Form and deformity: the trouble with Victorian pockets

This essay explores the Victorian debate about the place of pockets in men's and women's clothing. By studying the representation of men as naturally pocketed creatures and the general denial of useful pockets to middle-class women, the essay demonstrates the tenacious cultural logic by which men's and women's pockets were imagined to correspond to sexual differences and to index access, or lack thereof, to public mobility and financial agency. Interconnected readings of visual art, essays, and novels show how the common sense about gendered pockets was utilized and promulgated in Victorian narratives. The question of who gets pockets is thus positioned as part of the history of gendered bodies in public space.     

Dusting Down Second Hand Rose: Gendered identities and the world of second-hand goods in the space of the car boot sale

This is concerned with the connections between second-hand exchange and consumption, and gendered identities, and draws on research conducted within car boot sales in Britain. The article demonstrates the highly gendered nature of patterns of exchange and consumption within the space of the car boot sale; connects this to the various gender identities found within conventional retail environments, notably the department store; and examines in depth the intricacies of what happens when both women and men buy from and sell to one another in the space of the car boot sale. For women, the world of the car boot sale is shown to require the negotiation of the multiple and frequently contradictory feminine subject positions embedded in exchange and consumption, notably woman as object of masculine heterosexual desire, woman as mother and woman as homemaker. For men, by contrast, the construct of masculinity to be negotiated is apparently homogeneous, utilitarian and instrumentalist-man the builder of domestic space. The article reflects on these differences and on the highly gendered pattern of exchange and consumption found within car boot sales, arguing that both are intricately connected to the expert gendered knowledges inscribed in particular commodities, knowledges which are argued to be at a premium in spaces of second-hand exchange and consumption.     

A gender analysis of everyday mobility in urban and rural territories: from challenges to sustainability

Gender differences in mobility patterns between women and men have long been acknowledged. This study analyses how these differences are reproduced in different urban and rural contexts. Using mobility data from a large travel survey taken in 2006 in Spain, we examine the differences between gender mobility through age, modal split and trip purposes. Special attention is paid to how territory shapes mobility and how these territorial settings differently affect gendered mobilities. The use of this data source allows the comparison of all trips made by the total population, including all means of transport. By taking a global view on mobility, the uneven relationships that men and women have with different means of transport become more visible. After disaggregating data by age and territorial settings, results show that women are using sustainable transport modes more often than men, and travelling for more diverse reasons. Gender is thus a fundamental variable in understanding modal split and, by extension, transport sustainability, in terms of energy consumption and the emission of greenhouse gases. From this point of view, we consider women's mobility knowledge and practices – typically related to the most sustainable means of transport – as factors with rising value that could effectively guide public policy in its way to promote more sustainable mobility patterns.     

Beach Boys Do It Too: Subculture and Commoditised Desire in a Transnational Tourist Site in Kerala,South India

This article is based on an ethnographic study of a group of Scheduled Caste (SC) male youth in a globalised tourist site in Kerala, South India, who participate in situational sexual and romantic relationships with predominantly tourist women from the global north. We first aim to expand on the “sex and romance tourism” literature of such encounters to provide an Indian context. Secondly, we aim to highlight how young men involved in such encounters undertake complex mediations of localised and global forms of consumption and commoditisation to participate in the neoliberal tourist market place. Mainly by way of a subculture known as the Jungees, we describe how young men utilise the former processes to seek economic and social mobility for themselves and their families but also to valorise and re-imagine their identity along racial, gendered, caste and class-based dimensions. Finally, we explore the young men’s articulation of a hierarchy of preferred encounters that draws on gendered, sexualised and racialised local and global imaginaries of commoditised desire(s) of tourist women from the global north. We highlight the ways in which participants actively utilise the neoliberal context to engage in a range of self-generated livelihood strategies and to contest their marginality.     

