Woman as Wife, Mother, and Home-Maker
Equal Rights International and Australian Feminists' Interwar Advocacy for Mothers' Economic Rights
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2228840 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James Keating (0000-0002-2910-9988, UNSW Sydney, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 957-985 |
| Publication date | 2022-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/718864 |
| OpenAlex | W4282943280 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 35 |
The reconsideration of wages for housework, among the most maligned strands of women’s liberation in the 1970s, has provoked vital debates about gender, care work, and the problem of accounting for reproductive labor. Yet such discussions typically ignore the campaign’s roots in first-wave feminism. In examining Australian journalist Linda Littlejohn’s tenure as chair of Equal Rights International (ERI; 1934–41), a lobby group often cast as the vanguard of legal equality feminism in interwar Geneva, this article explores its surprising role in spreading Antipodean ideas about the “money value” of “home work” through the League of Nations. In doing so, it first historicizes the contentious forty-year struggle to recognize women’s domestic labor in Australasia. Shifting from Sydney to Switzerland, it traces the international circulations that allowed Littlejohn and her allies in the United Associations of Women to redirect ERI away from its founders’ concern with an equal rights treaty and toward a brand of feminism constructed around the recognition of difference in the home and equality in economic and political life. Reading ERI through the lens of Littlejohn’s years as chair, I contend, not only complicates binaries between equality and difference within international interwar feminism, revealing a messier and less centralized history of feminist ideology, it also enriches our understanding of ongoing struggles to illuminate and compensate reproductive labor
Feminism · Human rights · Ideology · League · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vanguard · Wife · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Labor Movements and Unions · Law
The Working Class and Welfare
Progressive New World
Reconsidering Women's Role in the Professionalisation of the Economy
International Developments in the Woman's Movement
Creating White Australia
The Rise of Women's Transnational Activism
Worlds of Women
The Sociology of Housework
Working at Home
Real Men Do Real Farming, While the New Woman Goes Home
The housewives’ wages debate in the 1920s Australian press
Marriage as bondage
Feminist history as national history
The Inviolable Woman
Equality of Women's Economic Status? A Major Bone of Contention in the International Gender Politics Emerging During the Interwar Period
Australia from a Woman's Point of View
The Politics of the Small Purse
Feminism's Forgotten Fight
Mrs Street-Now There's a Subject
The Quality and Not Only the Quantity of Australia's People
Woman to Woman
Domesticating Colonizers
Women and Social Movements, International--1840 to Present
Feminist Frequencies
Broken Circles
An Unpopular Cause
State Socialism for Australian Mothers
Jessie Street
Domestic Service in Australia
The Independence of Women and the Brotherhood of Man
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |