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Citation Assessment ORDER NOW FOR CUSTOMIZED AND ORIGINAL ESSAY PAPERS ON Citation Assessment [1] Y. Frankfurth, Mothers, morality and abortion: The politics of reproduction in the formation of the german nation. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 18(3), 51-65. (2017) Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/docview/1878811850?accountid=8289. Citation Assesment [2] A A Boersma & B Meyboom-de Jong, Medical Abortion in Primary Care: Pitfalls and Benefits. The West Indian Medical Journal, vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 610-613 (2009). Retrieved from EBSCO host , search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mdc&AN=20583695&site=ehost-live&scope=site Citation Assessment [3] R. Khorfan & A. I. Padela, The Bioethical Concept of Life for Life in Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam: Abortion When the Mother’s Life is in Danger. The Journal of IMA, 42(3), 99–105. (2010). Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.5915/42-3-5351 I have attached PDF copies of all 3 citations. Bluebook citation please proper grammar and english is a must. Citation Assesment Read through all 3 of the webpages and honestly assess their respective qualitative value as academic resources based on whether it contains: Citation Assesment – broad generalizations, pinpointed information, or somewhere in-between; Citation Assesment – up-to-date information; – information that is helpful for expanding readers’ knowledge of the subject; – consistently accurate facts; – clearly identified distinctions between purported facts and assumptions; – language at the right level for those who are most likely going to use its information; – grammatical or spelling errors; – obvious biases; – comprehensive review of other resources on the same subject; – accurate citations; – author contact information; – author credentials that validate expertise; – reputable publisher; – reliable organizational sponsorship; – peer review (especially blind peer review); Based on your assessment, assign each one of the three resources that you selected a letter grade (e.g., A, B, C, D, or F) and explain why you rated it as such. Citation Assesment citation_1.pdf citation_2.pdf citation_3.pdf This journal and its contents may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. ©2017 Journal of International Women’s Studies. Mothers, Morality and Abortion: The Politics of Reproduction in the Formation of the German Nation By Yvonne Frankfurth 1 Abstract A substantial amount of literature dealing with conceptualisations of the nation has neglected the importance that gender and the politics of reproduction play in the construction of national identities. Analysing images of political campaigns and activists as well as public discourses on motherhood, abortion and childcare, I will illustrate the importance that gender and sexuality assumed in German nation-building projects before and after its unification in 1990. After 1949, East and West German ideas of nationhood were premised on opposing ideas of gender roles, in that politicians within these two German nations mobilised distinct gender identities to assert their respective political system as superior and progressive. Citation Assessment . While in East Germany, the progressiveness of the socialist project was measured along the lines of women’s integration into the labour force; in West Germany, the idea that a woman’s identity was primarily rooted in motherhood played an influential role in nationalist discourses. Once East and West Germany reunified in 1990, these opposing ideas of gender roles clashed. This became particularly visible in the context of political debates around abortion and childcare. An analysis of these debates suggests that the “new” unified German nation was premised upon a story in which the West German idea of the housewife-breadwinner model prevailed. This was diametrically opposed to what was framed as the East German “woman-worker” who had free access to abortion, and was abjected as immoral and backward. Analysing how such a national story was constructed is highly valuable, as it elucidates the ways in which gender has become a constitutive and structural element in the nation-building process of unified Germany to the present day. Key words: Germany, politics of reproduction, abortion, gender, nation Introduction The nation is, among other things, a symbolic community that is held together by powerful figures of belonging, as well as through an imagined code of shared values built through the repetition of specific historical narratives about key events and people.Citation Assesment . The ways in which women feature in national discourses as social and biological reproducers is fundamental to understanding the social and cultural renewal of the national community. As Foucault has stated, “sexuality has always been the forum where the future of our species, and at the same time our ‘truth’ as human subjects, are decided” (1991:111). Building on this theoretical backdrop, this essay will use images 1 Yvonne Frankfurth is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology. Her research examines the regulation of reproductive technologies in Germany, specifically the prohibition of egg donation and associated ideas of motherhood/nationhood. Using ethnographic fieldwork, she documents the experience of German intended mothers travelling to Austrian fertility clinics for treatment (see www.repro-travel.com). Her