journal articles by Maud Anne Bracke
Gender & History, 2018
Introduction to special issue 'Translating Feminism'
European Revue of History, 2022
The article analyses postwar amily planning campaigning in Italy and the legalization o the Pil... more The article analyses postwar amily planning campaigning in Italy and the legalization o the Pill (1971), in order to illustrate wider processes o change in sexual norms and practices, the eminization o contraception, and the emergence o notions o individual rights in procreation. Situating the Italian amily planning movement as part o a transnational network and a global agenda, it problematizes understandings o amily planning as a site o individual liberation only, highlighting the hierarchization o reproductive bodies that underpinned the campaigns o many amily planning activists. Drawing on archives, publications and memoirs by amily planners in Italy and the US, this is the rst scholarly analysis o the Italian amily planning movement's role in the (illegal) distribution o contraception and sexual inormation, as well as its key contribution to the legalization o the Pill. The article aims to ofer an original contribution to the socio-political negotiation o reproductive agency in the postwar period, set against the backdrop o the globalization o demographic debate, secularization, changing gender roles and new medical technologies.
French Historical Studies, 2022
The article analyzes debates on family planning, demography, and gender roles to explore the emer... more The article analyzes debates on family planning, demography, and gender roles to explore the emergence of new notions of the reproductive subject in France between the 1950s and the 1970s. Drawing on papers of French and international family planning organizations, it argues that while the expansion of family planning ideology across France allowed for the discursive and practical construction of an autonomous reproductive subject, such a subject was framed by a hierarchization according to race, culture, and social class. Specifically, the analysis focuses on interventions in immigrant groups and on the French family planning movement's contribution to programs in Francophone Africa before and after decolonization. The article aims to contribute to an understanding of family planning as a transnational movement embedded in the globalization of demographic debate and the drive to normalize the nuclear family, and to an understanding of sexual change in Europe as shaped by global processes.
International History Review, 2022
The article traces the emergence of reproductive rights principles in the UN during the 1960s-70s... more The article traces the emergence of reproductive rights principles in the UN during the 1960s-70s. Family planning programmes were the key discursive terrain on which conflicts over fertility, global population, and women's roles in 'third world development' were interlinked. The UN's 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 women's rights issue. This shift resulted from competing but in some respects converging concepts of women's rights among Western-based, communist-aligned and Global South-based women's organisations at the Commission. While subsequent UN conferences, specifically Bucharest 1974 and Mexico City 1975, revealed enduring global conflicts over 'population management' and 'third world development', the UN reframed family planning in relation to human rights principles. It hereby responsibilised women in their social roles, potentially enhancing their reproductive autonomybut 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 women's rights NGOs, UN agencies, and family planning organisations.
Gender & History, 2023
United Nations, and the emergence of reproductive rights principles (1970s-1980s) 1 Introduction ... more United Nations, and the emergence of reproductive rights principles (1970s-1980s) 1 Introduction At the Fourth World Conference on Women convened by the UN in Beijing in 1995, a Platform for Action was adopted which called on governments and to '[p]rovide more accessible, available and affordable primary health-care services of high quality, including sexual and reproductive health care, which includes family planning information and services'. 2 Herewith, the UN established global human rights norms in reproductive rights and health, linking these with other key areas of activity including population policies, access to health services, and women roles in socioeconomic development. 3 Scholars have interpreted the Beijing Conference as a milestone in the longer-term, gradual articulation of principles aimed at protecting individual autonomy in procreation. Yet despite significant insights notably by P. W Eager, B. Hartmann and M. Connelly, 4 the historical processes leading to the UN reproductive rights paradigm as it was defined in the mid-1990s remain under-explored in scholarship. This paper contributes to a post-1945 international genealogy of reproductive rights thinking, focusing on the role played by what I refer to as the global women's health movement. As will be demonstrated, this global network of feminists and health activists, emerging in the 1970s, developed a pioneering concept of bodily autonomy and reproductive liberty, and an original praxis of global cooperation. The article starts by tracing one strand of this movement's origins around 1975: the creation of the International Campaign for Abortion, Sterilisation and contraception (ICASC) in London. Its transformation from a European to a global network is charted, as the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights was created in 1984. The trajectory from ICASC to
Contemporary European History, 2019
The article presents an in-depth analysis of the struggle for gender equality in hiring, as well ... more 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 1970s-80s 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 deindustrial-isation 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 workers' 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.
