Women and the Public Sphere

In Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the contrast between ‘public’ and ‘private’ worlds drew not on one, but on multiple, contrasts. However, recognising such variations does not necessarily provide us with new analytical tools. This article examines some of the ways in which twentieth-century commentators have attempted to categorise these contrasts. In particular the article critically engages with Habermas's definition of the public sphere and suggests the advantages and disadvantages of using his notion through a discussion of the relationship of the British women's suffrage movement to the debate over citizenship in the 1860s.     

Writing Inside the Kaleidoscope: Re-Representing Victorian Women Public Figures

‘The myths that crystallize in the literary imagination are the buried lives of women whose lives are themselves further emboldened by these same myths.’¹     

Arena symposium: equal opportunities

The Internet is a hospitable medium for distance learning. Some geography educators fear that distance education confronts the discipline with a moral dilemma, however. One, in particular, acknowledges some of the advantages of distance learning, but contends that it cannot convey the sense of place that is 'the essence of what it means to be a geographer'. This paper is concerned with the morality of distance learning. In particular, it considers educators' obligations to deliver quality education, and to make it as widely accessible as possible. The paper stresses that the key distinction between distance learning and traditional resident instruction is not the mode of delivery, nor is it the distances in time and space that separate students and teachers. Rather, it is that distance learners are a qualitatively different, older population, with different educational needs from traditional on-campus undergraduates and graduate students. The paper argues that geography educators have a moral obligation to serve lifelong learners, an obligation that should take precedence over our allegiance to conventional notions about what constitutes the essence of our field.     

America and Japan in the World Arena

Book reviewed in this article:
Walter LaFeber, The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations     

On the Contours of Public Space: A Tale of Three Women

This article explores the changing contours of the relationship between gender and the distinction between public and private spaces in western cities. Our account returns to the emergence of a modern understanding of public and private spaces to highlight its class and gender connotations. Then, focusing on middle-class women's experiences of public spaces, we use examples from the mid-nineteenth century and the late-twentieth century to illustrate continuities and changes. We emphasize persistent but evolving exclusions from the category "public," which have been sustained in part by changing delineations of "public space" associated with consumer activities. In developing our argument, we question representations of public spaces invoked in arguments about its decline and argue for a politics sensitive to different experiences of such spaces.     

Arena gets the growth syndrome

Abstract

Geographical educators can make useful contributions to the process of community development by helping local communities to achieve greater understanding of their environments. One way to do this is via the concept of regional synthesis, developed by, and shared with, the local residents of a community through the medium of a course which focuses on their local regional geography. A localised geography course was offered in 1977 to out ‐of‐school adults in the Kohala area of the island of Hawaii. The specific mechanics of the course are described here, and short‐term outcomes are evaluated. The potential of this form of ‘applied geography’ is briefly discussed.     

Private Cooking,Public Eating: Women street vendors in South Durban

The diverse cultural spaces of eThekwini (Durban), South Africa, reflect the accommodations and daily cultural negotiations made by the residents of a city whose demographies represent the complex inheritances of interactions between a long history of colonial segregation, nearly 50 years of formal apartheid policies, rapid modernisation, and global networks of migration, production and exchange. This article explores the heavily gendered spaces in which the street food which is characteristic of many areas of the city is produced. ‘Kitchens’, whether a paraffin stove on the street or in an ‘informal’ settlement shack, or dedicated space in a modern flat or house, locate and position borrowings, appropriations and imitations in ingredients, techniques and recipes, between diverse cultural traditions. The cultural performance of identity links the private and the public, the kitchen and the spaces of consumption. Food, and the making of food, are inscribed with ethnicity, with understandings of what is ‘real’, of authenticity and tradition.     

Personal Acts with Public Meanings: Suicides by Soviet Women Teachers in the Early Stalin Era

During the first stage of the Stalin era, suicides by Soviet women teachers revealed the essential ambiguity of a self–destructive act, the uncertain identity of women as public activists, and the difficult position of teachers at a time of intense political conflict. Examining eight women teachers who killed themselves in the period 1928 to 1931, this study argues that this assertion of self–control through self–destruction was also a surrender to others, including the actors and structures whose domination originally contributed to suicidal behaviours. This study thus describes both limited opportunities for and considerable restraints upon women teachers in the Stalinist context.     

The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex,Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy

How did judicial authorities in late medieval Italy understand the relationship between gender, sexuality, social status, magic and public order, especially when magic was used to facilitate the crime of adultery? What might this reveal about the intersection of gender, magic and public order in a place and time so fraught with political and social tensions? This study qualitatively compares four love‐magic trials from fourteenth‐century Lucca and suggests that the anxieties underpinning these trials were both particular to late medieval Italian communes and projected onto two populations, women and priests, whose unchecked sexuality posed the greatest threat to civic order. Historians examining gender in medieval European magic trials have often treated judicial officials’ anxieties as portents of the ‘witch craze’ of early modern Europe. Historians of medieval Lucca have tended to treat the political and gender histories of the city as largely separate. This article suggests that the courts’ increasing regulation of gender and sexuality in late medieval Lucca reflected larger ecclesiastical and communal concerns about the dissolution of civic order. In a world of civic power that increasingly belonged to secular men, the unchecked sexuality of women and clergy represented a dual threat to the stability of the family and, by extension, the city. This article argues that secular and ecclesiastical judicial officials feared not magic itself, but the ability of magic to invert power relations between men and women and between clergy and laity, destroying public order.