Women's and gender history

Dans ce travail sur l’évolution historique des canons esthétiques de la beauté féminine au Portugal, l’accent sera mis sur le passage du modèle « rondeurs-beauté » à celui de « beauté-sveltesse » qui intervient à un moment particulier de l’histoire de ce pays : la transition, à la fin du XXème et au début du XXème siècle, de la Monarchie à la République. Nous nous pencherons sur les motivations idéologiques des discours sous-jacents à ces modèles (du point de vue religieux et politique mais aussi et surtout médical) et étudierons l’aspect social des populations en question pour conclure que la notion de « minceur » s’adressa en priorité aux femmes des couches sociales les plus élevées tandis que le modèle esthétique « rondeurs et robustesse» ciblait les couches sociales les plus basses, essentiellement urbaines, de façon à contrôler ce que l’on appelait alors la « décadence physiologique de la race portugaise».

The central topic of this paper is the historical evolution of the aesthetic canons of female beauty in Portugal. The author focuses on the shift from the model of the “plump beauty” to that of the “slim beauty”, which took place at a particular moment in the country’s history: the transition from the Monarchy to the Republic in the late 19th and early 20th century. She discusses the ideological grounding of the discourses of religion, politics and especially medicine regarding these models, and characterizes their target audience in social terms. Her findings show that the notion of “slimness” was primarily directed towards upper class women, whereas the aesthetic model of “robust and plump” bodily forms was reserved for women of the lower, especially urban, social ranks, thus seeking to control what was then called the “physiological decay of the Portuguese race”.

Se trata de un monográfico coordinado para Jerónimo Zurita: Revista de Historia donde se pone de manifiesto que los estudios de género han posibilitado una importante renovación historiográfica, abriendo una gran diversidad de temas de estudio que hasta ese momento permanecían fuera de los debates, con el consiguiente enriquecimiento de la disciplina. Las nuevas preguntas que se han suscitado desde este campo han tenido un notable impacto en los estudios sobre la guerra, dada la importancia de las feminidades y las masculinidades para entender el mundo militar o los complejos procesos y dinámicas que rodean los conflictos armados. El dosier que aquí presentamos busca ahondar en el modo en que se desenvolvieron y construyeron diferentes modelos de género en tiempo de guerra, para lo cual proponemos una perspectiva trasversal a distintas cronologías y latitudes.

Las contribuciones del número introducido con este texto metodológico-conceptual son las siguientes:

Presencia política y participación militar de las mujeres en la Cruzada Albigense, por Martín Alvira

El impacto de la Guerra de Cataluña en Aragón: la difícil convivencia entre las tropas y la población civil, por Porfirio Sanz Camañes y Enrique Solano Camón

Manliness, Dedication, and Loyalty: Military Masculinity and Peasant Soldiers in Sixteenth-Century Sweden, por Mats Hallenberg

Am I a Man: Masculinity and Black Military Service during the American Civil War, por Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

Complex Perpetrators: Forced Marriage, Family, and Fatherhood in the Lord's Resistance Army, por Myriam Denov, Anaïs Cadieux Van Vliet, Atim Angela Lakor y Arach Janet

Women's emancipation through productive labour was a key tenet of socialist politics in post-World War II Yugoslavia. Mass industrialisation under Tito led many young women to join traditionally 'feminised' sectors, and as a consequence the textile sector grew rapidly, fast becoming a gendered symbol of industrialisation, consumption and socialist modernity. By the 1980s Yugoslavia was one of the world's leading producers of textiles and garments. The break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, however, resulted in factory closures, bankruptcy and layoffs, forcing thousands of garment industry workers into precarious and often exploitative private-sector jobs. Drawing on more than 60 oral history interviews with former and current garment workers, as well as workplace periodicals and contemporary press material collected across Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia, Women and Industry in the Balkans charts the rise and fall of the Yugoslav textile sector, as well as the implications of this post-socialist transition, for the first time.
In the process, the book explores broader questions about memories of socialism, lingering feelings of attachment to the socialist welfare system and the complexity of the post-socialist era. This is important reading for all scholars working on the history and politics of Yugoslavia and the Balkans, oral history, memory studies and gender studies.