research is funded by the Department of Sociology and the ESRC. Broader research interests include medical sociology, gender, reproduction, health and immigration. Research methodology: Secondary literature analysis 51 Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 17, No. 3 February 2017 from political campaigns, public discourses on abortion, childcare and women’s integration into the labour market, to illustrate how reproduction and gender figured as structuring elements in imagining nationhood in East and West Germany between 1949-1990, as well as in the reunited Germany after 1990. Citation Assessment . Rather than providing a fixed definition of gender (equality), I will trace the ways in which its meaning was reframed and/or reproduced within these shifting contexts. After World War II, Germany was divided into the American-guided Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the Soviet-led German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and thus became grounds of the East/West political and economic contestations in the context of the Cold War (1949-89). While a majority of academic studies have analysed the emergence of different political and economic identities in the East/West divide, I will focus on how politicians in East and West Germany mobilised distinct gender identities in East and West Germany to assert their respective political system as superior and progressive in the Cold War battle of ideas. The different political and economic systems of East and West Germany constructed diverging notions of an ideal worker and a model family, which were framed in diametrically opposed ways in the East and West German family and labour market policies. Citation Assessment . In West Germany, the notion of gender equality was closely tied to that of the US, and was measured in terms of the attainment of the housewife- breadwinner model, which was anchored in the industrial capitalist system of the West. East Germany, in contrast, orientated its social policies on the Soviet project of socialism, which mainly defined gender equality in terms of women’s labour force participation. Both in the context of East and West Germany’s gender regimes discourses of gender were mobilised to promote and legitimise the respective political and economic systems. The West’s emergence as the winner of the global contestation of liberal capitalism against Soviet socialism meant that the normative Western framework of change would shape the discourses of reunification and transition in Germany after 1990. The emergence of this unequal power relationship between East and West shaped gender discourses in such a way that they gave expression to the hierarchical relationship between East and West and reaffirmed a type of “otherness” that categorised the East as “past” and the West as “future”. The ways in which gender and reproductive policies play an integral part in the national agenda can be observed to the present day. This essay will suggest that while nation-building is a deeply gendered process, this process must by no means be temporally linear or follow previously established patterns. Rather, looking at some reproductive policies like the extension of the childcare system in Germany today, it seems that politicians have “forgotten” about their onceantagonistic stance on East German notions of gender roles. I will thus finish by illustrating the importance of “forgetfulness” in the construction of national imageries on reproduction. Citation Assessment . The Gendered Construction of the Nation It is quite rare for the analysis of national imaginaries to make explicit reference to their highly gendered and sexualised uses of history, narrative and genealogy. Indeed, despite the almost extreme use of highly gendered representations of patriotism, and the prominent place of reproductive imagery in the depiction of national identities, often neither gender nor parenthood are explicitly mentioned in literature on nations and nationalisms. Benedict Anderson, for example, has theorised the nation as an “imagined community”, which emerged as a result of the development of print capitalism and the subsequent creation of a community of people speaking and reading in their country’s vernacular (1991). Anderson insightfully observed how a heterogeneous group of people may become a nation, a “cultural artefact”, an “imagined political 52 Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 17, No. 3 February 2017 community”, through an integrative process of imagination (1991:3–4). Through this process, the national community becomes an artefact in the minds of people who may never meet, but who are connected through the abstract imagination of a shared community (1991:6). Citation Assesment In this, nationbuilding becomes a process of constant self-invention, or as Joane Nagel puts it, “nations are empty vessels waiting to be filled by symbolic work” (2003:157). While Nagel stresses the vital role that gender and sexuality plays in constructing a national identity, Anderson never explicitly uses gender as a concept to theorise the process of nation-building, but merely acknowledges the ways in which nationalism may be rooted in a masculinised imaginary, what he calls a “fraternity” and “a horizontal comradeship” (1991:7). An acknowledgment of the gendered construction of the nation is similarly absent in the influential conceptualisations of the primordialists, such as Edward Shils (1957), Clifford Geertz (1997) and Pierre van den Berghe (1979), who theorise the