49 research outputs found
Labour, gender, and de-industrialisation: women workers at Fiat (Italy, 1970sâ1980s)
The article presents an in-depth analysis of the struggle for gender equality in hiring, as well as campaigns for parental leave and demands for improved work conditions, by female workers in manufacturing industry in 1970sâ80s Italy. The case study is focused on Fiat in Turin, a highly significant site given its economic role in Italy and Europe, and its history of social conflict and radical workforce. Against the backdrop of dramatic changes in gender relations since the 1960s, ongoing industrial unrest since 1968 and the introduction of new gender-equality legislation, fatefully coinciding with the onset of deindustrialisation and the rise of unemployment in manufacturing, trade union feminism presented an original and, viewed in hindsight, highly significant agenda. The events in Fiat demonstrate the extent to which new demands and ideas regarding the value of women's work became acceptable in the workersâ movement and in society at large, but also reveal the obstacles which the feminist politics of work encountered, and the persistence of gender-based prejudice in understandings of the value of work in all its forms. The analysis is based on archive material, press and original interviews
Feminism, the State, and the centrality of reproduction: abortion struggles in 1970s Italy
This article analyses an episode of intense socio-political conflict over the question of abortion in 1970s Italy. Considering the shifting positions of feminist groups and other pro-legalization actors on the one hand, and institutions, political parties and the Church on the other, it offers a new analysis of social mobilization, leading to parliamentary debate and legal change. It presents an original approach to an understanding of feminist challenges to patriarchal cultures and institutions, and of the latterâs immediate responses. Focusing on Italy but referring to developments in other industrialized countries, the article inscribes the history of the battle for reproductive rights in 1970s Italy within a framework centred on the Foucauldian notion of biopolitical power. It is argued that the legal settling of the issue came to be seen by state actors as central to the wider socio-political stabilization of the country. For feminists, the question of abortion was less straightforward than is often assumed. Italian feminist debate, while visibly impacting on wider society, was marked by dilemmas around the private and the public, the relationship to the state, and concerns around centring the feminist agenda on reproduction
Introduction. Translating feminism: transfer, transgression, transformation (1950sâ1980s)
No abstract available
Womenâs rights, family planning, and population control: the emergence of reproductive rights in the United Nations (1960sâ70s)
The article traces the emergence of reproductive rights principles in the UN during the 1960sâ70s. Family planning programmes were the key discursive terrain on which conflicts over fertility, global population, and women's roles in âthird world developmentâ were interlinked. The UNâs Commission on the Status of Women was a key actor: in the late 1960s it defined family planning in relation to a broadened definition of human rights, and repositioned it as a womenâs rights issue. This shift resulted from competing but in some respects converging concepts of womenâs rights among Western-based, communist-aligned and Global South-based womenâs organisations at the Commission. While subsequent UN conferences, specifically Bucharest 1974 and Mexico City 1975, revealed enduring global conflicts over âpopulation managementâ and âthird world developmentâ, the UN reframed family planning in relation to human rights principles. It hereby responsibilised women in their social roles, potentially enhancing their reproductive autonomy â but failing to fully abandon the population control agenda, against the calls of feminist movements in the Global South. The article contributes to histories of the UN and of the emergence of globally connected feminist movements, and is based on archives and publications of womenâs rights NGOs, UN agencies, and family planning organisations
Cigarette smoking alters intestinal barrier function and Peyer's Patch composition
Smokers have a two-fold increased risk to develop Crohnâs disease (CD). However, little is known about the mechanisms through which smoking affects CD pathogenesis. Interestingly, the Peyerâs patches in the terminal ileum are the sites where the first CD lesions develop. To investigate whether smoke exposure causes alterations in Peyerâs patches, we studied C57BL/6 mice after exposure to air or cigarette smoke for 24 weeks. First, barrier function of the follicle-associated epithelium overlying Peyerâs patches was evaluated. We demonstrate that chronic smoke exposure is associated with increased apoptosis in the follicle-associated epithelium. Furthermore, immune cell numbers and differentiation along with chemokine expression were determined in the ileal Peyerâs patches. We observed significant increases in total dendritic cells (DC), CD4+ T-cells (including regulatory T-cells) and CD8+ T-cells after smoke exposure compared with air-exposed animals. The CD11b+ DC subset almost doubled. Interestingly, these changes were accompanied by an up-regulated mRNA expression of the chemokines CCL9 and CCL20, which are known to attract CD11b+ DC towards the subepithelial dome of Peyerâs patches. Our results demonstrate that cigarette smoke exposure induces apoptosis in follicle-associated epithelium and is associated with immune cell accumulation in Peyerâs patches, changes which can predispose to the development of CD
French responses to the Prague Spring: connections, (mis)perception and appropriation
Looking at the vast literature on the events of 1968 in various European countries, it is striking that the histories of '1968' of the Western and Eastern halves of the continent are largely still written separately.1 Nevertheless, despite the very different political and socio-economic contexts, the protest movements on both sides of the Iron Curtain shared a number of characteristics. The 1968 events in Czechoslovakia and Western Europe were, reduced to the basics, investigations into the possibility of marrying social justice with liberty, and thus reflected a tension within European Marxism. This essay provides an analysis specifically of the responses by the French leftâthe Communist Party, the student movements and the gauchistesâto the Prague Spring, characterised by misunderstandings and strategic appropriation. The Prague Spring was seen by both the reformist and the radical left in France as a moderate movement. This limited interpretation of the Prague Spring as a liberal democratic project continues to inform our memory of it
Political travel across the âIron Curtainâ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s
This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the âAmericanisationâ story. It argues that the concept of the âblack boxâ, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groupsâ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the âcapitalistâ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursionsâ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of âdoing oneâs own thingâ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.PostprintPeer reviewe
Conclusions to Part III.
In the aftermath of the Czechoslovak crisis, the line of the PCI and PCF on internationalism was reset on specific issues. While these changes made the continuation of their Soviet-aligned internationalism acceptable to the bulk of the rank and file of these parties, as well as, generally, to their main domestic political partners, it did not solve the central problem connected to their internationalism, namely, the implications of Soviet global and European strategy for their domestic strate..
Chapter 4. West European Communism and the Prague Spring: reform and dĂŠtente
âThe world, divided between neo-capitalists and neo-Stalinists, risks one day to be upset by thisâand in a good wayâ This chapter looks at the reactions to the Prague Spring, prior to the invasion, by the PCI and the PCF publicly and by their leadership internally. The pre-invasion responses to the Prague Spring will be analyzed in close connection with, firstly, the political interplay on the domestic level, especially with other forces of the Left, in the context of the radical student prot..