Author: Meredith Fraser
Publisher: CBE International

Among the first women to emerge as a Holiness preacher was Maria (pronounced Mar-EYE-ah) Woodworth Etter, then known as the Trance Evangelist, but now known as the Mother of the Pentecostal movement. Woodworth Etter (1844–1924) lived and preached in an era when women were required to be silent in church, and to submit to their husbands’ authority, both at home and in the broader social spectrum.

El libro que aquí presentamos se hilvana en torno a una preocupación central: reconstruir las transformaciones en la vida cotidiana en la Argentina de los años sesenta desde las perspectivas que ofrecen la historia social y la historia cultural. Entendemos la vida cotidiana como una dimensión crucial para aprehender la experiencia vivida por las personas en sus interacciones diarias, en las que se moldean y cuestionan las relaciones de clase, género y edad, entre otras. En este sentido, poner el foco en la vida cotidiana no ocluye, sino que recoloca a las dinámicas económicas y políticas en la narrativa histórica. El estudio de la cotidianidad permite iluminar, por ejemplo, la ampliación de la oferta y los cambios en los consumos de ciertos bienes que marcaron a los sesenta, como los electrodomésticos o los discos de larga duración-y la concomitante emergencia de nuevos mercados, como el juvenil-, tanto como la creación de sentidos en torno a ellos. Asimismo, este estudio permite entrever cómo los procesos políticos y las políticas públicas se corporizaron en la vida de quienes los hicieron, vivieron o padecieron. La reconstrucción de la vida cotidiana incluye también al mundo de las representaciones sociales y culturales. Los artículos aquí reunidos exploran cómo ciertos materiales culturales-películas, revistas de actualidad o canciones-produjeron representaciones en torno a las relaciones entre varones y mujeres o la vida sexual y, al hacerlo, intervinieron en la configuración pública de lo aconsejable, permisible o posible en la vida cotidiana de los sesenta.

In this paper I explore the emergence of women's organizations and feminist consciousness in the twentieth century in the English-speaking (Commonwealth) Caribbean. The global ideas concerning women's equality from the 1960s onwards clearly informed the initiatives taken by both women and states of the Caribbean. None the less, the paper illustrates, by use of examples, the interlocked nature of women's struggles with the economic, social and political issues which preoccupy the region's population. I examine in greater detail two case studies of women's activism and mobilization around the impact of structural adjustment policies in the two territories of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. By tracing the connections between and among the organizations and initiatives of women in the region, the paper situates the feminist movement in the English-speaking Caribbean as a continuously evolving one, fusing episodic struggles in different territories, engaging women of different classes and groups, and continuously building on past experience. Dating back to the nineteenth century we can locate women of the English-speaking Caribbean in women's organizations. In the main these have been religious-based women's organizations, primarily in the various denominations of the Christian Church. The organization of women was particularly important in this region as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was the main mechanism for transferring and incul-cating Western European values of women's place in society, for determining the post-emancipation sexual division of labour, and for ordering social and domestic organization of communities. Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the earliest recorded organizations of women were charity organizations. An example of one such is the Daily

In this article, I explore the challenges and opportunities associated with using 'informed imagination' to write a speculative biography of an historical figure. In the process, I problematize the notion of the archival gap, which has been recently romanced by numerous writers, including myself. By citing archival gaps as a justification for creative license, we neglect the fact that all archives are inherently idiosyncratic in ways that invite, perhaps even demand, the use of both speculation and imagination. Here, I make a case for what I am calling the archival overlap. A careful examination of the existing sources, however sparse or abundant, is likely to reveal reoccurring clues that can be used to shape how we image and construct our subjects. Before we consider the gaps we should tend to these overlaps, I argue, using a current work-in-progress case study of the colonial artist Adelaide Ironside to explore how speculation and imagination are intrinsic to these stages of the biographical process.

