journal articles by Maud Anne Bracke
Gender & History, 2018
Introduction to special issue 'Translating Feminism'
European Revue of History, 2022
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
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.
Journal of Contemporary History, 2012
European History Quarterly, 2011
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