The Ambiguities of Power in Russia, the United States, Japan, and France

Elisa Camiscioli, Jean H. Quataert

Journal of Women's History, Volume 27, Number 4, Winter 2015, pp. 7-12
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2015.0043

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/605146

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2015
Editorial Note
“The Ambiguities of Power in Russia, the United States,
Japan, and France”

T his issue explores how women have accessed power, authority, and
influence in different national and imperial settings, the ways they
mobilized around women’s issues, and the implications of their strategic
compromises, whether implicit or explicit. While the question of power is
well-trodden ground in women’s and gender history, the six articles in this
volume find it in unexpected places and treat it as politically ambiguous,
contingent, and based on other exclusions. We begin with an article that
analyzes how educated and reformist Muslim women articulated their
own understandings of women’s rights and equality with reference to
Islamic law (Sharia). Another article examines multiple pulls on women’s
activism—on behalf of the pro-life movement. Two contributions discuss
women’s suffrage, or the demand for formal political power through vot-
ing rights. A pair of articles considers how women’s authority is made
manifest in domestic space, whether through charity and hospitality, or in
accordance with such discourses on domesticity as home economics. We
close with one final article and two book review essays that treat a differ-
ent theme: the reproductive body, scientific discourses about reproduction,
and the embodied experiences of gender and sexuality in conjunction with
class and race.
Marianne Kamp’s “Debating Sharia: The 1917 Muslim Women’s
Congress in Russia” introduces many of the central themes of this volume:
women’s rights, women’s activism, and the alliances and compromises that
may seem necessary for influence in a rapidly changing political landscape.
At the Muslim Women’s Congress, female scholars and activists engaged
in a heated debate over women’s rights. Since the Provisional Government
had granted all women and men the vote following the 1917 Revolution,
women’s suffrage was not at stake. Their discussion centered instead on
women’s rights within Islamic law and, specifically, on the vexing ques-
tion of polygyny, the practice of one man having multiple wives. While all
participants in the debate concurred that Sharia, rather than secular law,
was the field in which women’s rights should be contested, an important
question of interpretation remained. One group of reformers held that
even if women’s and men’s rights in Sharia might not be “identical,” they
could still be “just” and acknowledge women’s dependence on men. An-
other group assumed that “when Sharia was rightly understood, women’s
and men’s rights were identical, and that any inequalities found in Sharia
should be rejected.” The former group wished to limit rather than abolish

© 2015 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 27 No. 4, 7–12.

8 Journal of Women’s History Winter

polygyny. Their strategic rereading of the Qur’an revealed that polygyny

was sometimes necessary—for example, when the first wife could not have
a child—and the problem was simply that men had abused it in the interest
of their own “pleasure.” The latter group applied a historicist reading of the
Qur’an to argue that because polygyny only made sense in the social context
in which the Qur’an had originated, polygyny should be abrogated. In the
end, the Congress sanctioned the position of the first group. While Sharia
could be “re-interpreted to emphasize justice,” the words of the Qur’an
could not be ignored nor could polygyny be abolished. But at the mostly
male All-Russia Muslim Congress that followed the Women’s Congress,
the discussion took an altogether different turn: the “feminist call to ban
polygyny was at cross-purposes with the Congress’s nationalist assertion
of autonomy.” Delegates were more concerned with preserving Sharia as
an autonomous space in which only Muslims had authority and therefore
entrusted the decision to the Muslim Spiritual Directorate. In the end, nei-
ther Sharia nor Muslim autonomy prevailed. When the Communist Party
began its aggressively anti-Islamic policies, Sharia courts and other Islamic
institutions were shut down. Women’s rights were to be built instead on a
secular communist basis.
Karissa Haugeberg’s “‘How Come There’s Only Men Up There?’:
Catholic Women’s Grassroots Anti-Abortion Activism” clearly demon-
strates the potentially disempowering consequences of strategic choices
made by activist women alluded to by Kamp. Her article begins with the
anti-abortion activism of socially progressive and often feminist-identified
Catholic women in the 1970s in the United States and ends with their unsuc-
cessful partnership with male evangelical pro-lifers. Lay Catholic women
saw anti-abortion activism as an extension of their participation in other
forms of grassroots social justice work, such as the peace movement, anti-
nuclear protests, the civil rights movement, and labor activism. Impatient
with the “gradualist” approach of “moderate anti-abortion organizations
and clergy,” these women turned to direct action protest against abortion:
leafleting, harassing patients and staff, invading clinics, and chaining
themselves to equipment. Peace, labor, and nuclear disarmament activists
were not keen to affiliate with progressive pro-life women, however. Nor
were conventional anti-abortion activists who believed that feminism was
inseparable from abortion rights. But among the thousands of Protestant
evangelicals who flooded the anti-abortion movement in the 1980s, some
saw the opportunity for a productive alliance with Catholic women who
had nearly a decade of experience in protesting abortion. One was Randall
Terry, who offered a position at Operation Rescue to the Catholic feminist
Juli Loesch. Despite Operation Rescue’s lack of commitment to social
justice and its dearth of women leaders, Loesch agreed to join its ranks,
2015 Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert 9

