From Yekke to Zionist: Narrative strategies in life stories of Central European Jewish women immigrants to Mandate Palestine

This article examines the life stories of Jewish women who emigrated from Central Europe to Palestine in the 1930s, on the basis of memoirs written, or transmitted orally, many years later. Although the experience of migration could have caused a crisis in self-perception, their memoirs show that they managed to construct their lives (and identities) anew in a coherent way by means of two main narrative axes – continuity and meaning. The axis of continuity served to establish a bridge between the women's lives, before and after emigration, while the axis of meaning, focusing on the Zionist meta-narrative, provided justification for the choices they made. This discussion illuminates how Central European Jewish women coped with the challenges of immigration to Palestine, both those that were unique to the experience of aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and those that were similar to the challenges faced by immigrants in other times and places.     

Samuel Clarke’s Lives and husbands’ remembrances of their wives

ABSTRACT

Among the narratives of eminent divines and Christian worthies that Samuel Clarke derived from published sources and included in his many publications are the lives of fifteen early modern women, three of them written by their husbands. Humphrey Gunter’s funeral memorial of his wife Mary, Samuel Clarke’s life of Katherine, and Richard Baxter’s of Margaret have a personal immediacy and an affectionate detail often absent from the other biographies. In the contexts of both the original publications and Clarke’s texts, their depictions of spousal relationships reflect the tension between traditional commemoration and individual expression apparent in seventeenth-century narratives of women’s lives. The bonds each husband recalls celebrate the virtuous wife, though none of the recollections is as forthright as Baxter’s insightful recognition of Margaret’s complex character and her significant role in their marriage.     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.     

Choosing Health? Exploring Children's Eating Practices at Home and at School

Abstract:  This paper considers the influences on children's eating habits in both school and home spaces in the UK. Since 2002 the UK government has been committed to halting the increase in child obesity rates, and has sanctioned particular parental and school based practices as more "healthy" than others. This study examines this through critically questioning, in particular, the classed discourses written into health education advice and advocates a new way of thinking about health education messages. Based on qualitative research with children from one secondary school and with eight families in the North of England the paper reveals that while parents and children make decisions about their lives with reference to dominant discourses about ideal "healthy" family eating practices, their ability to realise these practices is limited in numerous ways. Moreover, the influences on children's eating habits in both home and school spaces are intricately interrelated and children's practices are clearly influenced by the spaces they inhabit. Their decisions involve balancing health education knowledge with a range of other knowledges that are bound up in the socio-spatial relations of their everyday lives. A holistic approach to understanding children's eating habits therefore requires a critical understanding of class background, parental influences and contemporary parenting practices as well as the microgeographical relations found in the school dining room.     

Children’s citizenly participation in the National Revolution: the instrumentalization of children in Vichy France

Children held a privileged place in Vichy France. They became the subjects and objects of a vigorous propaganda which recognized their ability to contribute to the National Revolution. This article discusses three ways in which children were instrumentalized by the regime, showing their reciprocal engagement with it, which is understood as ‘citizenly’ behaviour. First, drawn into the maréchaliste leadership cult, they were used to embed the values of the regime. Second, children’s compassion was co-opted in various campaigns which contributed to national(ist) solidarity. Third, they engaged with a gendered duty to national population growth, now and in the future. The article uses ‘public’ written sources (for example, letters and essays sent to Marshal Pétain and thus archived in public collections, not diaries or drawings for private eyes, in private hands) produced by children. Although it recognizes these as epistemologically unstable, such sources present opportunities for understanding elements of children’s agency, which is seen in conformity as well as dissent. By recognizing children as historical actors, we can identify them as ‘beings’ active in their own lives, and not just adults-in-waiting.     

Movements in Time and Space: Using Multiple Methods in Research with Young People in Accra,Ghana

The contribution discusses methodological issues involved in researching youth in an African context. Based on the experiences gathered during field research in Ghana, it is argued that research with young people in Africa requires careful reflexive practice. The rationale behind, and experience of, methods such as group discussions, oral life stories, lifelines, written diaries, photo-diaries and participant observation is critically discussed. It is argued that by combining these methods it is possible to capture the diversity and complexity of youth experiences in the present as well as longitudinal processes of transition. Moreover, combining different methods provides young people with the space and time they require to communicate the complexities of their lives.     

The Genealogical Society Library of Salt Lake City: A Source of Data for Economic and Social Historians

Abstract. Some important novelists have written a great novel early in their careers and have produced lesser works thereafter, whereas others have improved their work gradually over long periods and have made their major contributions late in their lives. Which of these patterns a novelist follows appears to be systematically related to the nature of his work. Conceptual writers typically have specific goals for their books, and they produce novels that emphasize plot; experimental writers' intentions are often uncertain, and their novels more often stress characterization. By examining the careers of 12 important modern novelists, the author demonstrates that conceptual novelists—including Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway—are generally those who have declined after writing landmark early novels, while, in contrast, experimental novelists—including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf—have typically arrived at their most important work later in their careers. As is the case for modern painting and poetry, the ranks of great modern novelists have included both conceptual young geniuses and experimental old masters.     

