Revisiting global body politics in Nepal: A reflexive analysis.

Using the example of a human rights training in Nepal, the author looks at global body politics in a reflexive piece on her engagement in development practices that translate western feminist ideas on gender inequality and empowerment via UN human rights policies into non-western contexts. It firsts look at postcolonial and critical literature on feminist engagement in gender and development processes including a discussion on the concept of global body politics before examining briefly the framing of gender-based violence in Nepal. The core of the paper is a reflexive analysis and interrogation of the training in Nepal in order to bring out the tensions and contradictions around western developmental, feminist and human rights discourses. The discussion looks at how difficult it is for feminist, human rights and developmental discourses and practices to unmoor themselves from the notion of the 'expert' and those who do the rights/work/righting rights training and those who are perennially seen as requiring training. The conclusion reflects on possibilities of other epistemic practices found in intercultural dialogues.

The convergence of HIV/AIDS and customary tenure on women's access to land in rural Malawi.

This paper examines the convergence of HIV/AIDS and the social processes through which women access customary land in rural Malawi. Data were collected from focus group discussions with women in patrilineal and matrilineal communities. Women's land tenure is primarily determined through kinship group membership, customary inheritance practices and location of residence. In patrilineal communities, land is inherited through the male lineage and women access land through relationships with male members who are the rightful heirs. Conversely in matrilineal matrilocal communities, women as daughters directly inherit the land. This research found that in patrilineal communities, HIV/AIDS, gendered inequalities embedded in customary inheritance practices and resource shortages combine to affect women's access to land. HIV/AIDS may cause the termination of a woman's relationship with the access individual due to stigma or the individual's death. Termination of such relationships increases tenure insecurity for women accessing land in a community where they do not have inheritance rights. In contrast to the patrilineal patrilocal experience, research on matrilineal matrilocal communities demonstrates that where women are the inheritors of the land and have robust land tenure rights, they are not at risk of losing their access to land due to HIV/AIDS.

Forced genital cutting in North America: feminist theory and nursing considerations.

This article will examine forced nontherapeutic genital cutting (FNGC) through the lens of feminist theory and in relation to the concept of social justice in nursing. I will address the underlying assumptions of feminism and how they apply to the two currently legal forms of FNGC in North America: male infant circumcision and intersex infant/child genital cutting. Through a literature review and critical analysis of these practices, I will illustrate the challenges they present when considering the role of nurses in promoting social justice. If feminism asserts that bodily integrity, autonomy, and fundamental human rights are essential components of gender equality, it follows that these must be afforded to all genders without discrimination. Historically, there have been few feminists who have made this connection, yet a growing and diverse movement of people is challenging the frameworks in which we consider genital cutting in our society. Nurses are positioned well to be at the forefront of this cause and have a clear ethical duty to advocate for the elimination of all forms of FNGC.

San Francisco's Pioneer Mother Monument: maternalism, racial order, and the politics of memorialization, 1907­1915.

The 1907­1915 campaign to create San Francisco's Pioneer Mother Monument provides both a case study of conservative uses of maternalism and a window into the political mutability of maternalist rhetoric. Ella Sterling Mighels, a pioneer descendant, utilized the monument campaign to promote white women's moral influence over middle-class men, to argue against Asian immigration and labor unrest, and to inculcate old-fashioned moral values among urban children. Although some of Mighels's contemporaries cited pioneer mothers as proof of women's fitness for suffrage, Mighels herself used the pioneer mother to argue against suffrage. The final statue, created by the sculptor Charles Grafly, failed to encapsulate Mighels's multivalent political message and to express her ideals about gender, race, class, and morality.

What do women know about government services and benefits?

This article examines how much women know about government services and benefits and discusses why this type of knowledge matters. Using data from a survey as well as focus groups conducted in Montreal and Toronto, we show that the women who are most likely to need information about these programs are often the least likely to be aware of them. This is especially true of low-income women, older women, and women who came to Canada as immigrants. We end by suggesting some steps that could be taken to address these knowledge gaps.

"Hunnish scenes" and a "Virgin birth": a 1920s case of sexual and bodily ignorance.

When, in June 1921, a clairvoyant informed Christabel Russell, to her great surprise, that she was pregnant, her husband denied paternity and petitioned for divorce on grounds of adultery. The Hon. John Russell claimed that on the very few occasions that they had slept in the same bed in their two and half years of marriage, his method of birth control (which she referred to disapprovingly as "Hunnish scenes") had made pregnancy impossible. What added to the sensational nature of the case was the revelation that whilst pregnant, Christabel's hymen was unbroken ­ hence the claims of a "virgin birth." Two divorce trials and two appeals followed. The first trial ended inconclusively, the second trial was won for John Russell by the eminent barrister Sir Edward Marshall-Hall, but on the second appeal, in the House of Lords, it was ruled that evidence questioning the legitimacy of a child born in wedlock was inadmissible. The decree nisi was rescinded and the baby was legitimized.

Care workers, care drain, and care chains: reflections on care, migration, and citizenship.

In this article, we discuss a case study that deals with the care chain phenomenon and focuses on the question of how Poland and the Ukraine as sending countries and Poland as a receiving country are affected and deal with female migrant domestic workers. We look at the ways in which these women organize care replacement for their families left behind and at those families' care strategies. As public discourse in both countries is reacting to the feminization of migration in a form that specifically questions the social citizenship obligations of these women, we also look at the media portrayal of the situation of nonmigrating children. Finally, we explore how different aspects of citizenship matter in transnational care work migration movements.

Unruly women and invisible workers: the shrimp traders of Mazatlán, Mexico.

During the 1980s, a group of women from rural communities in the Mexican state of Sinaloa organized a grassroots social movement in order to gain legal access to the sale of shrimp. The movement reached its peak in 1984, with the formation of a shrimp traders union and the establishment of a shrimp marketplace in the tourist city of Mazatlán. Despite the long trajectory of the movement and the success of the shrimp market, these women and their work have been completely ignored by government agencies in charge of the development and management of the fishing industry. For the most part, one gets to read about the shrimp traders only in tourist-oriented brochures depicting them as a "local attraction," something to be seen while one is touring the city on a private charter bus en route to the Archaeological Museum or to the upscale jewelry shops in the Golden Zone. In this article, I examine how women used their gender and their identity as rural workers to defy the state and its policies, overcome poverty, and take control of the local marketing of shrimp. Another objective of this article is to show why and how women engaged in collective action so they could be legitimized as workers and how gender shaped their individual experiences.

How did women count? A note on gender-specific age heaping differences in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

The role of human capital in economic growth is now largely uncontested. One indicator of human capital frequently used for the pre-1900 period is age heaping, which has been increasingly used to measure gender-specific differences. In this note, we find that in some historical samples, married women heap significantly less than unmarried women. This is still true after correcting for possible selection effects. A possible explanation is that a percentage of women adapted their ages to that of their husbands, hence biasing the Whipple index. We find the same effect to a lesser extent for men. Since this bias differs over time and across countries, a consistent comparison of female age heaping should be made by focusing on unmarried women.

Home-grown slaves: women, reproduction, and the abolition of the slave trade, Jamaica 1788-1807.

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.

The impact of conservative discourses in family policies, population politics, and gender rights in Poland and Turkey.

