Eric W. Pasold,O.B.E.

Abstract

This article examines the clothing of the rural poor in seventeenth-century Sussex, considering what men and women wore, what their clothing was made of and where they got it from, drawing on a broad range of documentary sources including legal depositions, probate material and overseers’ accounts. As would be expected, the clothing of this social group was primarily functional, reflecting limited budgets and arduous working lives. But we can see in the choice of fabric colour, trimmings and accessories that men and women were concerned about their appearance and could achieve a measure of social display, at least in their ‘holiday’ clothes. The ways in which the poor acquired their clothes were complex, involving them in overlapping spheres of production and distribution, which included home production and shop-bought ready-to-wear, all accommodated within a range of economic survival strategies.     

Negotiating between patriarchy and emancipation: rural-to-urban migrant women in Albania

It is essential to explore the role of gender while analysing internal migration in Albania to account for the differing experiences of men and women. Quantitative studies suggest that Albanian internal migration is pioneered by men, with women merely acceding to their wishes. This article addresses the undervalued role of women in the academic discourse concerning migration in Albania. Utilizing ethnographic research techniques, it explores the role of women migrating from rural to urban areas as part of a larger household and examines the coping and negotiating strategies used for survival in the city. Our findings reveal that women actively participate in the rural-to-urban migration process, including the initial decision to migrate and the choice of destination. Women's narratives provide evidence of specific emancipation strategies through which they express themselves and their new ways of living. Women adjust to and challenge their new urban environment through gaining paid employment and expanding their social networks, as well as experience emancipation through daughters and by changing their appearance, achieving varying degrees of personal and social prosperity.     

Bodies That Walk,Bodies That Talk,Bodies That Love: Palestinian Women Refugees,Affectivity, and the Politics of the Ordinary

In this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the affective memories of Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I reflect on how bodies and spaces connect and disconnect at violent junctures, and on the vital forces vulnerability and precariousness ignite in displacement. Throughout the geography of separations and shifting shelters, refugee women engaged in place‐making, transforming the transience enforced by their continuous evictions into the permanence of home, not as a static identity‐place‐nation, but as a site of dynamic affective, social relations and connections. Read through Michael Hardt's metaphor of “social muscles”, as bodily and emotional drives that blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for concrete relations and for existing in the world.     

Women of the Sisters' Hall: religion and the making of women's alternative space in Taiwan's economic restructuring

Against the background of Taiwan's recent economic restructuring, this article investigates the lives of a group of working-class women who were believers of I-Kuan Tao, a sectarian religion, and who had by and large decided to remain single in order to better practice their religious teaching. They lived together in an I-Kuan Tao temple. This article situates singlehood in the literature of resistance and sees it as a strategy of these women seeking an alternative lifestyle from the culturally prescribed roles of wife, mother and daughter-in-law. Three interlocking factors are particularly important to an understanding of these women's experience: cultural (the Taiwanese patrilineal family), religious (I-Kuan Tao), and economic (Taiwan's post-World War II export-oriented industrialization and its recent economic restructuring). Paradoxically, while trying to establish an alternative social space, these women were also seeking cultural legitimacy for their choice. Marriage resistance, in this case, was an act of both transgression and conformity. Yet the different readings that these women and their families applied to their situations, as well as the ingenuous strategies they deployed to solve their predicaments, also added new elements to the cultural repertoire which, collectively considered, might broaden the range of options for future Taiwanese women who attempt a similar life trajectory. In this article, I therefore caution against a totalizing understanding of the concept of resistance based on its final result, but call for a more nuanced analysis focusing on the process.     

General Social Capital,Education‐Related Social Capital,and Choosing Charter Schools

Proponents of charter schools credit them with many advantages over traditional schools. One claim is that school choice yields increased parental participation in voluntary school activities—which we shall call education‐related social capital. In this article we test for the independent effect of school choice on education‐related social capital, controlling for general social capital and other potentially confounding variables. Studies of school choice invariably show that choosing parents have a greater level of general social capital than non‐choosing parents. Consequently, any increase in education‐related social capital could be spurious—due to the fact that choice parents start with atypically high levels of general social capital. We find under controlled conditions that school choice has a small but statistically significant effect on education‐related social capital. However, its effect is considerably smaller than for general social capital, as well as for other traditional predictors such as parental education and the school‐related home resources that parents may provide.     

