Bella Abzug at Women's Equality Day march to Central Park

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Suffragist Isola Dubic (seated) on Women's Equality Day March

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

ERA march on Women's Equality Day with Bella Abzug

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

ERA march on women's equality day

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Betty Friedan speaks at Women's Equality day rally

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Women's Equality Day rally

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Bella Abzug speaks at Women's Equality Day Rally

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Bella Abzug attends NYC's Proclamation day to celebrate women's equality day

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

2nd Women's Equality Day March on 5th Avenue NYC

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Bella Abzug speaks at Women's Equality Day rally

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

A ‘right to have rights’ in the EU public sphere? An Arendtian justification for the application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

This paper discusses the Court’s reasoning in interpreting the EU Charter, using recent case law on horizontal effect as a case study. It identifies two possible means of interpreting the provisions of the Charter: firstly, an approach based on common values (e.g. equality or solidarity) and, secondly, an approach based on access to the public sphere. It argues in favour of the latter. Whereas an approach based on common values is more consonant with the development of the case law so far, it is conceptually problematic: it involves subjective assessments of the importance and degree of ‘sharedness’ of the value in question, which can undermine the equal constitutional status of different Charter provisions. Furthermore, it marginalises the Charter’s overall politically constructional character, which distinguishes it from other sources of rights protection listed in Art 6 TEU. The paper argues that, as the Charter’s provisions concretise the notion of political status in the EU, they have a primarily constitutional, rather than ethical, basis. Interpreting the Charter based on the very commitment to a process of sharing, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the ‘right to have rights’ (a right to access a political community on equal terms), is therefore preferable. This approach retains the pluralistic, post-national fabric of the EU polity, as it accommodates multiple narratives about its underlying values, while also having an inclusionary impact on previously underrepresented groups (e.g. non-market-active citizens or the sans-papiers) by recognising their equal political disposition.

Discourse on equality in organizations. A case study of the chemical industry in Tarragona

This paper presents a proposal for analyzing discourses on gender equality in organizations. The research is carried out as a case study, focusing on the chemical industry in Tarragona. To the question: why there are still so many differences between women and men in labour market, despite having multiple tools to avoid inequalities? we propose to focus on discourses of equality to find an answer. The viewpoint that companies have on gender is crucial in enabling policies for equality. To ensure that policies are truly aimed at promoting equality, it is needed a gender approach that nowadays is not widespread in organizations. From these considerations, we present a fourfold typology of discourses on equality in organizations.

Equality versus Fraternity? Rethinking France and its Minorities

The relationship between France and its minorities is complex. Recent events including the 2015 terrorist attacks, the prohibition on wearing religious symbols in public, or the 2005 riots, have been perceived as symbols of great tension in French society when its comes to its minorities.2 Indeed the ten-year anniversary of the riots prompted reporting that nothing had changed in the intervening period in the structures of inequality that caused them,3 while in January 2015, the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that the country was facing a “territorial, ethnic and social apartheid”.4 This statement from the Prime Minister seems to be at odds with the overall policy of rejecting any targeted policies or laws to protect minorities in France. As a tradition France is against minority rights. French authorities have consistently rejected the use of the term ‘minorities’, and have banned any form of special measures for national, racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic groups.5

Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting

“Faithful Genres” examines how African Americans adapted the genres of the black church during the civil rights movement. Civil rights mass meetings, as the movement’s so-called “energy machine” and “heartbeat,” serve as the project’s central site of inquiry for these meetings were themselves adaptations of the genre of the black church service. The mass meetings served as the space to draw people into the movement, encourage people toward further activism, and testify to anyone watching that the African American community was working toward desegregation, voting rights, and racial equality. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.” In these weekly or sometimes even nightly meetings, participants inhabited the familiar genres of the black church, song, prayer, and testimony. As they did, they remade these genres to respond directly to white supremacy and to enact the changes they sought to create. While scholars have studied the speeches men and women such as King, Ralph Abernathy, and Fannie Lou Hamer delivered at meetings (Wilson; Selby; Holmes; Brooks), scholars have yet to examine how civil rights mass meetings functioned through a range of genres and rhetors. My study addresses this absence and invigorates this discussion to demonstrate how the other meeting genres beyond the speech—song, prayer, and testimony—functioned to create energy, sustenance, and motivation for activists. Examining these collectively enacted genres, I show how rhetors adapted song, prayer, and testimony toward strategic interventions. I also examine how activists took these same genres up outside the meetings to circulate them in broader contexts for new audiences. By recovering and defining the mass meeting as a flexible repertoire of genres and then examining the redeployment of meeting genres outside the meeting, “Faithful Genres” contributes to histories of civil rights and African American rhetorics, genre studies, and histories of religious rhetorics.

Fundamental Rights and Reverse Discrimination

Reverse discrimination – whereby member states may treat their own nationals worse than nationals of other member states by invoking a “purely internal situation” in which European law does not apply – has long been a problem within the European Economic Community turned European Union. Using as a touchstone the Zambrano case, to be decided shortly, this paper argues that introducing citizenship alters the status of individuals vis-à-vis their governments, implies equality of treatment among citizens, and should eliminate reverse discrimination. Raising examples from the United States and Canada, I show how the introduction of federal rights empowered individuals and redrew the relationship between the governments of the center and the units. Citizenship limits the power of member states to treat their own nationals worse than nationals of other member states. This does not eliminate the tension between center and unit (or federal and regional; EU and member state) law but should give extra weight to former over the latter. Jurisdictional issues remain, but the rise of Union citizenship means that EU law should grow to encompass any right protected or promoted by shared citizenship.