Innocence and experience: sexuality among young people in modern France, c. 1750-1950

Prying into the sex lives of young people in the past has alwaysproved a challenging exercise. Historians have often ended uprelying on the testimony from adult observers or on the quantitativeevidence provided by illegitimacy rates. This article adoptsa more direct route by drawing on first-hand accounts of earlysexual experiences written by French people in diaries, childhoodreminiscences and autobiographies. As a preliminary, it analysesthe way various authorities depicted young people as sexual(or non-sexual) beings, and the state of sex education in Francebefore the mid-twentieth century. It then considers the waypeople depicted their first stirrings of sexuality during childhoodand adolescence. Finally, it examines evidence from the ‘egodocuments’ on sexual relations in the run-up to marriage.     

The texture of literacy in the testimonies of late-medieval English proof-of-age jurors, 1270 to 1430

This article examines references by jurors in proof-of-age hearings from 1270 to 1430 to writing and written documents. By analysing the incidence of these references decade by decade over the whole period and by close attention to changes in the wording of individual testimonies, some important insights into the place of literacy in the lives and mentalities of quite humble medieval men are apparent. Of only ‘village status’, these jurors' testimonies provide evidence of the way literacy gradually permeated more and more intricately the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, often not replacing older ways of doing things but co-existing with them. Some conclusions as to how literacy affected different occupations and different areas of the country are drawn.     

Neurobiographies: Writing Lives in the History of Neurology and the Neurosciences

This essay surveys the present state of biographical writing in the history of neurology and neuroscience. Individual lives play a significant role in practitioner-historians' narratives, whereas academic historians tend to be more nonindividualistic and a-biographical. Autobiographies by neurologists and neuroscientists, and particularly autobiographical collections, are problematic as an historical genre. Neurobiographies proper are published with several aims in mind: some are written as literary entertainment, others as contributions to a cultural and social history of the neurosciences. Eulogy, panegyrics and commemoration play a great role in neurobiographical writing. Some biographies, finally, are written to provide role-models for young neuroscientists, thus reviving the classical, Plutarchian biographical tradition. Finally, a recent cooperative biography of Charcot is mentioned as an example of how the biographical genre can help overcome the alleged dichotomy between the historiographies of practitioner-historians and academic historians.     

Neurobiographies: writing lives in the history of neurology and the neurosciences

This essay surveys the present state of biographical writing in the history of neurology and neuroscience. Individual lives play a significant role in practitioner-historians' narratives, whereas academic historians tend to be more nonindividualistic and a-biographical. Autobiographies by neurologists and neuroscientists, and particularly autobiographical collections, are problematic as an historical genre. Neurobiographies proper are published with several aims in mind: some are written as literary entertainment, others as contributions to a cultural and social history of the neurosciences. Eulogy, panegyrics and commemoration play a great role in neurobiographical writing. Some biographies, finally, are written to provide role-models for young neuroscientists, thus reviving the classical, Plutarchian biographical tradition. Finally, a recent cooperative biography of Charcot is mentioned as an example of how the biographical genre can help overcome the alleged dichotomy between the historiographies of practitioner-historians and academic historians.     

Fearsome people and places,narratives of street and hideout children in Freetown,Sierra Leone

This article is based on a GOAL Global field study of street children in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It draws on narrative accounts given by street children who have migrated to Freetown from rural Sierra Leone. The study used the participatory ranking method to generate data about children’s street and hideout (a room, shack or part of a building where children live in groups) lives post-migration. These data contained much about children’s fears, and the article explores their experience of fearsome people and places, showing that fear is a dominant aspect of these children’s lives. Fear shapes their day-to-day choices and decisions: their agency. It also suggests that agency should be seen as complex, contingent and sometimes paradoxical. The article concludes by identifying implications for social policy and practice, suggesting that these necessarily entail risky engagement with fearsome people in the liminal spaces of children’s street and hideout lives.     

Follow the Thing: Papaya

In a recent round table about Antipode 's radical geographies, contributors argued that the journal needed more papers which stimulated debate, were accessible to academics and non-academics alike, didn't "preach to the cognoscenti", were written to fit into radical teaching agendas, and were diverse and eclectic in style ( Waterstone 2002 :663; Hague 2002 ). This paper has been written to fit this bill. It outlines the findings of multi-locale ethnographic research into the globalization of food, focusing on a supply chain stretching from UK supermarket shelves to a Jamaican farm, and concluding in a North London flat. It addresses perspectives and critiques from the growing literature on the geographies of commodities, but presents these academic arguments "between the lines" of a series of overlapping vignettes about people who were (un)knowingly connected to each other through the international trade in fresh papaya, and an entangled range of economic, political, social, cultural, agricultural and other processes also shaping these connections in the early 1990s. The research on which it is based was initially energized by David Harvey's (1990 :422) call for radical geographers to "get behind the veil, the fetishism of the market", to make powerful, important, disturbing connections between Western consumers and the distant strangers whose contributions to their lives were invisible, unnoticed, and largely unappreciated. Harvey argued that radical geographers should attempt to de-fetishise commodities, re-connect consumers and producers, tell fuller stories of social reproduction, and thereby provoke moral and ethical questions for participants in this exploitation who might think they're decent people. This paper has been written to provoke such questions, to provide materials to think through and with, for geography's ongoing debates about the politics of consumption.     

