‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

In this article, I consider the kitchen as domestic space that is at once gendered and gendering in its construction and use by women as they negotiate their social position across the life course. Deeply rooted patriarchal values structure Konkomba society in northern Ghana, and a woman's role is to be a wife, to prepare food in support of her husband's family and community. Although the normative definition of woman's role in society stems from a clear-cut division of labor between women and men, a woman must negotiate her social position and ability to fulfill these labor obligations; she becomes a woman and wife by working to gain access to and control over resources and labor. I explore the shifting dynamics of women's work and social position across the life course, emphasizing the transition from young woman to woman-as-wife-as-cook in her husband's community. These negotiations take place in the kitchen – a fiercely feminine space in which a woman becomes a wife when she earns the right to place hearth stones and prepare a ceremonial ‘first meal’ for her husband and his community.     

Anton Dumitriu,the ‘Axiomatic Culture’ and the ‘Crisis of the West’

Anton Dumitriu (1905–92) was a Romanian philosopher and logician who attempted to develop the more or less consistent theory of an ‘axiomatic’ tradition, referring to culture and civilisation in the ‘East’ (defined actually as Far East) vs. the ‘West’ (mainly Europe, both Western and East-Central) especially in the inter-war and post-war periods. Dumitriu's essays on Romanian culture or on Eastern vs. Western culture as published in his book Eleatic and Heraclitic Cultures (1987) will make the object of this study. This work is a revised version of his East and West (1943). It should be noted that most of the material discussed here is actually still available only in Romanian since Dumitriu's work on Logic is already translated into English, but his musings on culture and civilisation are available only in Romanian and are, consequently, almost unknown outside the country. This study attempts to make up for that and also to connect Dumitriu's views on culture and civilisation or East and West both to earlier Romanian views and currents in defining culture as well as to contemporary general European trends, while also taking into account the context of the Communist regime in which the second edition of his book was issued.     

Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen's Troubled Archive

Rachael Pringle Polgreen, a freed‘mulatto’ woman who owned an infamous brothel/hotel in Bridgetown, Barbados during the 1770s and 1780s became known to her contemporaries through her role in the (sexual) entertainment of transient naval officers and the visits of Prince William of England. Piecing together ‘evidence’ from her will, estate inventory, a nineteenth‐century novel, a lithograph and an interview with a British officer, I engage Polgreen's complicated and fragmented archive, revealing how Polgreen represents an example of the problems with sources depicting women of African descent who lived in a slave society and the silences that inundate their archive. The first part of this article critically re‐examines pieces of her archive, through which an image of Polgreen emerges incommensurable with narratives of her triumphs. Next, through an analysis of the processes by which Polgreen is historically confined by powerful archival and subsequent historical representations, I challenge previous assumptions about her life. Finally, introducing material from the British parliamentary debates in which an incident involving Polgreen is described and new material from Barbados deeds left by Polgreen's former slave, I expose the nuances of Polgreen's ‘agency’ in a slave society – that which depended upon her sexual subjugation of other women of African descent.     

Our Dear Cousins the Americans: Sara Jeannette Duncan in Washington

As a young woman, Canadian author Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861–1922) spent nearly a year writing for the Washington Post on literary and cultural matters, and published many of her assessments of American society in The Week, Goldwin Smith's journal of Canadian affairs. Her articles repay close scrutiny not only for their inherent interest as witty observations of America by an engaged Canadian observer, but also for the manner in which they reveal Duncan's national preoccupations and biases. Approaching the Republic with neither antipathy nor deference, Duncan turned her newspaper sketches into an occasion for wide-ranging cultural comment on the nature of the republican experiment – especially concerning America's claims to freedom and human flourishing. She found the results encouraging, if not without salutary warnings, for Canadian efforts in the same direction.     

Religion,Community and The Infanticidal Mother: Evidence From 1840s Rural Wiltshire

Abstract

The existing literature on the history of infanticide has typically considered the crime as a reaction to a specifi c set of diffi cult individual circumstances, but has not attempted to place the infanticidal mother within a longer personal timeframe. Nor has the role of her religious belief been much examined. This article investigates three key elements in the case of Rebecca Smith (1807–1849), the last woman executed in England for the murder of her own infant: her bad marriage; her poverty; and her Baptist religion. These factors provide context for her socio-economic and psychological development, and thus for her status as England's best documented serial infant killer. The article suggests that, as a married woman, Smith's choices were infl uenced by conditions both wider and deeper than the more immediate issues which have tended to be associated with infanticide by unmarried women.     