Women and Alcohol Consumption in Fascist Italy

This article examines discourses and practices around women's drinking in Fascist Italy. The history of alcohol production and consumption in Italy during the fascist dictatorship has only recently received attention; alcohol's gendered dimensions, especially women's drinking, have been hitherto overlooked. While the production of legislation, rhetoric and propaganda on alcohol consumption was dominated by men, women were identified as key constituents whose alcohol-related practices could make or break the causes of fascist propagandists, ‘anti-alcohol’ campaigners and alcohol industry associations. The article explains how Italian women were imagined and addressed by regime propagandists, alcohol industry producers and temperance campaigners as (a) simultaneously the principal victims of and responsibility bearers for male excess alcohol consumption, (b) potential ‘crisis-women’ whose unpatriotic drinking choices (whether English tea, French champagne or American cocktails) denoted their prioritising of fashion over fascist values and (c) gatekeepers of family alcohol consumer practices and consumers of alcohol in their own right. It then moves to examine sources left by interwar Italian women to explore what, how and when they drank. Ultimately, it argues that despite attempts to construct women's drinking in archly nationalistic terms, the discourses and actual practices of Italian women around alcohol consumption operated within profoundly transnational frames.     

First Mayan Women's Congress

In October 1997, over 200 participants attended the First Mayan Women's Congress in Mexico and called for financial assistance, capacity building, and training to help Mayan women escape poverty. The Congress was initiated by the UN Development Fund for Women in collaboration with the Small Grants Program of the UN Development Program. Traditionally, Mayan women and men have played distinct roles in society, and efforts are underway to increase gender sensitivity and achieve a new balance of power. Mayan women attending the Congress reported that they face daily challenges in gaining their husbands' approval for participation in income-generating activities outside of the home. Eventually, however, some husbands also start working in these enterprises and are learning to assume their share of domestic responsibilities. Mayan women have been forced to reevaluation their role in society by a prevailing agricultural and environmental crisis as well as a high unemployment rate. Crafts that were once produced only for household consumption are now considered for export. Because the women need funds to initiate income-generating activities, the Conference linked women's groups with development practitioners, policy-makers, and donors. The women requested financial aid for more than 30 specific projects, and Congress participants agreed to pursue innovate strategies to support the enterprises with funds, training, and technical assistance. The Congress also encouraged environmental nongovernmental organizations to include Mayan women in mainstream development activities. This successful Congress will be duplicated in other Mexican states.     

3. SPACE,PLACE, AND GENDER: THE SEXUAL AND SPATIAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN THE EARLY MODERN HOUSEHOLD

Much has been written about the history of the work of men and women in the premodern past. It is now generally acknowledged that early modern ideological assumptions about a strict division of work and space between men and productive work outside the house on the one hand, and women and reproduction and consumption inside the house, on the other, bore little relation to reality. Household work strategies, out of necessity, were diverse. Yet what this spatial complexity meant in particular households on a day‐to‐day basis and its consequences for gender relationships is less clear and has received relatively little historical attention. The aim of this paper is to add to our knowledge through a case study of the way that men and women used and organized space for work in the county of Essex during the “long seventeenth century”. Drawing on critiques of the concept of “separate spheres” and the models of economic change to which it relates, together with local/micro historical methods, it places evidence within an appropriate regional context to argue that spatial patterns were enormously varied in early modern England and a number of factors—time, place, occupation, and status, as well as gender—determined them. Understanding of the dynamic, complex, uneven purchase of patriarchy upon the organization, imagination, and experience of space has important implications for approaches to gender relations in early modern England. It raises additional doubts about the utility of the separate spheres analogy, and particularly the use of binary oppositions of male/female and public/private, to describe gender relations and their changes in this period and shows that a deeper understanding demands more research into the local contexts in which the gendered division and meaning of work was negotiated.     

SKILLS,THE GENDER WAGE GAP,AND CITIES

This paper links gender wage gaps with the urban wage premium. First, the study documents gender wage gaps are narrower in larger U.S. metropolitan areas in 2000 and 2010. Skill agglomerations are then considered to explain this. Specifically, if men and women employ heterogeneous skills, and these skills have differential productivities across city sizes, agglomerative forces may differentially reward men and women. Occupational data show that women are concentrated in jobs relatively more intensive in interactive and cognitive skills, while men are comparatively in physical skill‐intensive jobs. Decomposing the gender wage gap shows that explanatory factors (education, skills, and location) predict women would outearn men. Instead, agglomerative skill returns account for majority of the gap. These estimates suggest that even as women employ skills rewarded in agglomeration economies, they benefit less from agglomerations than men, resulting in the observed gap.     

Employment and Training Alternatives for Non‐College Women: Do Redistributive Policies Really Redistribute?

