From Margin to Centre: Recent Trends in Modern Italian Women's and Gender History

This article reviews the considerable progress that has been made in modern Italian women's and gender history over the last decade. It puts forward the argument that such history, whose roots lie primarily in the feminist movement of the 1970s, was until recently consigned to the margins of the historical establishment but is now beginning to make a much greater impact. The article looks at the richness of the current wave of new publications and the wide range of topics they cover but argues that in a number of areas the historiography is still somewhat uneven. It also suggests that there is a pressing need for works of synthesis to draw together the research that has been done to date.     

Gender,Colonialism and Citizenship in the Modern Middle East

Books reviewed in this article: Selma Botman, Engendering Citizenship in Egypt Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (eds), A Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon     

Modern and Medieval Approaches to Pilgrimage,Gender and Sacred Space

This article examines both modern ethnographical, and medieval hagiographical, constructs of sacred space in the context of female pilgrimage. Beginning with an overview of the ways in which anthropological theories of sacred space and gender have informed pilgrimage scholarship over the last fifty years, it focuses in particular on two conceptual models: that which argues that spatial practices employed by cult centres served to distance women from holy places, and that which contends that accommodation was reached between the devotional aspirations of female pilgrims on the one hand, and the institutional policies of the Church on the other. In turning to the Middle Ages, the second part of the article examines narrative representations of sacred space, and reveals that the spatial challenges posed by female pilgrimage in the medieval West were addressed and mediated in hagiography in surprisingly similar ways.     

近代早期英国家庭中的性别关系

家庭是形成性别关系最小的基本单位,在近代早期,英国社会中的性别关系在家庭中得到明显的体现。结婚后,丈夫和妻子为了建立一个独立的新家而共同协作,劳动的性别分工基本遵循男主外、女主内的模式,各个阶层的妇女都要为家庭经济作贡献,但这并没有改变其地位卑微的状况,“男尊女卑”、“男主女从”仍然是这一时期家庭中的常态。     

The Construction of Gender in Modern Chinese Law: Discrepant Gender Meanings in the Republican Civil Code

This article examines the intersection of law, gender, and modernity during the transitional Republican era (1912–49). It approaches the topic through a critical reading of the Republican Civil Code of 1929–30, and related commentary on the code by Chinese legal experts. By analyzing the gender assumptions embodied in several newly emergent categories of legal regulation, including legal personhood, minimum marriage age, consent, domicile, surnames, marital property, and child custody, the article’s line of questioning reveals how gender meanings helped to shape modern concepts like universality, equality, and freedom. The findings illustrate the ways in which Republican civil law broke with late imperial legal and gender norms tied to Confucian patrilineal ideology and in addition established new legal and gender meanings that helped to consolidate Chinese politics on a republican basis and to reconfigure modern gender difference on a conjugal basis.