Emphasizing the Daughter of Pharaoh

ABSTRACT

A woman mentioned as “the daughter of Pharaoh” reappears six times in the OT, five in 1Kings and once in 2Chronicles. Because of her mentioning several times in the OT as King Solomon's woman scholars came to the conclusion that the union between this woman and the King was of a great importance. These scholars, however, have ignored the development concerning her status in King Solomon's palace and the cause for this devel-opment. The changing position of this woman in the palace of King Solomon is one of the indications to a change in power of the kingdom of Israel during the reign of King Solomon.     

Black sisterhood: The situation of urban aboriginal women and their relationship to the white women's movement 1

The article argues that Aboriginal women in urban aboriginal society experience very different oppressions than do white women in urban white society. Aboriginal women believe that their greatest oppression is racism not sexism. When their objective conditions are examined it becomes obvious that this is indeed so. In fact Aboriginal women are statistically better educated and better employed than are Aboriginal men. Other economic and societal factors combine to produce a situation whereby a black woman's status within her own society is very different to that of her white sisters. Black women are more likely to be heads of household; more likely to be political leaders and less likely to be child‐burdened than their white counterparts. Consequently women's movement demands such as abortion, child‐care, the right to work and sexual liberation are not given high priority by the Aboriginal women's movement. Aboriginal women's demands stem from the politics of poverty and discrimination. These are caused by racism not sexism.     

Does the Law and the Constitution of the Family Have to Change?

The law and constitution of the family has been targeted for transformation in recent years, leading most notably to the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, mandating same-sex marriage as a matter of constitutional law. In this essay I undertake a thought experiment, asking how advocates of traditional marriage ought to want the law of marriage to change in light of this development. I begin by reviewing the argument for legal change sketched by Aquinas and then applying it to developments concerning marriage in modern America. Next I sketch the natural-law argument on behalf of traditional marriage. Finally, I turn to the case of Michael H. v. Gerald D., in which the Supreme Court upheld a statutory reiteration of the common-law presumption that the husband of the mother is the father of her child, against a challenge from the biological father, suggesting that this case, long admired by conservatives, needs to be reconsidered—and that the dissent in the recent Indian Adoption Case recognizing a constitutional right of biological parents might prove useful to the restoration of marriage law.     

Darwin Wept: Science and the Sentimental Subject

Could a man of science be sentimental in an age of objectivity, when emotions were largely purged from the field of Victorian science, and feelings themselves defined as animal instincts and reflex mechanisms? This essay addresses the question through Darwin's work on the expression of emotions, and the relationship between his work and his own emotional experience, with particular attention to grief and tears. An old woman in a railway carriage is suddenly overcome with a painful recollection, perhaps that of a long lost child – her mouth becomes ever so slightly contracted, her countenance falls, her eyes suffuse with tears … . An opthalmic surgeon perseveres with his treatise on the physiology of weeping while mourning the loss of his daughter … . With difficulty, a mother prolongs her infant son's screaming in order to record the shape of his mouth for a family friend and famous naturalist … . Her observations later appear in a work on emotional expression (Darwin's), together with photographs of sobbing children, and faces of a psychiatric patient charged with electrodes. Such subject matter, presented in correspondence, private journals, and print, suggest that science and sentimentality could form a more reciprocal pair, where observation was conducted in a sentimental setting, the feelings of observers regulated but not withheld, processed by an experimental regime, and then reinserted in the domain of print, reconfiguring the sentimental for Victorian readers.     

《棉被》中的“新女性”形象

田山花袋创作的《棉被》被誉为是日本自然主义、私小说的代表作,小说中所描写的“新女性”代表人物芳子,在受惠于消费社会发展所带来的丰富多彩的物质生活和精神生活的同时,也成为男性排遣自身焦虑和不安的消费对象。“新女性”虽然取得了一定的社会权利,但从根本上仍然未能摆脱传统社会的束缚;“新女性”不过是男权社会新鲜而又时髦的玩偶而已：     

From the Absent Mother to the Oppressive Mother to the New Mother in Lucía Etxebarria's Un milagro en equilibrio

This article examines the transformation of maternal and paternal images that occurs in Lucía Etxebarria's 2004 novel Un milagro en equilibrio. Sandra Schumm argues that the novel engages and transforms the postwar archetype of the “absent mother.” Using Schumm's study as a springboard, my article takes this argument further by showing how Etxebarria rewrites a second maternal archetype, the “oppressive mother,” a figure that symbolizes patriarchal values and the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women. At first, protagonist Eva Agulló characterizes her mother, Eva Benayas, as one of these oppressive mothers, a characterization that Etxebarria has also employed in her two most famous novels to date, Amor curiosidad, prozac y dudas and Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes. Un milagro en equilibrio marks a change in Etxebarria's treatment of mothers because, as the novel progresses, Agulló questions and then complicates this portrayal. The Benayas that emerges is a complex woman influenced by personal, familial, and national conflicts. Conversely, Agulló's father comes to assume more culpability for family abuse and dysfunction as Agulló associates him with Francoism. This reassessment of maternal and paternal roles demonstrates Etxebarria's own evolution in maternal representations as it dialogues with and recreates previous works such as Ana María Moix's 1969 novel Julia and Ana María Matute's 1959 Primera memoria and 1969 La trampa—three foundational novels that also employ tyrannical maternal figures. In rejecting the oppressive mother role she had assigned to her mother, Agulló rewrites a long history of maternal figures associated with the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women.     

Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives: The Anti‐Abortion Movement's Influence in Defining the Abortion Experience in Australia Since the 1960s

This article provides a genealogy of foetocentric grief, an emotion that permeates accounts of abortion in Australia across multiple discursive sites. Foetocentric grief represents women as indelibly mourning their ‘unborn children’ after abortion. The emotion first came to prominence in anti‐abortion activism of the mid‐1980s. Focus on the purported consequences of abortion for women enabled anti‐abortionists to respond to charges that they were unsympathetic towards women who have abortions. Foetocentric grief also transcribes the primary claim of the anti‐abortion movement – that abortion entails a mother's destruction of her unborn child – onto the very experience of abortion. Since the mid‐1980s, foetocentric grief has moved outside the anti‐abortion movement to dominate accounts of the abortion experience in the print media as well as, surprisingly, mainstream pro‐choice activism. This article maps the convergence of these trends and examines the political and regulatory effects of foetocentric grief. It argues that foetocentric grief is a culturally enforced emotion that discursively recuperates the figure of the aborting woman to normative regimes of pregnancy and femininity, where pregnant women are envisaged as already mothers to autonomous foetal‐subjects.     

Marital sexual relationships and birth spacing among two Yoruba sub-groups

Discussion focuses on the marital sexual relationships (MSR) and the timing of the next child among the Ekiti and Ikale subgroups of the Yoruba (Nigeria). Contrasts in postpartum sexual practices between the 2 groups allows for demonstration of the importance of parents' perception of their child's growth and their observance of prohibitions on sexual intercourse during the wife's lactation as factors shaping their decision to have another child. It is argued that the similarity in birth spacing among the 2 groups, derived from contrasting attitudes to postpartum abstinence, is evidence of an explicit decision on the timing of the next child. Such a decision considers the role of the child's growth and social development as it affects adults in the performance of their daily social and economic routines and goes beyond an unquestioned response to quasi-religious taboos. A questionnaire was administered in the local dialect to 535 Ekiti women and 460 Ikale women, currently married and aged 14-49 years. Appropriately modified male questionnaires were completed for 398 and 380 husbands of eligible women in the respective locations. Due in part to conservatism in sexual behavior and family formation, the main features of Yoruba postpartum practices such as extended and demand breastfeeding, the taboo on sexual intercourse during lactation, and the devotion to child welfare are believed to, and do, occur in Ekiti. Socioeconomic development has brought many changes, but the combination of these practices with the high infant mortality resulting from limited access to modern health care and the lack of basic amenities assures that children are born at substantial ages apart. The need for the surviving child to reach a consciously determined age and/or stage of growth and development assures the adequacy and rationality of child spacing in this age conscious society. The Ikale are an exception to the general rule concerning sexual abstinence during lactation. The theme of a mother's trials and concern over her children is also valid with the Ikale. The Ikale mother supplements the natural protection offered by postpartum amenorrhea with the use of traditional methods of contraception, most notably the rhythm method. The crude birthrates for the 2 groups were hardly different--54.7 in Ekiti and 54.4 in Ikale. There was only a negligible difference in fertility rates. In both groups only negligible proportions of women would breastfeed for less than 6 months. Only 7.4% of Ikale women would breastfeed beyond 2 years, but 12.9% of Ekiti women were breastfeeding that long. In Ikale there was a higher awareness of the association between extended breastfeeding and the delay in the onset of menstruation. The main implication of this discussion is to challenge the emphasis on lactational abstinence as the main determinant of changes in fertility behavior. The Ikale case shows that such an assumption is not valid.     

