Domestic Spaces as Public Places: An Ethnoarchaeological Case Study of Houses, Gender, and Politics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

In an ethnoarchaeological case study, we take a gendered perspective on the house as a locus of political life in Conambo, a village of about 200 Achuar- and Quichua-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this small-scale society, women and men engage actively in political practice in independent yet complementary ways, and the domestic context is a place where political life is conducted on a daily basis. In this article, the house is examined as a politicized context at three scales of materiality: the organization of settlement in the community, the spatial relationships in the house, and the scale of painted designs on pottery bowls used in the house. At each scale, we identify material correlates of women's and men's participation. Our goal is to bring attention to potential archaeological correlates of women's political involvement in past societies, to question assumptions about women's political lives and domestic spaces, and to expand the ways in which anthropological archaeology may contribute to understanding cross-cultural variation in women's and men's domains of power.     

The trial of the new woman: citizens-in-training in the new Soviet Republic

This essay examines the texts of Soviet plays from the 1920s known as agitation trials that deal with issues of women's emancipation and participation in the public sphere. It argues that, far from showing women to be men's equals (the ostensible purpose of the plays), the trials give a shocking portrayal of their heroines' faults, from passivity and meddling to gossip and lack of discipline. Given these weaknesses, the women delegates are supposed to recognise their need for tutelage from the new authorities. Their citizenship is thus held, at best, on contingent approval from those authorities.     

公共空间内犯罪被害性别差异的阐释:基于整合性的理论视角

激进女权主义以父权制为理论核心,为私人空间内发生的女性被害提供了直接的解释。然而,父权制却无法对公共空间内存在的被害性别差异提供完备的解释。基于女权主义犯罪学、日常活动理论和时间地理学,本文从整合的视角,以父权制作为结构性起点,以劳动分工和女性对犯罪的恐惧为中间环节,以女性日常活动中时空约制对其被害风险的影响为落脚点,阐释了公共空间内犯罪被害性别差异的原因。最后总结了本文的解释思路,并为进一步促进我国犯罪地理学发展提出了一些建议。     

Empowering women: an essential objective

The draft action plan of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) calls for enhancing women's participation in all levels of the political process and public life, promoting women's education and employment with attention to alleviation of poverty and illiteracy, halting discriminatory practices against women, establishing women's rights, and improving women's ability to earn income and achieve economic self-reliance. The document specifically refers to the importance of girls beyond their traditional roles as potential childbearers and caretakers. The action plan requests actions to enforce minimum marriage age laws and to assure women's choice in spouse selection. Female genital mutilation is prohibited. Preventive efforts are to be directed to infanticide, prenatal sex selection, trafficking in girls, female prostitution, and pornography. The men who are in positions of power have a particular responsibility to bring about gender equality and to focus on men's responsibility in parenthood and child support. Fertility is related to women's paid employment and higher educational levels. The longterm success of population programs is dependent on women's ability to make informed decisions at all levels and in all spheres of life.     

‘A Wigwam to Westminster’: Performing Mohawk Identity in Imperial Britain, 1890s–1990s

This article examines the travels and appearances of Canadian Mohawk writers, lecturers, and performers E. Pauline Johnson and John Brant‐Sero, who appeared in Britain as self‐identified Mohawks, Canadians, and members of the British Empire during the late‐Victorian and Edwardian years of heightened imperial sentiment. The article draws upon feminist scholarship on performance, imperialism, and culture and consumption for the late‐Victorian and Edwardian period. It argues that, while Johnson and Brant‐Sero challenged stereotypes of Mohawk gender relations, they also were part of imperialist modernity; their gendered ‘performances’– on and off‐stage – must be analysed within the context of the gendered cultures of consumption and performance of late‐Victorian and Edwardian British society.     

‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style,Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.     

Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth–Century Britain

This study situates pockets as significant gendered objects in the dress and lives of men and women in the period from the 1790s to 1914. Using surviving examples and a diverse range of visual and documentary sources, it examines the role of pockets in the consumption of personal possessions and money, and explores how pockets occupied a special place in relation to the body and its gestures. By revealing differences in the way men and women used their pockets, the study concludes that pockets embodied change and complexity within the consumption of fashion and the construction of gender.     

