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Partial Truths and the Politics of Community considers what happens
after feminists succeed in achieving social change or in founding
organizations dedicated to accomplishing their personal and social
goals. This collection of eighteen essays by scholars from the
fields of international relations and feminist studies explores the
theoretical dilemmas and practical politics of living with raised
consciousnesses in ""worlds of our own making."" The contributors
explore feminisms as dreams of human rights, as a cluster of
ideologies, and as a bounty of social practices set within
frameworks for tackling problems in nation-building and global
governance. In essays that illustrate the impact of feminist
concerns with the quality of education, the contributors offer
studies of homeschooling, of the education of impoverished girls in
rural Mexico, of sororities and their relation to female autonomy,
and of the teaching of prisoners by volunteers in county jails.
Other contributors call for a greater attention to the ecology of
social life, viewing society as a complex of individuals bound to
one another through webs of transactions and obligations. These
contributors recount examples from Northern Ireland, Poland, and
the United States in which such webs sometimes support and
sometimes strangle efforts to achieve human dignity and autonomy.
Evaluating progress made in the legal realm, other contributors
chart the opportunities and limitations of international and
domestic law as tools to advance and protect human rights. They
consider gender discrimination in universities and colleges, the
United Nations and its mixed record on women's issues, and the
effects of adding rape to the list of prosecutable war crimes. The
volume concludes with two works on how feminism supports democratic
constructions of science and religion, with results that
destabilize dominant institutions in both realms.
A look at more than a century of feminist activism around the world
Conscious Acts and the Politics of Social Change counters the
notion, widely propagated by antifeminist forces, that feminists
represent a group of socially deviant outsiders. In fifteen essays
that explore feminist projects to advance human freedom, social
activists and academic analysts find feminists to be typical
members of their society who promote social movements for
nonviolent change in law-abiding ways. Foiling the picture of
aberrance, they portray feminists as grandmothers demonstrating
quietly in city squares, mothers distributing "subversive"
literature from their babies' strollers, and pious women taking
issue with politicians who use religion to justify repressive
legislation. The contributors also contend that feminism has been a
strong force for building civil society and fighting oppression in
political and social systems throughout the world. The essays offer
a range of reports on feminist theory and activism, some of which
celebrate success stories, including the struggle of American women
who fight for suffrage, of Czechoslovaks who resist Communist
censorship, of Chilean women who want to end the oppressive
Pinochet regime by demanding an accounting of their "disappeared"
children. Other essays relate failures--the use of an organization
intended to provide assistance to Russian families to gain
publicity for its American director and to embezzle funds for her
local assistants, the clash among women's groups in Iowa that
contributed to the defeat of a state equal rights amendment. The
remaining essays consider the persistence of socially ambiguous
behavior such as lying, violence, cruelty, and discrimination.
Collectively the case studies provide opportunities to investigate
the characteristics and strategies that have affected positive
social change--and those that have not--with an eye toward
understanding how persons who want to initiate constructive social
change might do so with the resources at their disposal.
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