Civil society and gender justice: historical and comparative perspectives

✍ Scribed by Karen Hagemann, Sonya Michel, Gunilla-Friederike Budde

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 336
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Civil society and civic engagement have increasingly become topics of discussion at the national and international level. The editors of this volume ask, does the concept of “civil society” include gender equality and gender justice? Or, to frame the question differently, is civil society a feminist concept? Conversely, does feminism need the concept of civil society?

This important volume offers both a revised gendered history of civil society and a program for making it more egalitarian in the future. An interdisciplinary group of internationally known authors investigates the relationship between public and private in the discourses and practices of civil societies; the significance of the family for the project of civil society; the relation between civil society, the state, and different forms of citizenship; and the complex connection between civil society, gendered forms of protest and nongovernmental movements. While often critical of historical instantiations of civil society, all the authors nonetheless take seriously the potential inherent in civil society, particularly as it comes to influence global politics. They demand, however, an expansion of both the concept and project of civil society in order to make its political opportunities available to all.

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Acknowledgements (page viii)
Editors' Preface (page ix)
Introduction: Gendering Civil Society (Karen Hagemann, Sonya Michel, Gunilla Budde, page 1)
RETHINKING CIVIL SOCIETY AND GENDER JUSTICE
Chapter 1 Civil Society Gendered: Rethinking Theories and Practices (Karen Hagemann, page 17)
Chapter 2 Dilemmas of Gender Justice: Gendering Equity, Justice, and Recognition (Regina Wecker, page 43)
EARLY CIVIL SOCIETIES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Chapter 3 The Progress of "Civilization": Women, Gender, and Enlightened Perspectives on Civil Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Jane Rendall, page 59)
Chapter 4 The City and the Citoyenne: Associational Culture and Female Civic Virtues in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Gisela Mettele, page 79)
Chapter 5 Feminist Campaigns in "Public Space": Civil Society, Gender Justice, and the History of European Feminism (Karen Offen, page 97)
CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE FAMILY
Chapter 6 The Family-A Core Institution of Civil Society: A Perspective on the Middle Classes in Imperial Germany (Gunilla Budde, page 119)
Chapter 7 Veiled Associations: The Muslim Middle Class, the Family, and the Colonial State in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India (Margrit Pernau, page 135)
Chapter 8 "Only Connect": Family, Gender, and Civil Society in Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Paul A. Ginsborg, page 153)
CIVIL SOCIETY, GENDERED PROTEST, AND NONGOVERNMENTAL MOVEMENTS
Chapter 9 Necessary Confrontations: Gender, Civil Society, and the Politics of Food in Eighteenth- to Twentieth-Century Germany (Manfred Gailus, page 173)
Chapter 10 "Good" vs. "Militant" Citizens: Masculinity, Class Protest, and the "Civil" Public in Britain between 1867 and 1939 (Sonya O. Rose, page 190)
Chapter 11 Civil Society in a New Key? Feminist and Alternative Groups in 1960-1970s West Germany (Belinda Davis, page 208)
Chapter 12 Civil Society-by-Design: Emerging Capitalism, Essentialist Feminism, and Women's Nongovernmental Organizations in Postsocialist Eastern Europe (Kristen R. Ghodsee, page 224)
CIVIL SOCIETY, THE STATE, AND CITIZENSHIP
Chapter 13 The Rise of Welfare States and the Regendering of Civil Society: The Case of the United States (Sonya Michel, page 245)
Chapter 14 Fellow Feeling: A Transnational Perspective on Conceptions of Civil Society and Citizenship in "White Men's Countries," 1890-1910 (Marilyn Lake, page 265)
Chapter 15 Bringing the State Back In: Civil Society, Women's Movements, and the State (Birgit Sauer, page 285)
Selected Bibliography (page 302)
Contributors (page 309)
Index (page 314)