‘Like man and wife’: clerics’ concubines in the diocese of Barcelona

Clerical concubinage was a persistent problem throughout the Middle Ages, but scholars have largely ignored the historical experience of the women involved. Parish visitation records from the early fourteenth-century diocese of Barcelona reveal a wealth of information about these women. Although their lives were in part circumscribed by an inherently gendered legal category, their day-to-day lives and interactions with other members of their communities depended on more than their legal status, and were in fact as diverse as those of women in legitimate marital unions.     

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.     

‘Pleading for Help’: Gender Relations and Cross‐Cultural Logic in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Religious conversion cases involving women constitute an important aspect of early modern Mediterranean history. Various Muslim women left their homes in the Ottoman Empire, came to Venice and attempted to convert to Christianity. While some women found male protection and established themselves as Christians, others were pursued by male relatives and found themselves in contested cross‐cultural struggles. In this regard, gender relations surrounding female conversions also involved questions of private power, honour and legal jurisdiction. Framed by complex power relations and by complicated gender dynamics, males exercised control over female converts in a variety of ways.     

ON BEING NOT EVEN ANYWHERE NEAR ‘THE PROJECT’: WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE

This paper challenges current constructions of “the project” in radical geography by examining the phenomenon of “missing sisters.” We discuss the social construction of lesbians and disabled women as invisible “others” and how this is manifest in Geography. We argue that disabled women and lesbians have had their experiences and lives marginalized; both in the geographic literature and through practices of exclusion. We call for a reconstructed radical geography which includes lesbians and disabled women, on their own revolutionary terms, in the production of knowledge and in political practice. Such an inclusionary project will enrich our understanding of geographic processes and strengthen our efforts to build political strategies of resistance to contemporary forms of oppression and marginalization.     

‘I Am a Slave Not a Wife’: Slave Women in Post‐Proclamation Gold Coast (Ghana)

This article contributes to the recent wave of historical studies that have examined the immediate social transformations implied by slavery abolition on gender relations. It highlights slave women's attempts to alter their status and the personal agency they displayed in the immediate post‐proclamation period in the Gold Coast (present‐day Ghana). During this very early period (1874–1877) women were quite an active presence in the colonial court and the percentage of cases discussing the right of women to leave their husbands increased. Traditional and colonial powers soon reacted to this changing situation. There were two main constraints to women's emancipation. On one hand there was a general confusion on the legal status of wives within traditional family, and on the other, the logic of debt concealed within the repayment of dowries tried to force women back into bondage even when they succeeded in changing their status from slaves to free women.     

Home-grown slaves: women, reproduction, and the abolition of the slave trade, Jamaica 1788-1807

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

‘Unfortunate Objects’: London's Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century

Unmarried mothers in eighteenth‐century London captivated the public imagination in unprecedented ways. Using the petitions for admission into London's Foundling hospital, this article argues that unmarried mothers did not have to conform to a model of female sexual passivity, of ‘respectable illegitimacy’, in order to receive charitable relief in the eighteenth‐century metropolis. The governors of the Foundling Hospital could be indiscriminate in the petitions that they passed. This did not mean, however, that petitioners were unaware of how best to represent their case in their attempts to find a home for their child. But throughout the eighteenth century, ‘proper objects of charity’ included petitioners with many different stories to tell. These were determined by the concerns and questions of the Foundling Hospital's authorities and were not unproblematic representations of poor women's mental maps, but this piece emphasises that the circumstances of their lives rarely required embellishment to convince others of their necessity. Economic need rather than shame was the all‐important criterion in the admission of a child into the Foundling Hospital. Women's accounts of their lives provided overwhelming evidence that they, rather than the fathers of their babies, were the ‘unfortunate sex’, but they were neither hopeless nor without desire. The language of the petitions was intimately related to the everyday lives of London's poor. What framed most of the accounts presented by petitioners was not seduction, shame or secrecy but misfortune.     

Clerical "concubines" in northern Italy during the fourteenth century

This essay reconstructs the lives of a neglected group of women in the Christian church during the later Middle Ages. So-called clerical “concubines” were well-known in their communities, but their lived experience has been largely ignored by modern historians. Yet studying clerical concubines sheds light not only on the women themselves, but also on the social organization of the medieval Christian church. Drawing on information gathered from notarial acts across the northern Italian peninsula, I argue that concubines were not a unitary group. Their experiences varied instead according to their status and the regions they inhabited. For instance, while laywomen who became priests’ concubines moved into their lovers’ homes, nuns retained cells in their religious houses during these relationships. Furthermore, concubines in cities such as Treviso could openly live with their lovers and share their property, while in other places, such as Bergamo, severe legal restrictions on concubines made them a particularly vulnerable group.     

