Description
Book Synopsis For over half a century, the countless organizations and initiatives that comprise the Women’s Liberation movement have helped to reshape many aspects of Western societies, from public institutions and cultural production to body politics and subsequent activist movements. This collection represents the first systematic investigation of WLM’s cumulative impacts and achievements within the West. Here, specialists on movements in Europe systematically investigate outcomes in different countries in the light of a reflective social movement theory, comparing them both implicitly and explicitly to developments in other parts of the world.
Trade Review “This book is rich in content and thoroughly researched. Several chapters bring relatively un-known movement dynamics to an English-speaking audience for the first time. These contributions provide important empirical evidence of what the diversity of the many Western European Women’s Liberation Movements actually stand for, what they do, and how they develop.” · Susanne Zwingel, Florida International University
“Both exciting and very well-written, this book offers original empirical work on a range of core issues related to the Women’s Liberation Movements. It is based on multiple methods of case studies, and brings forward refreshing empirical material and methodological reflections. There are so many myths about feminism and WLM that claims and descriptions based on solid research, such as those offered by this collection, are essential.” · Beatrice Halsaa, University of Oslo
Table of Contents Introduction: A Success without Impact? Case Studies from the Women's Liberation Movement's in Europe
Kristina Schulz
PART I: THE WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
Introductory Remarks
Brigitte Studer
Chapter 1. Women’s Liberation Movement and Professional Equality: The Swiss Case
Sarah Kiani
Chapter 2. How The Women’s Movement Changed Academia: A Comparison of Germany and the United States
Stefanie Ehmsen
Chapter 3. Female Bodies — Fetal Subjects? New Reproductive Technologies, Feminist Claims and Political Change in Switzerland in the 1970/80s
Leena Schmitter
PART II: SHARING WORDS
Introductory Remarks
Silja Behre
Chapter 4. Momone and the Bonnes Femmes; or Beauvoir and the MLF
Sylvie Chaperon
Chapter 5. Women and Words: Literary Practices as Collective Self-Discovery
Kristina Schulz
Chapter 6. Lesbian Vertigo: Living the Women’s Liberation Movement on the Edge of Europe
Ana Martins
Chapter 7. Sexy Stories and Postfeminist Empowerment: From ‘Häutungen’ to ‘Wetlands’
Christa Binswanger and Kathy Davis
PART III: IDENTITIES AT STAKE: GENDER, RACE, CLASS
Introductory Remarks
Thierry Delessert and Lucy Delap
Chapter 8. Lesbianism as Political Construction, in the French Feminist Context
Christine Bard
Chapter 9. Gender and Class in the Italian Women’s Movement
Marica Tolomelli and Anna Frisone
Chapter 10. “Sisterhood is Plain Sailing?” Multi-Racial Feminist Collectives in 1980s Britain
Natalie Thomlinson
Chapter 11. Uneasy Solidarity: The British Men’s Movement and Feminism
Lucy Delap
PART IV: BEYOND NATIONAL BOUNDARIES
Introductory Remarks
Lucy Delap and Thierry Delessert
Chapter 12. Echoes of Ourselves? – Feminisms between East and West in the Leningrad Almanac Woman and Russia
Kirsten Harting
Chapter 13. Cyberfeminism on the German-Speaking Net: Contestation beyond Binary Code
Johanna Niesyto
PART V: THINKING ABOUT IMPACT AND CHANGE: CONCEPTS AND RESEARCH STRATEGIES
Introductory Remarks
Magda Kaspar
Chapter 14. The Myth and the Archives: Some Reflections on Swedish Feminism in the 1970s
Elisabeth Elgan
Chapter 15. After the Protest: Biographical Consequences of Movement Activism in an Oral History of Women’s Liberation in Britain
Margaretta Jolly
Chapter 16. Writing the History of Feminism (Old and New). Impacts and Impatience
Karen Offen
Postscript
Kristina Schulz
Index