Reconceptualizing gender and reconstructing social life: Ugandan women and the path to national development

This article focuses on how women's responses to crisis and social change in Uganda signal attempts to achieve a more gender-equal social life while facilitating national development. After an introduction, the article reviews research on women's response to change and points out the limitations of this research. In the next section, the article provides a historical overview of Uganda's gender system and the political and economic changes that occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s. The third main section argues that while the social structural changes created widespread hardship, they also provided openings for women to advance their interests. Thus, the National Resistance Movement of the mid-1980s responded to the mobilization of women by creating new avenues for women to participate in political life and have control over financial resources. Traditional ideologies, divisions of labor, and the social construction of gender have also been altered by such factors as the involvement of women in the guerrilla movement and the key developmental role played by nongovernmental organizations and women's groups. The article continues by considering the effect of these changes on contemporary gender relations. Data from a sampling of women and men from two regions of the country and of small business owners provide the basis for a discussion of the different strategies (such as small scale entrepreneurship and networking) employed by women to meet their daily and longterm needs. It is concluded that women's attempts to change their lives have influenced macrolevel social structure. However, it remains to be seen whether these postinsurgency gains can be sustained.     

Education and perceptions of social status and power among women in Larteh,Ghana

In exploring the status of women in the developing world, most research emphasizes the impact of development indicators, like income or health, on women. This article goes beyond development indicators by discussing women's own perceptions of social status and power in rural Larteh, Ghana. It focuses primarily on the effects of gender and education on perception of social status and power. Section 1 offers a brief overview of the history of Ghana, reflecting the current position of women in the country. Definitions of social status and power within an African context are presented in section 2. Section 3 examines 24 interviews collected in Ghana, which asks respondents to discuss their own social status and power in relation to their community. In general, the results indicate that a woman's perception of increased social status and power is dependent on education and occupation. Other factors affecting perceptions of social status and power are wealth and culturally embedded positions held within the community, including elder, chief, and priestess.     

Bridewealth a Pardon: New Relationships and Restoration of Good Daughters

Bridewealth is recognized as vital in the reproduction and reconfiguration of Pacific environments and women play an integral role in this process. In contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG), bridewealth is reconfigured by kin to acknowledge the considered actions of women as they enter into relationships with men. This paper will explore how women's choices impact and influence their experience of these exchanges and determine the role of women and their kin as they undertake these practices. Here I aim to understand how the social relatedness that frames bridewealth exchanges enables the practices of bridewealth to be used as a tool for recognition of women's choices, autonomy and personhood. Although women enter into relationships without initial kin approval, bridewealth practices converge ultimately with a women's autonomous choice of husband. Wardlow suggests (2006:86) 'bridewealth confers value and dignity on female gender', and going beyond her observation, I show that bridewealth has been useful in achieving this in regard to managing and supporting social, kin and affinal relationships. This article will explore two cases, to identify what each tells us about women's ability to act in ways that are beneficial to them and important to kin. I show how moral evaluations frame (pasin) and recognize (luksave) kin and social relationships that ultimately constitute their personhood.     

The friend,the loner and the independent traveller: Norwegian midlife single women's social identities when on holiday

This article explores the social identities available to Norwegian midlife single women when on holiday. As inherent in their habitus, the social identity of a friend is a way of tackling tourism spaces that accommodate bonding. With friends women feel socially included as tourists and seldom disempowered by the surveillance of the tourist gaze. However, the sustenance of friendships is also about discerning what matters; bonding in holiday spaces contributes to maintaining interpersonal relationships in everyday life. Nevertheless, this social identity also requires that women disidentify with being midlife singles, a strategy which is sometimes problematic. The social identity of the loner is linked to fears of solo holidays. This fear is associated with social exclusion, especially when eating out alone in a resort of an evening. In such spaces women dislike being midlife singles; they feel somehow suppressed by the tourist gaze and become aware of their lack of bonding. The social identity of the independent traveller, however, is about enjoyable solo holidays. It is their way of resisting, contesting and negotiating tourism as about sociability with significant others, thereby transforming habitus and manoeuvring the tourist gaze in public holiday spaces, such as restaurants. It is additionally about positive identification with being a midlife single woman.     

