Policy advocacy and leadership training for formerly incarcerated women: An empowerment evaluation of ReConnect,a program of the Women in Prison Project,Correctional Association of New York

There is limited knowledge on re-entry initiatives for formerly incarcerated women specifically on building women's advocacy and leadership skills. Our research highlights an empowerment evaluation on ReConnect, a 12-session; innovative advocacy and leadership development program rooted in an integrated framework of empowerment, and transformational leadership theories. Using thematic analysis, we coded three focus groups with 24 graduates, for themes that matched our framework's concepts. ReConnect graduates reported being empowered by the information they received on parental rights, housing, and employment. Participants agreed that ReConnect improved their communication skills, preparing them to advocate for themselves and community members.     

现代职业女性心理健康与休闲调适

由于社会竞争日趋激烈,现代职业女性群体心理负荷颇重,心理健康问题较多,严重程度远远超过普通人群的平均水平。本文通过对现代职业女性压力表现的分析,提出通过休闲活动来缓解职业女性压力的调适策略。使职业女性在参与休闲活动过程中获得愉悦、关怀及支持感,从而有效地帮助职业女性减轻压力,提升生活质量与心理健康。     

Founders' syndrome in women's nonprofit organizations: Implications for practice and organizational life

This qualitative study examines the impact of “founders' syndrome” in ten feminist nonprofit organizations, giving attention to the ways in which original members and organizers (founders) retain control and set the agenda of these organizations beyond their official terms of office. In these community‐based organizations, founders' syndrome provides stability, but it also affects the ability of younger members to contribute and influence organizational direction. Implications for practice are drawn from the study's results.     

Sex segregation in India's formal manufacturing sector

Using an index of dissimilarity based on data from the Annual Survey of Industries for 1989/90 and 2000/01, the authors find that sex segregation across India's so‐called factory sector decreased over this period. Most of the apparent improvement, however, was due to changes in the industrial structure of employment, not desegregation per se. The index is also sensitive to the number of industries in the underlying classifications. At the national and state levels, formal job opportunities for women are effectively very limited: they are highly concentrated in a small number of traditional “women's” manufacturing industries, such as food, tobacco, apparel, weaving and spinning.     

Mothers and work–life balance: exploring the contradictions and complexities involved in work–family negotiation

This article presents data from a project exploring women's experiences of work and care. It focuses primarily on work–life balance as a problematic concept. Social and economic transformations across advanced post-industrial economies have resulted in concerns about how individuals manage their lives across the two spheres of work and family and achieve a work–life balance. Governments across the European Union have introduced various measures to address how families effectively combine care with paid work. Research within this area has tended to focus on work–life balance as an objective concept, which implies a static and fixed state fulfilled by particular criteria and measured quantitatively. Qualitative research on women's experiences reveals work–life balance as a fluctuating and intangible process. This article highlights the subjective and variable nature of work–life balance and questions taken-for-granted assumptions, exploring problems of definition and the differential coping strategies which women employ when negotiating the boundaries between work and family.     

Local Rites and Body Politics

The growing awareness of violence against women has resulted in endorsement of various international codes and conventions relating to physical, psychological and sexual violence. Female genital mutilation is one form of violence against women that has polarized people within and across national borders. Here, I explore its popular representation, consider how activism against genital mutilation has been confounded by sex and race and how activism to eradicate the practice is understood by immigrant women in Australia. In doing this, I draw on research conducted with women immigrants to Australia from north Africa (the Sahel areas) and the Middle East, from countries where female genital mutilation is most common. These women are often frustrated by what they see as contradictions in hospital policy and practice that arise in response to their requests to be reinfibulated after childbirth. I tease out the dilemmas that emerge when refusal is contrasted with other permissible practices of the body, such as hymen reconstruction, and given the commodification of bodies and related issues of age and agency, the individual and the community. The perceived discrepancies suggest to these African women that rights discourse is discriminatory, racist and informed by sensational portrayals of traditional practices. I question the ethics, values and rights that inform public discourse about sexual and reproductive rights, when women’s rights and values are so discrepant from our own ideals.     

Young Women in the Australian Women’s Movement

This article explores and documents the role of young women in the contemporary Australian women’s movement. Through case studies of two very different groups of young women, working in submerged networks in the community and on university campuses, it aims to suggest the diversity of contemporary young feminist praxis. Further, it argues that the work that these young women are doing in discursively creating and maintaining a feminist political space is crucial to the future of the movement. Based in constructivist ‘new’ social movement theory this article suggests a way forward from the so-called ‘generational debates’ of the 1990s and argues that, through their own unique processes of collective identity, young women who are active in the Australian women’s movement are dealing with the conflicts that are essential to the movement’s survival.     

Children Born of Wartime Rape: Rights and Representations

The ongoing conflict in Darfur has once again served to highlight the threat of sexual violence that women face during times of war. Yet, although sexual violence in wartime has existed probably for as long as war itself, it is only in more recent times that its recognition as a crime under international humanitarian law has taken place. Moreover, although it is recognized that women may conceive as a result of such wartime rape, largely missing from the international rights framework, and from the discourse that surrounds it, is a consideration of the children – or ‘war babies’ – who are born as a result. This article places the focus upon ‘war babies’ by considering the reasons for their current marginalization as a category in international discourse. In addition to examining such marginalization within existing theoretical analyses, this article also analyses the potential for their incorporation within the wider rights framework: first, in terms of international legal practice and; second, in terms of the actions of civil society. The final section concludes.     

Engendering Government Budgets in the Context of Globalization(s)

This article considers the strengths and weaknesses of attempts to 'engender' government budgets in the context of globalization, drawing on my own personal engagement in such attempts, and on the work of many gender budget initiatives (GBIs) all around the world. GBIs have sought to improve the distribution, adequacy and impact of government budgets at national, regional and local levels; and to secure greater transparency in the use of public money; and greater accountability to women as citizens. Their spread has itself been an example of globalization, in this case the globalization of action for gender justice; facilitated by e-mail, the Internet and air travel; supported by international foundations and international development cooperation funds. But, it may be argued, GBIs have begun to engage with government budgets just at the time when governments, especially in the South, have less and less control over public finance decisions, due to other aspects of globalization. This article considers whether there is any point in GBIs if economic power lies in international markets, rather than in the Ministry of Finance, and draws on examples from a wide variety of countries.