given that organizations led by charismatic evangelical pastors were bet-

ter funded than feminist pro-life groups and more successful at mobilizing
their base. But soon she was arguing that the “hierarchical, male-pastor
driven structure of Operation Rescue” was detrimental to anti-abortion
organizing and that sexism violated the “spirit of social justice work.” She
and a number of other progressive Catholic women left the organization
and disappeared into the sidelines. Although the leadership of Operation
Rescue and feminists like Loesch both staked their claims to authority in
the name of the pro-life cause, in the end, their differing visions of gender
and justice could not be reconciled.
Pro-life activists like Juli Loesch wagered that grassroots activism was
more efficacious with substantial financial backing. So too did the leadership
of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Congres-
sional Union, organizations working on behalf of US women’s suffrage.
Joan Marie Johnson recounts this story in “Following the Money: Wealthy
Women, Feminism, and the American Suffrage Movement.” Focusing on the
fourteen years before the 19th Amendment was ratified, Johnson argues that
women received the vote in 1920 due to a “significant influx” of “enormous
donations” from wealthy women, along with the “leadership and strate-
gies they underwrote.” It cost a great deal of money to lobby the legislature
and transform the hearts and minds of the American public. Funds were
required for travel, staff, print, parades, and events. But with this strategic
alliance came the pressure to shape the suffrage agenda to please wealthy
donors, thus forcing the question of whether feminism, which challenged
established gender hierarchies, should also be “inherently democratic or
non-hierarchical across class (or race).” Wealthy women’s donations alien-
ated socialists and also middle-class women, the traditional base of the
suffrage movement. Moreover, all of the women donating large sums of
money were white. But even when donations came with strings attached,
suffrage leaders could not afford to turn them down. In their support of
suffrage, wealthy women hoped to ensure all women’s power in society
through equal rights and economic independence. The “disproportionate
voice of rich women” in the suffrage movement, however, posed serious
questions for feminism—and for democracy more broadly—with regard to
the perpetuation of the inequalities of class and race.
Irma Sulkunen also examines the question of women’s suffrage, al-
though she deliberately diverts our attention to the “geographical peripher-
ies” of Finland and New Zealand, where women received the vote earlier
than elsewhere in the Western world (1893 for New Zealand and 1906 for
Finland). Her article, “An International Comparison of Women’s Suffrage:
The Cases of Finland and New Zealand in the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Century,” decenters the foundational role of liberalism in realizing
10 Journal of Women’s History Winter

women’s suffrage; indeed, it was in “the more peripheral regions of liberal

thought” that women’s political rights were first implemented. Despite
notable differences in demographics and political culture, everyday life
was “surprisingly similar” in Finland and New Zealand, especially with
regard to the “gender cohesion” of the “traditional agrarian worldview.”
The realities of agricultural life did not correspond with the separate gender
spheres ideology sanctioned by liberalism and capitalism: “Spouses made
up a working unit where their livelihood depended on the input of both
parties, especially on small farms.” In Finland, where the liberal tradition
was especially weak, women and men participated together in unisex la-
bor organizations and temperance movements, both of which advocated
for universal and equal suffrage. Sulkunen argues that women were seen
as equal “partners” to men in creating these new nations, which enhanced
their social status and aided the suffrage cause. As in other nationalist dis-
courses, however, their role in nation building was gendered, leaving open
the question of whether complementary roles are in fact empowering ones.
In “Cultivating Feminine Affinity: Women, Domesticity, and Cold
War Transnationality in the US Military Occupation of Okinawa,” Mire
Koikari extends our discussion to Japan between 1945 and 1972. Koikari
also describes how women’s authority is often realized in collusion with
existing hierarchies of power, in this case the forces of US imperialism and
the geopolitical hierarchies of the Cold War. Drawing on recent work on
“domesticity,” she shows how women’s domestic discourse and practices
supported US expansionism and “Cold War multiculturalism.” American
women invited their Okinawan counterparts to join them in clubs that pro-
moted “mutual understanding” between the occupiers and the occupied;
activities included instruction in cooking, sewing, and American-style
home management. With domestic space serving as a site of intervention,
modernization, and rationalization, home economics was the form of knowl-
edge through which white women’s authority was expressed. Neither US
officials nor American women described this “grassroots diplomacy” as
political, but Koikari reminds us that “homemaking and empire-building
went hand-in-hand.” Through the soft power of domesticity, women func-
tioned as “agents of Cold War American expansionism” and secured their
gender-appropriate place within a racial and imperial regime. By reframing
their actions as a “feminized project of multicultural exchange . . . outside
of colonial domination,” however, the violence and coercion of American
hegemony was masked.
If domesticity is a form of “grassroots diplomacy” performed by
women, as Koikari suggests, an analogy may be found in the “day-to-day
representative diplomacy” of Elizabeth Stuart and Harriet Granville, two
British diplomatic wives. In “How Women Make Diplomacy: The British
2015 Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert 11