Employment and training programs aimed at women and men without 4‐year college degrees address the needs of the majority of the working population. Noncollege women tend to hold lower‐paying jobs with fewer opportunities for advancement, compared with the opportunities noncollege men have. One type of policy seeks to increase the numbers of women in occupations where men hold most of the positions, or “nontraditional occupations for women” (NTOs). Since many NTOs require a college education, do such policies improve noncollege women's economic self‐efficacy? Is there a link between holding a nontraditional occupation and earning significantly higher wages? This study establishes that, indeed, these programs provide access to jobs that are linked to higher earnings. Such policies redistribute earnings opportunities to noncollege women successfully, and therefore improve the economic efficacy of noncollege women.     

Down to Now: Memory,Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta,Georgia

This paper is a case study of African-American women’s leadership. It documents women’s involvement in a voter registration drive in 1946 and traces the develop-ment of an ‘official history’ of that event that emerged in the ensuing decades. This narrative shifted emphasis from the organising leadership that both women and men exhibited to a form of leadership – success in electoral politics – that pertained almost exclusively to men. Concluding remarks address the relevance of memory and narrative for writing the history of women’s leadership.     

Escape from the country: the gender politics of Chinese women in pursuit of transnational romance

This study focuses on two marginalized groups in Chinese society: 27-years old (or older) ‘left-over’ (never-married) women and divorced women. Both these kinds of women are subject to discrimination and ridicule by the mass media and even their own families. This essay argues that despite the economic prosperity China has enjoyed over the last thirty years, gender relations in the country are rooted in a patriarchal discourse that reveals a hybridity of old and new ideals – family responsibility and individual self-fulfillment – in which the pursuit of love and marital commitment cannot be divorced from larger social-cultural-economic structures that endorse intergenerational responsibility and obligation, as well as promote gender inequality in the home and workplace. For these two groups of ostracized women, romance with foreign men may seem an alternative to the constraints of this structural framework. Drawing from a pool of evidence, published interviews, media reports, and printed ethnographic studies, this study analyzes the predicaments of leftover and divorced women, the interactions between these women and foreign men, and what their experiences with these men say about gender and racial differences in relation to gender inequality.     

Building the City of Women: creating a site of feminist resistance in a northern Colombian conflict zone

Against all odds, in uncertain and violent times, Colombian women are mobilising for peace. They do so even when they face ongoing violence and personal threats from a variety of armed actors. Despite a well-established tradition of studying women’s social movements in times of conflict, there is a lacuna when it comes to analysing feminism as a mobilisation strategy. This article uses the case study of the League of Displaced Women, the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas (LMD) to illustrate the utility of Zulver’s High Risk Feminism framework to explain how and why women chose to build the City of Women, despite the real and threatened danger that this implied. The article narrates the history of the LMD, from its foundations in a geography of marginality to its creation of a space of resistance for displaced women and their families. In all, this articles demonstrates how feminist resistance has not only become a way of life for the women of the LMD, but also a strategy for creating pockets of safe places in the midst of a conflict zone.     

Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth

This study examines the recollections of medieval English men, found in proof–of–age inquests, regarding their participation in the rite of the purification of women after childbirth. Because the rite of purification was reserved to women, scant attention has been paid to how this rite and the customs surrounding it played in the lives of medieval men. These men’s recollections situate postpartum purification within the festivities celebrating the birth of a man’s heir. For them, it is a public event celebrating paternity and lineage, and a forum for the negotiation of social relationships.     

Widows,Wives and Witnesses: Women and their Involvement in the 1768 Northampton Borough Parliamentary Election

This article analyses sources relating to the 1768 Northampton borough election to determine the ways in which women were involved in pre‐reform elections. Although there has been literature relating to the participation of women in pre‐reform elections, it has largely focused on elite women. Through a case study of the 1768 election this article will suggest that non‐elite women were involved in a variety of ways. In particular, it will show that these women acted as witnesses during the polling and provided evidence relating to men and their eligibility to vote, and suggest that female householders had an impact upon the election through their property ownership. Through their role as householders, women were able to participate in elections through the exchange of property and enabling men to vote. The activities in which Northampton women were involved had further implications concerning home and its use as a public space.     