The association between maternal employment and child survival in India, 1998–99 and 2005–06

While many studies contend that a mother's economic activity may generate positive outcomes for both mother and children, empirical results from less developed countries actually indicate higher mortality rates among children of working mothers. This article examines the association between maternal employment and child survival using India's National Family Health Survey. Using propensity score matching, the study compares working with matched nonworking mothers in child's risk of death. To address the heterogeneous nature of working mothers, the employment-survival relationship is analysed across various occupational categories. A supplementary analysis examines gaps between children of working and nonworking mothers in nutritional status and low birth weight (LBW). Our results show that high risk of mortality and low nutritional status are more pronounced among children of mothers working in low-status occupations. The results indicate insignificant differences in LBW, a finding that favours the explanation that the mortality disadvantage of children of working mothers emerges primarily after birth most likely because of inadequate childcare. The article discusses these findings in relation to various potential mechanisms mediating the negative association between maternal employment and child survival.     

The Nation in Utero: Translating the Science of Fetal Education in Republican China

As Chinese nationalists grappled with the political and military weakness of the young Republic of China, some sought to strengthen the Chinese race by advocating a return to the ancient practice of fetal education. Fetal education held that every sight, sound, and flavor that a pregnant mother took in through her senses, as well as her emotions and demeanor, directly affected her fetus. This paper examines how the text Taijiao, Song Jiazhao’s 1914 Chinese translation of Shimoda Jirō’s Japanese work Taikyō, presents a modern reformulation of fetal education that draws upon both modern Western science and East Asian medicine. As the text uses modern biology and psychology to explain and demonstrate the efficacy of fetal education, it also narrows the scope of fetal education to focus almost exclusively on the mother’s psychological state. Similarly, as the text turns to instruct women on the practice of fetal education, it draws upon Edo and Qing gynecological principles to emphasise the importance of the pregnant mother’s emotional self-control. Ultimately this text represents a neo-traditionalist response to modernity as it presents a Neo-Confucian vision of fetal education focused on a pregnant mother’s moral self-cultivation and emotional self control.     

The Levelling Process as a Function of the Masses in the View of Kierkegaard and Ortega Y Gasset

The present article is an analysis of the emergence of a new Uruguayan author, Armonía Somers (1914–94), as well as the publication in 1950 of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman). It focuses on the Uruguayan social body of the 1950s, when society lived the paradox of recognizing women in its legal structure, but limiting them in the everyday social and cultural life. In this context, Somers's novel symbolically explores what I call the “crisis of feminine subjectivity,” through the creation of a woman who on her thirtieth birthday decided to throw away all the costumes and masks with which society and tradition imposed feminine roles and, naked, tried new ways of being, new subjectivities. Central to this study is an analysis of the different ways in which historical, social, and cultural demands produce certain kinds of human bodies, especially how they produce a woman's body. The specific argument that underlies this article is that the body inserts itself in conflictive and tense manners with the marks imposed on the genders. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of “feminine subjectivities” and “historical marked bodies” in a fiction that presents itself as a black box in which Somers finds herself as a woman who became a novelist in the 1950s and in which readers also find themselves questioning the persistence of gender marks on their own social bodies.     

A dystocic childbirth in the Spanish Bronze Age

Prehistoric cases of maternal and fetal death during labour are difficult to document. However, this must have been a frequent cause of death among young women who lived in hard circumstances and precarious health conditions. In this paper, a case of a Bronze Age woman who probably died during childbirth due to unavoidable reasons is presented: her baby was lying transversely with the right fetal arm protracted. Death of both mother and child was inevitable. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Compassionate Protector of America: The Symbolism of Old Hickory in a Jackson Woman's Mind

Serving as America's only female newspaper editor during the election of 1832, Anne Royall became possibly the first public “Jackson Woman” by supporting the chief executive's bid for re-election in her sheet titled Paul Pry. A closer look at Royall's recollections from her travels in Alabama from 1818 to 1822 shows her to be a blooming “Jackson Woman” developing before the Jackson party was even conceived. In 1828, Royall's Black Books produced a scathing indictment of American society. Both the Adams and Jackson campaigns actively recruited her for their mud-slinging contest but she declined. Three years later Royall started printing Paul Pry. The Black Books and Paul Pry gave Royall a public voice, and she was not afraid to use it. Between 1818 and 1832, Anne Royall went from being a Jackson admirer to being a public Jackson woman.     

Factors Associated with Married Iranian Women's Contraceptive Use in Turku,Finland

Iranians are one of Finland's major immigrant groups. Like other asylum seekers in Finland, the Iranians brought with them their own cultural practices, attitudes and beliefs regarding marriage and family structure. The aim of this research was to study factors associated with married Iranian women's contraceptive use in Finland. A total of 120 married women with more than one child were interviewed in Turku, a costal city situated about 200km from Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The questionnaires gathered information about the respondents' socio-demographic status, knowledge and use of contraception, number of children, length of time in Finland, education level and other social characteristics. Our research shows that the social factors that are associated with the Iranian women's contraceptive use are mainly due to changes in their conditions of life and adaptation to the Finnish society.