Reading Victorian Rags: Recycling,Redemption, and Dickens's Ragged Children

In Victorian Britain rags were not only associated with the inadequate clothing of the poor, they were also viewed as a valuable commodity, widely collected for recycling into paper. This essay examines rags as simultaneously despised and precious objects, tracing the connections between Victorian accounts of poverty, the industrial recycling of rags into paper, and the redemption narratives created by Charles Dickens about rescued children. A supporter of Ragged Schools and champion of rags recycling, Dickens drew on the idea of the transformation of dirty rags into clean paper in his representations of ragged children. To him, the recycling of rags indicated the civilizing forces of modernity, and reading Dickens's representations of ragged children in this context reveals how cloth recycling became a paradigm for society's duties towards destitute children. This essay explains Dickens's juxtaposition of ragged children with references to rag-dealing in his novels; by this means he suggested that street children, like their ragged clothing, were capable of being purified and transformed into social usefulness.     

Tender Beauty: Victorian Painting and the Problem of Sentimentality

One of the most enduring critical legacies of modernism has been the condemnation of the sentimentality of Victorian art. This essay argues that recent art historical attempts to discuss Victorian sentimentality are condemned to repeat modernist critical judgements about sentimental art because of their espousal of historicist methodologies which produce historical distance between artwork and the critical viewer in the present. Instead, I argue, our own emotional involvement with Victorian paintings should form part of our scholarly accounts of their meanings, because their affective power is central to their aesthetic qualities. To look properly, I argue, is also to feel. To exemplify this I discuss Augustus Mulready's Remembering the Joys that Have Passed Away (1873), in order to show how a sentimental look at this painting undermines approaches that absorb sentimentality into historicist, social-constructionist and ideological accounts of such a picture.     

“(S)he Conquers Who Endures”: Theodora DeWolf Colt and the Birth of a New Cultural Elite

This essay explores the intersection of gender and class in the making of the new “high brow” culture of the late nineteenth century, represented by the matriarch of Bristol, Rhode Island, Theodora Goujaud DeWolf Colt. Through her poetry and salons, Theodora, like other wealthy women of the time, helped fashion a new bourgeois culture, which, though centered in New York and Boston, radiated outward to the smaller cities of the U.S., such as Bristol. Although the gendered norms and practices of the time excluded her from participation in much of public life, Theodora represented a new model of autonomy for upper-class women, for she was unmarried, not dependent on a man, and an independent intellectual. Her work also demonstrated the gendered tensions inherent in the formation of this new culture, as she developed a distinctive literary perspective that subtly criticized the paternalism and bourgeois values of that era.     

Experiencing Displacement: The Transformation of Women's Spaces in (Former) East Germany

Based on a comparison of two different research projects carried out in (former) East Germany, this paper analyses the effects of German (re)unification and postsocialist transformation as a specific, gendered form of displacement. We show how new divisions between "public" and "private" have affected women's sense of self and identity, cautioning against the notion that geographical restructuring will inevitably result in an empowering dissolution of fixed, placebound identities. Instead, we emphasise that places are connected to identities through relations of power and social practices that create unequal conditions for engagement in the (re)production of space. Feminist approaches to citizenship are discussed as one way of challenging the current marginalisation of East German women in unified Germany.     

'Gendered Exclusions': women's fear of violence and changing relations to space

This paper examines how women's fear of violence is realised as spatial exclusions. Quantitative surveys on fear are used to show the number of women who are afraid, and the nature of the most frightening places. However, it is argued that quantitative surveys are of limited value in approaching the mental and social processes behind fear and in understanding the fear-related production of space. Qualitative research methods are used to explain the matter in more depth. It may be argued that fear is a consequence of women's unequal status, but it also contributes to perpetuating gendered inequalities. The paper reveals multiple experiences that change women's relations to space. Experiences and attempts at violence, and incidents of sexual harassment produce a space from which women are excluded on account of their gender. Social and emotional aspects, such as increased feelings of vulnerability, lack of social support, and a feeling of not having control over what is happening to oneself, have spatial consequences. These feelings often increase along with ageing, injuring, bereavement or moving to another place, as well as pregnancy and motherhood. I argue that the spatial exclusions in women's lives are a reflection of gendered power relations. Women's subjective feelings contribute to the intersubjective power-related process of producing space. Urban space is produced by gender relations, and reproduced in those everyday practices where women do not-or dare not-have a choice over their own spatial behaviour.     

Portraits of the Artist as Politician,the Politician as Artist: Commemorating the Disraeli Phenomenon

This article examines the reception of Benjamin Disraeli as a bestselling novelist and respectable elder statesman as reflected in obituaries and biographical sketches appearing in the wake of his death in 1881. It starts out by tracing Disraeli’s entry into the popular imagination during his lifetime before focusing on the intersections of literary and political fame in late nineteenth-century commemorations. Disraeli’s posthumous media reception reveals that his deft migration between the literary and the political fields as closely interconnected arenas of self-fashioning crucially influenced his position as one of the most eminent figures in Victorian public life. It will be shown, however, that the narrative of the duality of Disraeli’s public acclaim is complicated by the celebrifying impact of his lifelong position as a social, ethnic, and intellectual outsider who transgressed Victorian norms and categories. In its attempt to unpick the multiple layers of Disraeli’s Victorian pre-eminence from the angle of Celebrity Studies, this article illuminates the tension between processes of self-fashioning and media appropriation that informs the production and consumption of fame and celebrity in nineteenth-century Britain and beyond. It thus participates in an ongoing scholarly conversation about the cultural history of fame and celebrity, presenting Disraeli as a type of media celebrity whose public profile was fashioned from a variety of dynamically interacting and mutually sustaining manifestations of fame.     