Dominion of the Spirit over the Flesh: Religion,Gender and Sexual Morality in the German Women's Movement before World War I

This article examines the place of religious values in the thinking of leading figures in the mainstream German women's movement in the period before World War I. Focusing on the debate of sexual morality and abortion within the German League of Women's Associations, it argues that the position taken by these women is best understood as a product of their religious commitments, rather than their political ideas. The article seeks to place these women in the historical context of a particular liberal, Protestant, social and intellectual milieu that flourished in the period before 1914.     

Critical urban collaborative ethnographies: articulating community with Sappho for Equality in Kolkata,India

This article reflects on the notion of community through a collaborative ethnographic study with women loving women in Kolkata. Performing critical urban ethnographies in the global south and writing about sexualities that defy easy spatial categorizations are vital for those who seek to extend the scholarship of sexualities beyond the ‘gayborhood paradigm’ in the global north. This article focuses on how women loving women understand community and activism in Kolkata, a city that exists within tireless attempts at economic rejuvenation and vibrant modes of living. The question of community is moot in political activism around decriminalization of same-sex relationships and social legitimacy of the same. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic work with Sappho for Equality, an activist collective working with sexually marginalized women in eastern India, we engage with community as a space through which women loving women articulate marginalization and strategically connect with normative social institutions. I begin my discussion by introducing the notion of critical collaborative ethnography as a way to practice accountability in social research. Following that through select ethnographic vignettes, I demonstrate how a ‘queer community’ is not a predetermined end but is always in the making: a process that forms and dissipates within specific material contexts, activist practices, and social encounters.     

The Return of Displaced Nuer in Southern Sudan: Women Becoming Men?

Conceptualizing war‐time displacement as a catalyst for social change, this article examines the gendered emplacement experiences of returnee displaced women in the aftermath of the recent (1983–2005) civil war in South Sudan. The article attempts to shed light on the strategies of returnee women in transforming and contributing to their communities in the context of an independent South Sudan. It focuses specifically on their gendered emplacement strategies to access land, livelihoods and political rights. Through these diverse actions, some women contest and reconfigure gender identities while others reinforce unequal power relations within their households and communities. These gendered emplacements emphasize the hybridity of place, identity and self in processes of social transformation.     

Crossroads of Identities in Women Religious in Spain. Catholicism,Society and Second Vatican Council (1953–69)*

This article examines the evolution and transformation of female religious life in Spain under Franco's regime, which began after the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and ended with the dictator's death in 1975. During the dictatorship, the public stance towards Catholicism made consecrated religious life one of the potential social undertakings for women at that time. The Concordat of 1953 corroborated National Catholicism, and women religious abided by a heritage sanctioned by this ideology. The Second Vatican Council parted ways with this tradition, and some women religious reassessed their role as females and consecrated women in their society. This article analyses how the renewal doctrine of the Council was received in Spain, particularly regarding female religious life, revealing the commonalities and differences of opinions and practices resulting from the break with National Catholic schematism, as well as the first manifestations of renewal among women religious.     

Food,faith and community: social well-being of Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands

This article explores how Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands enhance their gendered social well-being. We provide an in-depth view of gender-specific places and relations that shape the social well-being of migrants, focusing on place-based lived experiences, by conducting in-depth interviews and observations. Our results demonstrate that social well-being is enhanced by social networks, wherein the participants recreate feelings of self-esteem, belonging and recognition. Furthermore, the special meaning of food and faith also contributes to the social well-being of the participants. Food and faith serve as commemorations of traditions in their home country and alleviate the transition to new traditions in the host country. We also found that specific places, such as shops and churches, contribute to the social well-being of participants in the study. Men and women in our study use different strategies to construct their well-being, and they interpret places and social relations differently, but they all showed to be active agents in enhancing their social well-being. Our female participants in particular look for opportunities in the host country to independently enhance their social well-being, for instance through establishing their own small businesses and social groups. Through its focus on the social well-being of migrants, the study contributes to increase understanding between different cultural groups.     