Embassy in Paris, 1815–1841,” Jennifer Mori explains that after the 1815
Congress of Vienna, which ushered in a more cooperative and consensus-
seeking vision of international relations, aristocratic women like Stuart
and Granville played a crucial role in fostering goodwill between nations.
Charity work, hospitality, and outreach dominated their time, reflecting
the expanded role that women would come to play in European embassies
in the increasingly “public and social environment of diplomacy.” Their
tasks included “hosting and attending parties; going to court; paying and
returning social visits; and patronizing local business and the arts.” Just
as domesticity was positioned outside the formal realm of politics, so too
was the hospitality and outreach work in which women like Stuart and
Granville engaged. Both women nevertheless gained satisfaction, author-
ity, and influence from their efforts on behalf of the embassy. Thanks to the
ostensibly feminine values of cooperation, intuition, and selflessness, Mori
explains, women helped to launch a “more open, informal, and continuous
dialogue between England and France.”
This issue’s final article and two book review essays turn to another
theme: reproduction and sexuality in conjunction with class and race.
In “Unusual Frontal Developments: Negotiating the Pregnant Body in
Nineteenth-Century America,” Shannon Withycombe asks how US and
Canadian women understood their pregnancies prior to the development of
ultrasound technology and the modern abortion debate, both of which have
contributed to the notion of “fetal personification.” Scholars typically assign
two models to pregnancy discourse in modern North America: “pregnancy
as illness,” which predominated in the nineteenth century, and “pregnancy
as fetal containment,” popularized since the turn of the twentieth century.
Withycombe’s reading of women’s diaries and letters, however, reveals
that the “connection between visualizing the fetus and personifying it was
neither a simple nor inevitable one.” For example, before modern technolo-
gies that might promote “fetal personification,” some women did, in fact,
imagine infants growing inside them. Conversely, despite developments
in embryology, many women did not describe their pregnancy as housing
a “distinct body or person.” According to Withycombe, this “[calls] into
question the historical connections between fetal visualization and fetal
personification.” In the nineteenth century, she concludes, pregnant women
understood their bodies “on their own terms, without reference to scientific
revelations or medical conceptions.”
Simone Caron’s book review essay “International Perspectives on
Reproductive History” also explores medical knowledge and embodiment
by offering a critical reading of recent scholarship linking reproductive
practices and state agendas. Her essay includes works that discuss Otto-
man pronatalism in the interest of augmenting the Muslim population; the
12 Journal of Women’s History Winter

impact of birth control advocates in the United States and Great Britain on
reproductive discourse in India; the ways US media outlets built popular
support for the legalization of contraceptives; and nonprofit self-help clin-
ics for women in the 1970s and 1980s that provided feminist alternatives to
the “medical-industrial complex.” Our final book review essay by Marlene
Medrano is titled “Building Identity through Work, Leisure, Migration,
and Activism: Latinas in the Twentieth Century.” Medrano reviews several
recent works on Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican women
in a transnational framework. Here the focus is on the lived experience
of sexuality—as well as its performance—in tandem with race and class.
While her review tackles a wide range of themes in order to highlight the
formation of “diasporic subjectivities,” Medrano underscores the regulation
of sexuality by family members, peers, religion, and the local and national
community, and, conversely, how Latina women challenged and reshaped
those parameters.
Power has been a central concern of women’s and gender history from
the outset. Feminist scholars have recognized the power of female actors
in historical narratives and exposed the foundational assumptions about
men’s power—and women’s disempowerment—that undergird prevailing
ideologies. But the articles in this volume are especially skillful at conveying
the ambiguities of women’s power: failed alliances, collusion with repressive
regimes, and sidestepping inequalities of race and class. Their authors also
remind us to look for women’s power in domesticity and other forms of
gendered emotional and social labor, in addition to shedding new light on
more traditional topics like suffrage. If asymmetries of power are a historical
constant, the articles in this volume offer intriguing examples of the ways
that women have negotiated these relationships.
Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert