A Liberal-Labour Lady

A Liberal-Labour Lady
Author: Veronica Strong-Boag
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0774867272

A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia’s first female MLA and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863–1933) demanded a fair deal for “deserving” British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in England in 1863, the daughter and wife of miners, she emigrated to Nanaimo, BC, in 1892. As she became a well-known suffragist and her husband Ralph won provincial and federal elections, the power couple strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism’s privileging of white women. Ralph’s 1917 death launched Mary Ellen as a candidate in a tumultuous 1918 Vancouver by-election. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Mary Ellen Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada’s compromised struggle for greater justice.

Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor

Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor
Author: Gina Schouten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2019-05-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192542451

This book defends progressive political interventions to erode the gendered division of labor as legitimate exercises of coercive political power. The gendered division of labor is widely regarded as the linchpin of gender injustice. The process of gender equalization in domestic and paid labor allocations has stalled, and a growing number of scholars argue that, absent political intervention, further eroding of the gendered division of labor will not be forthcoming anytime soon. Certain political interventions could jumpstart the stalled gender revolution, but beyond their prospects for effectiveness, such interventions stand in need of another kind of justification. In a diverse, liberal state, reasonable citizens will disagree about what makes for a good life and a good society. Because a fundamental commitment of liberalism is to limit political intrusion into the lives of citizens and allow considerable space for those citizens to act on their own conceptions of the good, questions of legitimacy arise. Legitimacy concerns the constraints we must abide by as we seek collective political solutions to our shared social problems, given that we will disagree, reasonably, both about what constitutes a problem and about what costs we should be willing to incur to fix it. The interventions in question would effectively subsidize gender egalitarian lifestyles at a cost to those who prefer to maintain a traditional gendered division of labor. In a pluralistic, liberal society where many citizens reasonably resist the feminist agenda, can we legitimately use scarce public resources to finance coercive interventions to subsidize gender egalitarianism? This book argues that they can, and moreover, that they can even by the lights of political liberalism, a particularly demanding theory of liberal legitimacy.

A Liberal-Labour Lady

A Liberal-Labour Lady
Author: Veronica Strong-Boag
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2021-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9780774867245

A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia's first female MLA and the British Empire's first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863-1933) demanded a fair deal for "deserving" British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism's privileging of white women. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada's compromised struggle for greater justice.

Women and Work

Women and Work
Author: Susan Ferguson
Publisher: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Arbejde
ISBN: 9780745338729

An analysis of the divergent strands of feminism, as the fight for women's emancipation takes centre stage.

Women of Westminster

Women of Westminster
Author: Rachel Reeves
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1788316770

In 1919 Nancy Astor was elected as the Member of Parliament for Plymouth Sutton, becoming the first woman MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. Her achievement was all the more remarkable given that women (and even then only some women) had only been entitled to vote for just over a year. In the past 100 years, a total of 491 women have been elected to Parliament. Yet it was not until 2016 that the total number of women ever elected surpassed the number of male MPs in a single parliament. The achievements of these political pioneers have been remarkable – Britain has now had two female Prime Ministers and women MPs have made significant strides in fighting for gender equality from the earliest suffrage campaigns to Barbara Castle's fight for equal pay to Harriet Harman's recent legislation on the gender pay gap. Yet the stories of so many women MPs have too often been overlooked in political histories. In this book, Rachel Reeves brings forgotten MPs out of the shadows and looks at the many battles fought by the Women of Westminster, from 1919 to 2019.

New Labour's Women MPs

New Labour's Women MPs
Author: Sarah Childs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2004-07-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135766177

Drawing on interviews with over half of new Labour women MPs, Sarah Childs reveals how the women experienced being MPs, and explores whether they acted for and like women - in constituencies, in Parliament and in government.

Woman and Labour

Woman and Labour
Author: Olive Schreiner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-08-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108053041

First published in 1911, this acclaimed and influential feminist classic is one of the most important of the twentieth century.

Crimes Unspoken

Crimes Unspoken
Author: Miriam Gebhardt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2016-12-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1509511237

The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies – American, French and British – as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.

Why America Needs a Left

Why America Needs a Left
Author: Eli Zaretsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2013-04-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745656560

The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left - especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism - proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse. Written in an accessible way for the general reader and the undergraduate student, this book provides a fresh perspective on American politics and political history. It has often been said that the idea of a left originated in the French Revolution and is distinctively European; Zaretsky argues, by contrast, that America has always had a vibrant and powerful left. And he shows that in those critical moments when the country returns to itself, it is on its left/liberal bases that it comes to feel most at home.

From Liberal to Labour with Women's Suffrage

From Liberal to Labour with Women's Suffrage
Author: Jo Vellacott
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 545
Release: 1993-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773563687

By 1913 Marshall was uniquely placed as a lobbyist, with inside information and sympathetic listeners in every party. Through her the dynamically re-organized NUWSS brought the women's suffrage issue to the fore of public awareness. It pushed the Labour Party to adopt a strong stand on women's suffrage and raised working-class consciousness, re-awakening a long-dormant demand for full adult enfranchisement. Had the general election due in 1915 taken place, NUWSS financial and organizational support for the Labour Party might well have been substantial enough to influence the final results. These impressive achievements were forgotten by the time Catherine Marshall died in 1961. Even recent research on the period has failed to show the full significance of the issue of women's suffrage, much less Marshall's part in the movement. Jo Vellacott's revealing account of Marshall's political work also includes vivid descriptions of a liberal Victorian childhood, a strangely purposeless young adulthood, and the heady experiences of women who, through the awakening of political consciousness, forged a lifestyle to fit their new aspirations.