nation as a continuation or extension of kinship relations and family systems, which misses the complex and intricate intertwinement of gender with projects of nation-building. Theorists who have rightfully stressed the importance that reproduction assumes in nationalist ideology include, for example, Floya Anthias and Nira YuvalDavis (1995), Lauren Berlant (1997), Joane Nagel (2003) and Sylvia Walby (2006). As YuvalDavis points out, “an individual usually enters “a people” by being born into it” (1997:4). Crucially, such a statement is indicative of a discourse that may itself be historically contingent and overlapping with that of nation-building. Focusing on the ways in which women feature as symbols of culture and nationhood, she demonstrates how in nationalist discourses women have often inhabited the ambiguous position of figuring as symbols of the nation while at the same time being absent in the public national domain, possessing an “object identity” rather than a “subject position” (1997:47). Citation Assessment. Similarly, in her account of how US national citizenship has come to be defined by matters of intimacy from the 1960s, Lauren Berlant (1997) suggests how ideas, images and narratives of sexuality and reproduction may shape national culture and the public sphere. Since the mass circulation of embryonic images, she argues, the embryo has come to act as a vessel for ideas of nationhood. Not yet able to speak, the embryo lends itself to become a national object of protection, a projection for cultural fantasy that provides a fruitful ground for thinking about ideas of national identity. In this fantasy, the role of the woman is primarily defined in terms of motherhood and her ability to biologically and socially reproduce the nation. As Bordo summarises, “the woman is cast in advance as already a mother embarked on a life trajectory of mothering” (1993:96). Such a depiction creates the ambiguous position, in which women may figure as national symbols (of motherhood) while being barred from the national public sphere as subject agents. It is important to note that different processes of nation-building are based on different frameworks for preferred gender relations, or “gender regimes” (Connell 1987). As Walby has argued, confrontations over gender relations are inherent to the development of nations themselves: “competition and contestation between nations is often gendered […] in that changes in the dominance of one nation over another can have implications for the gender regime in those nations” (2006:128). Citation Assessment In her analysis of how sex and nationalism were intricately connected in the nationbuilding processes of Europeans and Americans vis-a-vis their colonials, Nagel rightly stresses that the idea of who we are (as a nation) “is as much defined by “what we are” as by its antithesis of “what we are not” […] and part of our national self-construction process (is) the attribution of moral and sexual characteristics to them and us” (2003:155). As such, one’s own national identity is constructed in relationship to “the other”. As will be demonstrated further below, I will suggest that in East and West Germany, notions of “what we 53 Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 17, No. 3 February 2017 are not” were constructed by differing gender regimes, in which opposing values pertaining to the reproductive role of the woman fed into the respective nation’s political self-definition. Politicians acting on these dichotomies between East and West Germans, then, did not necessarily reflect social reality but constructed their own world of seemingly incompatible gender relations. Conflicts concerning national identity within reunified Germany after 1990 can therefore be understood as a contestation over a stylised understanding of “West German” versus “East German” gender relations. Women as National Symbols in West and East Germany, 1949-1990 In 1949, two separate German states were founded. These (patriarchal, male-dominated) West and East German states used their policies on “women’s liberation” after 1949 in part as a symbolic language to differentiate themselves from each other. Against this backdrop, the respective national identity was partially premised upon the “woman’s role”, which came to stand for modernity, progressive state policies, socialism, and morality. In West Germany, the family constituted a key site for the political self-definition of the national community, as it featured “a storehouse of uniquely German values that could provide a good basis for post war recovery” (Moeller 1993:6). Prevailing ideas and practices of the traditional breadwinner-housewife family model provided a “morally superior” entity that was supposed to counter socialist ideas from “the East”. In this ideal family construct, West German men and the state were seen as protectors of women and children, illustrated, for example, in the Christian Democrat’s election poster, “Protect us! Be ready for defence. Elect: CDU” (image available here https://goo.gl/images/zRJP8b). In this poster, a disproportionally big red hand representing communism is shown as threatening a defenceless mother and child, who appear frightened and in need of protection. In this depiction, the mother is shown in an “object identity”, serving as a national symbol to represent women’s perceived need of paternal state protection, and indeed, about the West German state itself needing protection; so the woman is symbolic of the West which must retain its separation from the “immoral East”. Citation Assessment. The poster also hints at the patriarchal power structure in West Germany, in which men featured in leading political roles, as a moral authority and as protectors of the nation. This unequal power relationship between men and women was further consolidated in marriage: according to West German law, husbands had full control over their wife’s income (if she had any) until 1958; and, until 1977, women had to provide written permission from their husbands if they wanted to work (Haller 2010). Citation Assessment . Cultural representations of the housewife maintained that a woman’s place was in the domestic realm, defined by the three “K” words: “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” [children, church, kitchen]. This concept can be vaguely translated into the English expression barefoot and pregnant, referring to the normative expectation that women should solely work in the domestic realm and have children. A slightly different version of the German proverb first appeared in a collection of German proverbs in 1870, reading “Four K’s for a pious woman: to keep respect for Church, Chamber, Kitchen, Children” (Wander, 1870 [1992], author’s translation). The view that a woman ideally did housework, raised children, and went to church to keep a moral spirit, not only endorsed a heterosexual family model, but also created the tacit expectation that a woman had to be a mother to fulfil her gender role. Citation Assessment. The anthropologist Daphne Berdahl observed that East German women were ridiculing West German women for what they perceived as a life confined to the domestic sphere: “We have often made fun of that, of women in the West who list “housewife” as their profession” (1999:201). 54 Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 17, No. 3 February 2017 In East Germany, the women’s liberation movement played a significant part in the political self-definition of the national community. The success of its perceived gender equality was measured along the lines of women’s integration into the labour market. East Germany had the world’s highest rate of female labour participation. In the mid-1980s, around 49% of the East German labour force was made up of women, with 83% of all women being in employment. In contrast, in 1983 about 39% of West German women were part of the labour force, most of whom worked part-time (Guenther 2010). In East Germany, International Women’s Day was organised on an annual basis by the Union Federation, and occurred continuously between 1946 and 1990 (Mueller-Vogg, 2016). In 1954, the Federation announced the Women’s Day in the form of a poster that illustrated an East German woman proudly working as a mechanic (image available here: https://goo.gl/images/fUK5ER). Citation Assessment . The poster suggests that it was not uncommon for women to work in what were considered typically male-dominated fields, and echoed the commonly propagated slogan: Gleiche Arbeit, gleicher Lohn [same occupation – same wage]. Crucially, in their quest for gender equality, East German politicians neglected the importance of changing men’s social roles as well as women’s (see Becker-Schmidt 2001; Einhorn 1991). While East German women were integrated into the labour market, men were not expected to support women in the domestic sphere, and while women were constructed as both workers and mothers, men were not seen as both workers and fathers. This led to what is often referred to as the “triple socialisation” of women under German socialism: “the obligation to be a devoted wife and mother, a dedicated worker, and an active member of the community” (Einhorn 1991:24). West German women often referred to their East German counterparts as Rabenmütter [raven mothers], insinuating that, like ravens abandoning their nests, East German women left their children in cribs and kindergartens from an early age, in pursuit of their careers (Kaminsky 2016). Such a view was reinforced through the extensive network of childcare in East Germany, which was free of charge. Before unification in 1990, about 90% of 1-3 year olds attended childcare in East Germany, while only about 3% of children under the age of three were in cribs in the West (Bundesregierung 2016; Guenther 2010). The different gender regimes not only differed with regards to childcare but also in terms of contraceptive choices. The East German Parliament imposed no restrictions in terms of the availability of contraception, such as condoms or the contraceptive pill (see Kuller 2004). After its initial introduction in 1965, the East German politicians decided to make the pill free of charge in 1972, so that it became easily accessible, “even [to] 14-year old girls” (Einhorn 1993:461). This stood in stark contrast to West Germany, where the pill was released earlier, but was initially prescribed only to married women who already had children and suffered from pre-menstrual syndromes (Barthemely 2011). Such a strict regulation of the availability of contraception was in line with the criminalisation of abortion in West Germany, which promulgated the view that “moral” behaviour was defined in terms of saying “yes” to a child. At the same time as the pill was made available free of charge, the East German legislators decided to legalise abortion in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, also free of charge. Granting personal freedom in an area wher … Citation Assessment Get a 10 % discount on an order above $ 100 Use the following coupon code : NURSING10