Месяц: Октябрь 2015

Discourse Theory and Ethics

The next three essays in the collection, Seyla Benhabib’s, Jodi Dean’s, and mine, reflect attempts to use Habermas’s discourse theory to bridge the gap that arises from significant feminist critiques of deontological ethics, ranging from the issues of the universal and the particular, to criticisms of Habermas’s account of the generalized other, and to discussions […]

Preserving ‘tradition’: Efundula as cultural heritage

This last section draws on very recent developments in Owambo, and the wider postcolonial Namibian society, where beginning in the mid-1990s disputes over the values that pull the national and local community together have increasingly embraced notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’. The production and prime-time screening of a documentary on efundula (Carstens 1996) exemplified this […]

Early 20th-century feminism

During the early 20th century, English women achieved legal and civil equality, in theory if not always in practice. Some women, those over the age of 30, were allowed to vote from 1918, and there were arguments about whether their priority was to press hard for enfranchisement on the same terms as men, or to […]

Coverture

The law of coverture was inherited from English common law and regulated legal transactions between husbands and wives. Most significantly, it established a sharp distinction between a legally in­dependent unmarried woman and a married wife. Single women obviously did not enjoy full legal citizenship, for example, with re­spect to voting or jury duty. Nevertheless, they […]

Constructing global feminism

From Global Sisterhood to Global Feminism Like many other social movements, feminism has long been transnational, in­cluding the transnational woman suffrage movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Yet, even though the United Na­tions had declared a commitment to equality in the U. N. Charter, the idea for an international […]

DEGREES EARNED

Evidence of women’s representation in science and engineering is often measured first in the attainment of undergraduate and graduate degrees. [26] In 2004, 50.4 percent of all S&E bachelor’s degrees went to women.[27] Women received the majority of bachelor’s degrees in the agricultural sciences, biological sciences, oceanography, and chemistry, and they were awarded more than […]

Going to Better Schools

Even without disabilities, a parents understanding of a specific child’s person­ality, or a parent’s desire to secure a “better” education, might lead to the con­clusion that a private school education would be the best option to help that child maximize achievement.10 A number of professional middle-class parents spontaneously explained that they had sent their children […]

The changing science of sex

In western science and common parlance prior to around 1700, women and men were understood not as anatomically different but as two vari­ations of the same sex. In the scientific version of this ‘one-sex’ model women were supposedly ‘imperfect’ versions of men, their genitalia were described as being the same as men’s, but on the […]