methods of scholarship/activism—has joined the fray. Representations/reproductions has developed to include the multiple levels and genres in which discursive practices produce and are produced by power relations. Spaces/borders has expanded to include physical arrangements of states, labor markets, families, bodies, clinics, schools, prisons, and security apparatuses. And finally, feminist methods of scholarship/activism has emerged as a theme due to these essays' shared reflections on how feminists study globalization.

This introductory chapter begins with a description of how feminists used the language and cause of national security, during the period between the Second World War and early Cold War era, to promote women’s education and employment, especially in the fields of science and engineering. It then sets out the book’s purpose, which is to illuminate the history of feminist interest in science before feminism’s second wave and to trace continuities between early and later efforts. An extended treatment of reformers’ use of scientific manpower concerns and national security prerogatives will expand the understanding of the problems and possibilities that they encountered along the way. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

In the wake of the Constitution of 1992, Ghana criminalized cutting not once, but twice. In chapters 6 and 7, which should be read in conjunction, I investigate the intimate relationship between violence and law by analyzing, respectively the associated efforts to reform and enforce the law against cutting. Chapter 6, The Feminist Fetish: Legal Advocacy illuminates how GAWW’s advocacy for more severe legislation functions as an early instantiation of “zero tolerance to FGM” logic. I attend to Ghanaian advocates’ reckoning with both the power of law and the tensions within feminist liberalism, namely, those between protection and punishment, and freedom and violence.

This concluding chapter reflects on the motivations of Jewish women engaged in early feminist activism, considering the importance of fluid, but ever-present, Jewish identity to every kind of social movement in which they became involved. Over a period of several decades and several generations, American Jewish women supported large-scale social movements that promised to grant them political authority and citizenship, enhance their power over their own bodies and families, and expand their roles in international relations through the promotion of peace. Though Jewish identity constantly fluctuated, many women held fast to their own ideas of what it meant to be Jewish; Jewishness often shaped their political commitments to secular causes. The chapter then discusses the impact of Jewish women on American women's feminist activism in order to understand the foundational and critical involvement of Jewish women in postwar feminism.

Who in civil society seeks to influence the representation of women's interests and how, in both democratic and authoritarian regimes? Relatively little is known about the full range of actors outside the state who care about the representation of women's interests. To more fully explore the who and how questions of women's representation, this chapter examines the feminist activists and Catholic activists who mobilized around the African Union's treaty on women's rights, the Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa. The chapter finds that feminists and Catholics employed multilevel strategies in their attempts to influence whether governments would ratify the African Union's treaty. Activists in democracies and autocracies engaged in international networking as well as domestic lobbying, protesting, and consciousness-raising.