International mobility of women in science and technology careers: shaping plans for personal and professional purposes

International mobility has become a key requirement in science and technology (S&T) professional career progression. On the one hand, the increasing mobility of women suggests that this may be a way for them to avoid or get away from women-unfriendly working environments. On the other hand, international mobility can present problems for women as they, particularly, have to plan their lives around their professional goals and personal lives. This article addresses the international mobility strategies of women regarding their personal and professional choices. We analyse their motivations to move, the way they manage their lives abroad and the effects of mobility on their lives. The analysis is based on 24 in-depth interviews of highly skilled women working in Spanish S&T sectors. Our main findings show that mobility is a new challenge which may improve women's family lives and professional careers. However, they have to plan carefully their lives on a long-term as well as a daily basis. In this sense, they need strong personal determination and the ability to balance their professional and personal goals. Moreover, their personal decisions depend not only on them as individuals, but also on their partners and families, on wider social values, on the institutional support they enjoy, and on the general public policies which they are affected by.     

‘A Rather Undefined Social Position and Public Recognition’: Professionalisation,Status and Masculinity in Provincial Museums,c.1870–1930

This article examines the background, careers and self-presentation of the first generation of British museum curators in local government-funded provincial museums, c.1900, to explore the issue of masculinity among the lower-middle classes. It argues that while such men were sometimes mocked for the lack of masculinity they showed in their domestic lives, a focus on their professional lives reveals a different set of problems facing them as they attempted to be manly men; curatorial roles, like others available to the lower-middle classes, involved a dependence on local elites, and required many of the skills and attributes which were being colonised by new women professionals. The study then examines the tactics used, with some success, by such men to assert a professional masculinity, focusing on their identification with their museum, their development of a professional body and their investment in manly physical activities.     

Plus difficile d'être élu dans une petite municipalité? Perceptions de la fonction élective par certains élus municipaux québécois

In Quebec, 75% of the province's elected municipal officials hold office in municipalities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. While we know that the demographic size of a municipality is likely to influence the career path and profile of elected officials and, more generally, the professional nature of elective office, to the best of our knowledge, little has been written about this relationship in Quebec municipalities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. This is surprising given the institutional, political, and financial context can vary greatly depending on the size of the municipality and is thus likely to influence the nature of the day-to-day elective office. Using a methodology based on semi-structured interviews with roughly 30 elected officials, our study highlights two specific characteristics. Some believe the nature of their elective office to be the same as that held by their counterparts in large municipalities, so they feel that they are not equipped with the same tools to meet the needs of their office. Some perceive the conditions under which they exercise their office are different, so they note the scope of their task is heavy, impacting their daily lives. These findings point to the need for further studies on the management of these smaller municipalities.     

Map or Terrier? The Example of Christ Church, Oxford, Estate Management, 1600–1840

Many factors might have prompted English landowners to map their properties after the genre of estate maps emerged in the late sixteenth century. However, the continuing predominance of the traditional written survey, or terrier, remains to be accounted for. An example from the muniments of Christ Church, Oxford, a large institutional landowner, is used to explain this pattern. Circumstantial evidence from maps and written surveys is augmented by the deeper insights gained from evidence of individual perceptions and institutional policies to explain the durability of the written, as opposed to the cartographic, record of land.     

Eye in the sky: visual geographies and emotional topographies of First World War airmen

Although the First World War highlighted human vulnerability through the terrors of a mechanised warfare ravaging the male body in new ways, it also fostered moments of intimacy and tenderness that privileged commonality, mutuality, and generosity, and encouraged friendship and comradeship as cornerstones of martial masculinities. This article explores such intimacies through analysis of letters and diaries written by British Royal Flying Corps airmen during combat on the Western Front. Informed by history of emotions approaches, I discuss the ways the sensual geographies of aerial combat and their promise of mastery and expanded vision shaped the emotional topographies of airmen’s combat lives. Following Santanu Das’s scholarship on the claustrophobic haptic geographies of trench warfare, this article addresses the following question: If the claustrophobia of the trenches and the impoverishment of visual experience facilitated certain geographies of senses that shaped male intimacies, what might similar emotional terrains look like for airmen exposed to more expansive visual practices?     

Hermits and hairshirts: the social meanings of saintly clothing in the vitae of Godric of Finchale and Wulfric of Haselbury

Solitary ascetics in the twelfth century were renowned for their ascetic practices, among them the wearing of hairshirts and loricae. These were not merely items of neutral ascetic value but could contain social symbolism. The varying possible social meanings of ascetic clothing are here explored particularly through a comparison of the Vitae of the two well known English holy men Wulfric of Haselbury and Godric of Finchale. The hagiographers of these holy solitaries used their ascetic clothing as one means of highlighting their subjects’ social roles throughout their lives, but it is also argued that the solitaries’ ascetic clothing was perceived during their own lives as marking their distinctive relationships with the world around them, and that these relationships were remembered through miracle stories.