This article uses childcare as a case study to test the impact of ideas that embody a traditional understanding of gender relations in relation to childcare. Conservative ideas regard increasing female labor market participation as a cause of decreasing fertility on the functioning of a set of general policies to increase fertility rates. It looks into the Polish and Turkish contexts for empirical evidence. The Polish context shows a highly institutionalized system of family policies in contrast to almost unessential institutions in Turkey. Formally, the labor market participation of women is much lower in Turkey than in Poland. Yet, given the size of the informal market in Turkey, women's labor participation is obviously higher than what appears in the statistics. Bearing in mind this divergence, the article suggests Poland and Turkey as two typologies for studying population politics in contexts where socially conservative ideas regarding gender remain paramount. We qualify ideas as conservative if they enforce a traditional understanding of gender relations in care-giving and underline women's role in the labor market as an element of declining fertility. In order to delineate ideational impact, this article looks into how ideas (a) supplant and (b) substitute formal institutions. Therefore, we argue that there are two mechanisms pertaining to the dominance of conservative conventions: conservative ideas may either supplant the institutional impact on family policies, or substitute them thanks to a superior reasoning which societies assign to them. Furthermore, conservative conventions prevail alongside women's customary unpaid work as care-givers regardless of the level of their formal workforce participation. We propose as our major findings for the literature of population politics that ideas, as ubiquitous belief systems, are more powerful than institutions since they provide what is perceived as legitimate, acceptable, and good for the societies under study. In the end, irrespective of the presence of institutions, socially conservative ideas prevail.

Convict bastards, common-law unions, and shotgun weddings: premarital conceptions and ex-nuptial births in nineteenth-century Tasmania.

This article uses reconstituted family data from birth, death, and marriage registers to measure ex-nuptial fertility and premarital pregnancies in nineteenth-century Tasmania. It also examines the extent to which convict origins of European society on the island caused a departure from English norms of family formation behavior, during a period when men greatly outnumbered women. Illegitimacy was high during the convict period. From the mid-1850s, after the convict system collapsed, levels of ex-nupital births were relatively constant until the end of the century, as indicated both by the illegitimacy rate and by the proportion of marriages associated with prenuptial births. By the end of the nineteenth-century, rates of illegitimacy and prenuptial conceptions in Tasmania were well within the range of those of contemporary English-speaking populations.

Harsh choices: Chinese women's paid work and unpaid care responsibilities under economic reform.

China's economic reforms over the past three decades have dramatically changed the mechanisms for allocating goods and labour in both market and non-market spheres. This article examines the social and economic trends that intensify the pressure on the care economy, and on women in particular in playing their dual roles as care givers and income earners in post-reform China. The analysis sheds light on three critical but neglected issues. How does the reform process reshape the institutional arrangements of care for children and elders? How does the changing care economy affect women's choices between paid work and unpaid care responsibilities? And what are the implications of women's work­family conflicts for the well-being of women and their families? The authors call for a gendered approach to both social and labour market policies, with investments in support of social reproduction services so as to ease the pressures on women.

Attributing selected costs to intimate partner violence in a sample of women who have left abusive partners: a social determinants of health approach.

Selected costs associated with intimate partner violence were estimated for a community sample of 309 Canadian women who left abusive male partners on average 20 months previously. Total annual estimated costs of selected public- and private-sector expenditures attributable to violence were $13,162.39 per woman. This translates to a national annual cost of $6.9 billion for women aged 19­65 who have left abusive partners; $3.1 billion for those experiencing violence within the past three years. Results indicate that costs continue long after leaving, and call for recognition in policy that leaving does not coincide with ending violence.

Maternalism, race, class and citizenship: aspects of illegitimate motherhood in Nazi Germany.

This article juxtaposes three types of illegitimate motherhood that came in the wake of the Second World War in Nazi Germany. The first found institutional support in the Lebensborn project, an elite effort to raise the flagging birth-rates, which at the same time turned a new page in the history of sexuality. The second came before the lower courts in the form of paternity and guardianship suits that had a long precedent, and the third was a social practice that the regime considered a 'mass crime' among its female citizenry: namely, forbidden unions between German women and prisoners of war. Through these cases the article addresses issues such as morality, sexuality, paternity, citizenship and welfarism. The flesh-and-blood stories have been culled from the Lebensborn Dossiers and Special Court files, as well as cases from the lower courts.