‘To Women in the Year 2000’: Norwegian Historians of Women,c.1900–c.1960

The lives and writings of three women who during the first half of the twentieth century wrote books on women's history are the subject of this article. Ragna Nielsen, a teacher and an amateur historian, in 1904 published her account of women's lives during the first part of the nineteenth century, stressing the sad consequences of patriarchal attitudes, but also the importance of women's contribution to the maintenance of a national identity. Anna Caspari Agerholt and Mimi Sverdrup Lunden, both with masters' degrees in history, belonged to the next generation. Agerholt is mainly remembered for her impressive book of 1927 on the Norwegian women's movement, while Lunden's books of 1942 and 1948 on women's work were important contributions to social history. The writings of these three women's historians are related to dominant positions within Norwegian historiography of their times, highlighting how they helped change central concepts by adding gender to class analysis and to the process of constructing a national identity, stressing the importance of voluntary organisations to the formation of politics and widening the concept of work.     

From Contentious to Contended: An ‘Event’‐ful Account of Karavaran History

In 2019, we returned to Karavar, one of Papua New Guinea's Duke of York Islands. Since our last visit 28 years earlier, many with whom we worked had died. However, their children knew about us and were eager for our recollections about the lives and times of their parents. We, in turn, wished to learn about current lives and times. Our conversations, thus, often focused on multi‐generational changes. Significantly, most Karavarans thought that these changes had been for the better. Indeed, they seemed relatively satisfied with their present circumstances. In contrast, the Karavarans we had earlier known were frequently fired up with grievance, disappointment, possibility, and occasional exultation. Here we consider how contentiousness turned into contentment; how, what Karavarans had been, approached what they wanted to be. In understanding this historical process, we consider several ramifying ‘events’: happenings that Karavarans recognized, whether immediately or in retrospect, as interrupting business as usual and, ultimately, as challenging assumptions about the workings of their world.     

Male ‘Providers’ and Female ‘Housewives’: A Gendered Co‐performance in Rural North India

Problems of measuring and public recognition of women's work are not merely statistical. This article highlights the co‐performance of stereotypical gender roles, where men and women jointly seek to establish the status of women as housewives rather than as farmers and of men as providers, thereby upholding a particular social order and simultaneously reinterpreting the meanings of existing norms to include new realities. Evidence from rural north India demonstrates the discernable disjunctures between social norms, narratives and action. Conscious of the growing insecurities faced by their husbands in the context of a rapidly changing economy, women try to allay rather than aggravate them. Instead of asserting their identities as ‘workers’, their strategies for gaining recognition and reciprocity from their husbands focus on reconstituting gender relations in the household, by expanding individual spaces and making incremental gains within the existing social order, rather than struggling for wider transformative changes.     

‘Best Practice’ Options for the Legal Recognition of Customary Tenure

Is there a ‘best practice’ model for the legal recognition of customary tenure? If not, is it possible to identify the circumstances in which a particular model would be most appropriate? This article considers these questions in the light of economic theories of property rights, particularly as illustrated by the World Bank's 2003 land policy report. While these theories have their flaws, the underlying concept of tenure security allows a typological framework for developing legal responses to customary tenure. In particular, this article suggests that the nature and degree of State legal intervention in a customary land system should be determined by reference to the nature and causes of any tenure insecurity. This hypothesis is discussed by reference to a wide variety of legal examples from Africa, Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific. The objective is not to suggest that law determines resource governance outcomes in pluralist normative environments, but to improve the quality of legal interventions in order to assist customary groups to negotiate better forms of tenure security and access to resources.     

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.     

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.     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.     

A company of women and men: men's recollections of childbirth in medieval England

The events that took place in medieval English birthing chambers were witnessed and assisted by a company of women. Although these events may have been isolated, they did not exist in isolation. Rather, they interacted in complex ways with the lives and activities of the men in the manor hall. This article examines those interactions as they are evidenced in proof-of-age inquests, legal documents that record the recollections of husbands, fathers, and male relatives and neighbors regarding the events surrounding the birth of an heir to crown land. It concludes that even though men rarely entered the birthing chamber, their dynastic interests and social politics routinely penetrated its walls, blurring the boundary between private and public spheres, female and male space.     

‘Patriotic Femininity’: Women's Morals and Men's Morale During the Second World War

The Second World War was a period which witnessed struggles for the definitions of appropriate ‘patriotic’ feminine identities and behaviours as much as it placed demands on men and their masculinities. The disruption to normality led to a heightened sense of heterosexuality. There were contests for the definition of femininity, contests which contradicted the centrality of discourses constructing domesticity and passivity. The way history has been constructed the heroic myths of the Second World War are male, thus there is a need for other kinds of critical knowledge to provide an understanding of women's lives and another, feminine, kind of heroism.     

Farm,family, and myself: farm women dealing with family break-up

Despite the rising divorce rate among farm families in Norway, surprisingly little research has examined these break-ups. Drawing on interviews with farm women whose marital or cohabiting relationships broke down, we explore the contradictions between individualization and the moral responsibility embedded in the patriarchal discourse of the family farm. We ask whether farm family dissolution represents a break with patriarchal ideology and practice, and thus threatens the survival of the family farm. A key finding is the struggle to balance establishing new lives for themselves with meeting their felt obligations to the farm. None of the women exercised their full legal rights if they worried that it might destroy the farm business. By ensuring the survival of the farm and the well-being of their children, the women's handling of divorce conforms to cultural conventions and protects the family farm.