American Historical Review, 2018
Social History, 2017
This article analyses an episode of socio-political conflict over the question of abortion in 197... more This article analyses an episode of socio-political conflict over the question of abortion in 1970s Italy. Considering the shifting positions of feminist groups and other pro-legalisation actors on the one hand, and institutions, political parties and the Church on the other, it offers an analysis of social mobilisation, leading to parliamentary debate and legal change. It presents an approach to an understanding of feminist challenges to patriarchal cultures and institutions, and of the latter's immediate responses. Focusing on Italy but referring to developments in other industrialised countries, the article inscribes the short 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 stabilisation 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 centering the feminist agenda on reproduction.
The article analyses cross-class encounters within 1970s feminist campaigning from the perspectiv... more The article analyses cross-class encounters within 1970s feminist campaigning from the perspective of the history of emotions. It is based on a case study of a feminist women's sexual health clinic (consultorio autogestito) in a working-class district near Turin, the Falchera, in the mid-1970s. The article investigates the role played by emotions in the creation of a sense of community among women from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. The encounters between feminist activists from Turin and working-class women living at the Falchera are understood as framed by these emotional exchanges, which led the women involved to question in new ways their own life-stories, aspirations and understanding of liberta`. It is argued that these exchanges led to a reshaping of feminist politics at the grass-roots, specifically in the articulation of strongly situated notions of liberation. The analysis is based on original interviews and interviews published at the time.
Journal of Contemporary History, 2012
This article explores the transnational, national and local origins and contexts of the Wages for... more This article explores the transnational, national and local origins and contexts of the Wages for Housework campaign in 1970s Italy and the Padua-based group Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) which coordinated it. The significance of the campaign and its legacy in Italian and transnational feminism are critically assessed. The origins of the campaign as it emerged in early-1970s Italy are traced by looking at the transnational activist trajectories of its two protagonists, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Further, the reasons why the campaign found relatively more support in Italy than elsewhere are explained by looking at the lack of women's financial independence due to rising unemployment and relatively low wages. The local context is placed at the centre of attention, as the ideological origins of Wages for Housework are traced in operaismo (workerism) and autonomist thought and practice, which were influential in radical-left and feminist milieux in the industrial area of Porto Margera and Padua around 1970. The article demonstrates the need for an understanding of 1970s feminisms that is fully cognisant of the interplay between transnational transfers and local recontextualisation, and presents an approach for doing so.
European History Quarterly, 2011
This article discusses changes in collective memory of World War Two in France during the 1960s-1... more This article discusses changes in collective memory of World War Two in France during the 1960s-1970s on the basis of a contextualized discussion of three films, all of which adopt, it is argued, a self-conscious politics of memory. The films are taken as examples of a particular relationship to World War Two that was historically possible in a given political context. As in most of the literature, 'the 1968 years' are taken as a moment of change, but it is argued here that they constituted the end rather than the start of a series of political challenges to collective memory of World War Two. During the 1970s representations of World War Two in cinema as well as public discourse more generally were increasingly historicized and disconnected from contemporary society, and thus de-politicized.
Europe-asia Studies, 2008
Agosti, A., Abse, T., Andrews, G., Bracke, M., Levy, C., and Risso, L. (2009) A man between two worlds? Palmiro Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party: Roundtable discussion. Twentieth-Century Communism: A Journal of International History, 1 (1). ISSN 1758-6437
Books by Maud Anne Bracke
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journal articles by Maud Anne Bracke
Books by Maud Anne Bracke