The Role of Lesser Aristocratic Women in Twelfth-century Yorkshire Society — The Rumilly,Arches, and St Quentin Charters*

This article argues that lesser aristocratic women were an active part of twelfth-century society and that as landholders and alienators they were able to significantly shape and mould local monastic society, family wealth and relationships, and other secular social networks. The influence women could have on these areas was on the material and physical geography of the land as well as on the social relationships. As landholders, women could and did maintain social networks with the ecclesiastical and secular societies. This was, however, limited by the geographic location of their landholding and thus demonstrates a social world that is defined by localities and regions. The three families of Rumilly, Arches and St Quentin provide cases whereby women’s activities can be evidenced in a range of events and actions. They also demonstrate a level of independence in women’s agency that did not rely on their male kin before land alienations or grants could be made. The available charter evidence for the three families studied is also illustrative of the existing charter material that can be identified for lesser aristocratic women and allows the paper to address twelfth-century women outwith the traditionally studied groups of royal and comital women or religious women.     

‘Generation Emigration’: the politics of (trans)national social reproduction in twenty-first-century Ireland

Placing social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction, the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered ‘time-space expansion’. The Irish Times' ‘Generation Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory (trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects.     

Bad blood: poverty, psychopathy and the politics of transgression in Kenya Colony, 1939-59

This article examines the inter-relationship between psychiatry and sex, both fertile fields within the recent historiography of colonialism and empire. Using a series of case files pertaining to European patients admitted to the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi during the 1940s and 1950s, this article shows how sexual transgression among colonial Europeans precipitated, and was combined with, mental distress. Considering psychiatric treatment as a form of social control, the article investigates a number of cases in which a European patient had been perceived to have transgressed the normative sexual behaviour codes of settler society in Kenya. What these files suggest is that transgressive sexuality in Kenya was itself framed by indices, as insistent as they were uncertain, of gender, race and class. While psychiatry as social control has some degree of purchase here, more valuable is an attempt to discern the particular ways in which certain forms of sexual behaviour were understood in diagnostic terms. Men who had sex with Africans, we see, tended to be diagnosed as 'depressed' on arrival at the hospital but were judged to be mentally normal consequently. Women, by contrast, were liable to be diagnosed as psychopathic, a diagnosis, I argue, that helped to explain the uniquely transgressive status of impoverished European women living alone in the margins of white society. Unlike white men, moreover, women did not have to have sex with non-Europeans to transgress sexual codes: this is because female poverty was a sexual problem in a way that male poverty decidedly was not. Poor white women were marked by uncertainty over their sexual behaviour—and dubious racial identity in its turn—and the problem of social contamination was described by reference both to the polluted racial ancestry of an individual and to the prospective contamination of healthy racial stocks. This article aims to address current historical debates around sex and empire, 'white subalternity' and the social history of psychiatry and mental health. All names have been changed to protect patient anonymity.     

‘It shocks me,the place of women’: intersectionality and mining companies’ retrogradation of indigenous women in New Caledonia

Indigenous women’s social positionings are complex and dynamic, informed by culture and post-colonial politics; gender and ethnicity intersect with age, socio-economic status, and social hierarchies. This article uses an ethnographic study of Kanak women’s engagements with mining in New Caledonia, to examine three questions. First, how do indigenous women’s dynamic social positionings shape their possibilities for negotiation with and resistance to industry? Secondly, how do women’s possibilities for engagement in turn shape the wider community’s possibilities for negotiation with or resistance to industry? Finally, what is the companies’ role in shaping women’s possibilities for such engagement? I draw on the critical feminist concept of intersectionality, bringing this into conversation with concepts of symbolic and cultural violence and hegemony. Over time, women began to actively negotiate with and resist industrial projects, in line with growing gender equity in New Caledonia, but the mining companies referenced – and thus reinforced – women’s dominated social position as an excuse to sideline their concerns, a type of cultural violence I term ‘retrogradation.’ Thus, this article recognizes indigenous women’s increasing agency in engaging with external actors, such as industrial projects, yet also shows how outsiders can commit retrogradation to further marginalize young, rural, poor community women. I discuss how such marginalization limits options for the larger group. Finally, I point to a way out of oppression, through transformation of hegemonic ideologies.