The writing is on the wall: the text(ure) of women's toilets in Australia

This article is about public toilets for women. Drawing on data provided by the textual material posted in women's toilets in Victoria, Australia, it is argued that in western nations, toilets represent more than instrumental facilities for the disposal of waste products. Because they also serve as repositories of social anxieties about bodies, gender, cultural and religious differences and health/death, public toilets are sites used to order the disorder of women's bodies and activities. Cultural intolerances have problematised differences in ablution practices and ‘correct’ toilet behaviours are frequently prescribed. As unique examples in the west of cultural and gendered practice, women's toilets offer rich material on the discipline and meaning of gendered space in a range of different environmental settings.     

Minding Civilisation and Humanity in 1867: A Case Study in British Imperial Culture and Victorian Anti-Slavery

As this analysis of press debate in 1867 finds, Victorian opposition to slavery defies any simple classification as universal humanitarianism or imperial reform. British anti-slavery sentiment, in very different contexts, might claim the mantle of Christendom, the empire or human civilisation. By considering such a porous area of international and colonial policy in public discussion, this article highlights some surprising commonalities between Bernard Porter's ‘absent-mindedness’ thesis and its critics. In doing so the piece suggests some possible directions for the new imperial history, as British historians reject an impenetrable national story and yet appreciate the sheer breadth of Victorian narrow-mindedness about the wider world.     

"De-humanised females and Amazonians": British wartime fashion and its representation in Home chat, 1914-1918

Popular representations of the fashionably dressed female body between 1914 and 1918 were highly contradictory and, as this essay will show, were sharply delineated in Home Chat, one of a growing number of relatively new women's magazines which addressed the needs of an expanding skilled working-class and lower-middle-class female readership. Aiming to provide women with practical advice about all aspects of their daily lives, from the traditional concerns of fashion and beauty, marriage and children, to the more contentious issue of women's aspirations beyond the home, Home Chat was uniquely placed to reflect shifting gender and class relations.     

On Not Reading The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service

This essay focuses on Garnet Wolseley’s controversial war instruction manual, The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service (1869). While the Pocket-book’s contribution to discussions of reading and soldiers’ education has carved out a significant place for it in Victorian military history, in its day it was constantly contested and undermined by contradictory representations, as a book much talked about but little read. This essay is an exercise in tracing these eccentric reception histories, as an acute reminder that books may well have vibrant intellectual lives without actually being read. To examine the literary and material circulation of the Pocket-book in the late nineteenth century, it draws on archival research in the Macmillan Archive and Wolseley’s private papers to discuss the genesis of the text not just as a compendium of information but also as an object that is handled, carried, and exchanged. I juxtapose these considerations with episodes in the representation of the Pocket-book: in an anti-war pamphlet; an anonymous satirical drawing found in Wolseley’s personal scrapbooks; and in Kipling’s short stories about British soldiers in colonial South Asia. In all of these, the Pocket-book is characterized as a dubious, even dangerous text – one that was neither read, nor should be. The examples demonstrate three of the different trajectories through which the Pocket-book emerged as an unread book in the Victorian imagination: through encouragements not to read, rejection, and misappropriation.     

Women's policy networks and the Infanticide Act 1922

This article examines the reason for the passage of the 1922 Infanticide Act, arguing that it owes much to the influence and work of women's policy networks. Historians have disagreed as to why the Act was passed with relative suddenness in the early 1920s, at a time when infanticide was generally considered a much less pressing social issue than it had been in Victorian England. Moreover, several Bills brought between 1908 and 1913 proposing that the law on this subject be amended so that women who killed their newborns no longer faced the death penalty had all failed. Importantly, the roles of juror and lay magistrate had become open to women in 1920, following the passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919. The public interest generated by a case of newborn murder tried at the Leicester Assizes in 1921 (particularly amongst women's organizations, including the suffragette group the Women's Freedom League) led several leading women with political connections to push for a change in the law. Without the pressure these women could bring to bear on civil servants and politicians, attempts to bring in new legislation on infanticide would have been postponed well into the twentieth century.