After her “Foucault turn”, Joan Scott caused a certain turmoil in the writing of history, conceived of by her as a strategy of resistance. The historian, who started reading Foucault in work groups at the Pembroke Center (Brown University), has continuously carried on engaging with Foucault up to her latest writings. The analysis of Foucauldian concepts has enabled her to examine the presumptions of the writing of history and to found, with the help of post-structuralistic and psychoanalytical theory, a form of critical history. This “Foucault turn” launched a history of difference, that aims to analyse the elements that form the basis of distinctions, hierarchies and conflicts and to question, more than only to describe, the foundations of nature, culture, religion, race or ethnicity. How did Foucault prove so essential for Joan Scott, what consequences did the reading of his work have on the writing of history, and what new reading does Joan Scott produce of Foucault’s work? This article addresses four points: the importance of Foucault in identity deconstruction and in the renewal of the epistemology of history; the way in which Joan Scott appropriates Foucault’s critique, as far as the question of universalism is concerned; the way in which she extends this critique identifying new forms of sexuality dispositives; the way in which she transforms Foucault’s perspective through a fortunate encounter with psychoanalysis.

Concern about the issue of forced prostitution reached its height in the Russian empire (as elsewhere in Europe and the Americas) at the turn of the twentieth century, as part of the wider international “white slave” panic. In 1909, new antiprocurement statutes were incorporated into the Russian empire’s Criminal Code to ensure that those who forced, coerced, or encouraged young women to enter the commercial sex industry felt the full force of the law. This article uses a case study of the Russian empire’s Estonian provinces (Estliand and Lifliand) to highlight the regional nature of Russian imperial experience. Prosecuting procurement was aligned with the priorities of local government, and the authorities in Revel’ (Tallinn) and Iu’rev (Tartu) used the issue of procurement to bolster their revenue. Here, the statutes gave the authorities additional tools for targeting individuals, such as managers of unlicensed brothels, who deprived the government of the income it generated from regulating the commercial sex industry. Drawing on court cases from the early 1910s, this article also examines the interaction of lower-class people with the state, their engagement with the legal system, their knowledge of the law, and the rhetorical strategies they employed to in their attempts to secure specific outcomes.

Series: Gendering the Late Medieval & Early Modern World
Publisher: Amsterdam U. Press

Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe examines the lives of women whose gender impeded the exercise of their personal, political, and religious agency, with an emphasis on the conflict that occurred when they crossed the edges society placed on their gender. Many of the women featured in this collection have only been afforded cursory scholarly focus, or the focus has been isolated to a specific, (in)famous event. This collection redresses this imbalance by providing comprehensive discussions of the women’s lives, placing the matter that makes them known to history within the context of their entire life. Focusing on women from different backgrounds“such as Marie Meurdrac, the French chemist; Anna Trapnel, the Fifth Monarchist and prophetess; and Cecilia of Sweden, princess, margravine, countess, and regent“this collection brings together a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines to bring attention to these previously overlooked women.

Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors

1. Introduction: Early Modern European Women and the Edge
Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins

Section I: Life on the Edge
2. ‘At the mercy of a strange woman’: Plague Nurses, Marginality, and Fear during the Great Plague of 1665
Lara Thorpe

3. Chemistry, Medicine, and Beauty on the Edge: Marie Meurdrac
Sarah Gordon

4. Anna Stanislawska’s Orphan Girl of 1685: Autobiography of a Divorce
Lynn Lubamersky

Section II: Witchcraft and the Edge
5. Touching on the Margins: Elizabeth Sawyer’s Body in Performance and Print
Alex MacConochie

6. Anna Trapnel: Prophet or Witch?
Debra Parish

Section III: Courtly Women on the Edge
7. Wife, Widow, Exiled Queen: Beatrice d’Aragona (1457-1508) and Kinship in Early Modern Europe
Jessica O’Leary

8. On the Edge of the S(h)elf: Arbella Stuart
Lisa Hopkins

9. Cecilia of Sweden: Princess, Margravine, Countess, Regent
Aidan Norrie

10. ‘Elizabeth the Forgotten’: The Life of Princess Elizabeth Stuart (1635-1650)
Jessica L. Becker

Epilogue: The Early Modern Edge in the Twenty-first Century
11. Catalina de Erauso—‘the Lieutenant Nun’—at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Eva Mendieta

Index