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Where does knowledge come from? Who makes it up? What purpose does it serve? Unfortunately, while these are fundamental questions for us, they are questions that are rarely asked.

“The dark” has long been associated with women. An attempt is made here to show how the “dark” can be seen as a valuable and significant concept for women understanding themselves as women and their situation for developing a view towards the concept of “power”. Women, as women, have a responsibility to themselves and others to make their voices heard and to become aware of their particular strengths and to develop these strengths both inside and outside existing organisations. Most current organisations are “male‐dominated” and “male” in approach. Both men and women are frequently unaware of the extent to which they are influenced and operating from a gender‐specific approach. Men and women can equally shape their organisations when women reclaim their strengths and refuse their position as a less important, less informed, “minority” status. The issues of conflict and trust in organisations and problem areas in relationships between women are explored.

New South Wales (NSW) was the first state in Australia to introduce a legislative requirement to undertake affirmative action for members of particular target groups in order to achieve equality of opportunity in employment. This requirement was introduced in 1980 as an amendment to the NSW Anti‐ Discrimination Act 1977. Referred to as Part IXa, the amendment required all public service departments and statutory authorities to produce an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Management Plan, setting out strategies by which EEO could be achieved for target group members, and to report annually to the Director of Equal Opportunity in Public Employment (DEOPE) on progress made towards this goal.

Ten years ago Dale Spender found that girls in mixed classes were ‘muted’ with boys getting more attention and time from teachers. Now, with boys increasingly out‐numbering girls, Helen Bright, who teaches in an Inner London comprehensive, reports that boys' dominance in the classroom and throughout school is detrimental to girls' learning opportunities and career aspirations. She describes how a group of teachers are trying to reverse the effects on girls of the shift in the balance of the sexes.

To a certain extent the history of women's poetry in America is a tale of confinements,” writes Alicia Ostriker in the opening chapter of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. I would argue that it is less a tale of confinements than a tale still untold. Ostriker's own book on the topic, for instance, covers the entire period of women's poetry from 1650–1960 in a single chapter.

Throughout its history feminism has produced “grey” literature. This material has played an important part in communicating women’s knowledge(s) and instigating activism. This paper considers the development of grey literature within feminism and its value to feminism, in brief. The key focus of the paper is in the potentials of the Internet as a communication mechanism and for feminist grey literature. Consideration is given to rapidly expanding forms of feminist grey literature on the Internet, and the potentials and concerns raised by this grey medium are discussed. Despite fears raised by some writers about the dangers and difficulties of cyberspace for women, overall this paper is optimistic about the potentials for feminist grey literature. Hence, it is suggested that grey literature on the Net offers global feminist sustenance; potential empowerment; and a means to challenge social inequalities.

This chapter focuses on the early history of feminist explorations in criminology in the UK in particular, but with reference to developments elsewhere. The chapter discusses the achievements of early feminist perspectives in criminology and assesses their impact in terms of ‘transforming and transgressing’ the criminological enterprise. In particular, the author focuses on the case for transformations in traditional research methodologies and looks at the different ways in which feminist writers in criminology grappled with the question of how to produce good quality knowledge. The chapter takes a chronological approach, identifying developments pre-1960s in a phase which might be described as an ‘awakening’ and then describing initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s. The discovery that ‘woman’ was a conceptual term which could be incorporated into the criminological framework really took off in the 1970s with the publication of Carol Smart’s pioneering work. Notwithstanding faster developments in other disciplines, slowly, mainstream criminology took stock of feminism’s early claims.