Mean consumption, poverty and inequality in rural India in the 60th round of the National Sample Survey

This article reports on mean consumption, poverty (all three FGT measures) and inequality during 2004 for rural India using National Sample Survey (NSS) data for the 60th Round. Mean consumption at the national level is much higher than the poverty line. However, the Gini coefficient is higher than in recent earlier rounds. The headcount ratio is 22.9 per cent. Mean consumption, all three measures of poverty and the Gini coefficient are computed at the level of 20 states and 63 agro-climatic zones in these 20 states. It is surmised that despite impressive growth rates deprivation is pervasive, pockets of severe poverty persist, and inequality is rampant.     

Delayed Asian Transitions to Adulthood

Korea witnessed a steady increase in women marrying younger men from 8.5 per cent in 1993 to 14.3 per cent in 2009. This study examines those women marrying younger men in Korea through an empirical analysis using a large and reliable data set of more than 5 million observations collected from marriage register reports from 1993 to 2009. The results indicated that an increase in Older-Women/Younger-Men Marriages (OWYMMs) in Korea was mainly due to a steady increase in the woman’s age at marriage and show that women with a higher level of education and/or income than men were more likely to choose the OWYMM. That is, the incidence of OWYMMs was related more to the gap in the level of education or income between spouses than to the absolute level of education or income of individual spouses. In this sense, the results provide empirical support for exchange theory.     

School-to-work transition of young people in Greater Jakarta: the determinants of success

This study aims to analyse the determinants of successful school-to-work transition of young adults in Greater Jakarta. The study argues that the most consistent and significant influences on successful transition among young adults are micro predictors rather than mezzo predictors. Education has a strong positive relationship to successful school to work transition particularly in attaining stable job category. This study also found that traditional culture is likely to have negative influences on the successful transition of young women, while a positive transition is experienced by young men. Education is a key strategy in reducing the negative impacts of traditional cultural values and promoting successful school-to-work transition particularly if both young men and women are to attain stable employment.     

It Doesn't Matter: Some Cautionary Findings About Sex and Representation From School Committee Conversations

One of the most important findings in the field of gender and politics is that women elected officials at the state and national levels do a better job than men of representing the interests of women, children, and families. This paper uses school committees to ask the same question about women elected officials at the local level. Thus the question that guides this paper is: Does it matter for women if women are elected to this local political institution? If it does matter, then we should “hear” women's distinct ways of participating through their discussions at committee meetings. The study finds, in contrast, that in this political institution women and men behave in remarkably similar ways when separated by committee roles, and that women elected officials in this political institution spend very little time addressing issues affecting girls in public education.     

Gender,Perceptions of Safety and Strategic Responses among Ohio University Students

Research on perceptions of safety in public spaces must seek a balance between paying careful attention to the effects of gender, while challenging simplistic notions of a dichotomy of fearful women and fearless men. In a study of perceptions of safety among undergraduate students at the Ohio State University, this principle was addressed by decentering fear as the object of study and focusing instead on the various strategies that women and men use to manage their perceptions of safety—including avoidance of certain situations (for example, being in specific places, or going outside after dark), precautionary measures, and assertions of confidence. Questionnaire responses and follow-up interviews indicated that most students usually felt safe on campus; however, women were more likely than men to have felt unsafe. Students used a wide range of strategies to make themselves feel safer, from staying home after dark to formulating plans for self-defense to telling themselves they had nothing to fear. While a focus on strategic responses illuminated areas of overlap in men's and women's experiences, gender differences were also striking. Men are unlikely to rely on avoidance strategies, while some women view self-imposed restrictions on activity as normal and necessary. Furthermore, many men are unwilling or unable to relate to questions about fear and safety, explicitly or implicitly reinscribing fear as a ‘women's issue’.     

Is Androcentric Archaeology Really About Men?

The article starts with a discussion of the relation between feminist archaeology and gender archaeology followed by a short account of how androcentrism may influence on archaeological research. By exploring two representative examples I will argue that androcentric archaeology mainly reproduces stereotype images of men and do not provide much new or real knowledge about prehistoric men or understandings of masculinity. Consequently, there is a need to study prehistoric men as gendered and I will argue that to include studies in men and masculinity into a gender archaeology based on feminist theory might challenge androcentric archaeological studies just as much as to study women in prehistory.