A Feminist Generation in Iran?

Numerous observers have noted that a feminist generation of educated young women appears to be emerging in Iran, despite the anti-feminist discourse of the Iranian government. Evidence from three surveys conducted in 2000–2003 confirms and complicates these observations. Educated young women are significantly more likely to espouse feminist attitudes of various sorts than other Iranians, including educated young men. In addition, educated young women are significantly more likely to work outside the home, marry later, give birth later, have fewer children, and have more egalitarian marriages than other Iranian women. However, surprising proportions of older Iranians also espouse feminist attitudes, and a majority of respondents in one nationally representative sample of urban Iranians identify themselves as proponents of women's rights.     

Women’s education,time use and marriage in Iran

In many parts of the world, higher education has increased female chances of paid work and reduced the economic benefits of marriage. In Iran, however, female labour force participation has remained in low rates despite considerable improvements in female education. In the absence of direct economic benefits of education for women, this paper uses data from the 2009 Time Use Survey, representing urban areas of Iran, to explore another pathway of the impact of education on transition to marriage. It is postulated that female education can lead to later marriage by changing women’s role priorities, at least in two ways. While enrolment in education is time-consuming and incompatible with requirements of marital life, higher education can increase the chances and desire for engagement in alternatives to the roles related to marriage. The findings provide partial support for both explanations. These findings not only deepen our understanding about differentials in the time use and the potential pathway of the impact of female education on marriage, but also provide important information for policy makers who are concerned with marital and fertility behaviours of the large cohort of young educated women in Iran.     

Freemasonry in Turkey’s modern history of ideas: A factor of liberalization and individualization?

This article provides a brief outline of the impact of Turkish Freemasonry on the development of modern Turkey since the eighteenth century. It draws a short and incomplete history from a qualitative viewpoint, including influential topics, approaches, and camps. As European influences were historically strong in shaping Freemasonry on the Bosphorus, the text makes Turkish Freemasonry a case of Turkish‐European exchange and an example of specific currents of modernization, individualization, and liberalization—with all their pros and cons—within Islamic societies. The relevant questions are where and in which frameworks such currents may have been effective, where they perhaps produced the opposite of what they intended, and to what extent they could contribute to mitigating today’s torn political climate to all participants’ benefit. The article is based on interactions with representatives of Turkey’s Freemasonry, mainly of the liberal and progressive strands, making it more a narrative‐oriented account of an evolving greater picture than an array of detailed empirical‐scientific evidence on single pillars. The goal is to illustrate the complexity of “semi‐secular” socio‐religious dynamics in a Muslim context and to put the past into some relation to the present.     

The “new” social history and the anthropological history of modern Mexico

Tutino, John. From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. xvii + 425 pp. including appendices, bibliography, and index. $42.50 cloth.

Beezley, William H. Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ix + 181 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $19.95 cloth.     

‘Hidden from view’?: an analysis of the integration of women’s history and women’s voices into Australia’s social history exhibitions

ABSTRACT

‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis’ work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.     

Why Women of Colour in Geography?

The dismally low number of women of colour in the discipline of geography in dominantly English-speaking countries can be explained by a number of systemic features of the discipline. Evidence suggests that a culture of whiteness in academic hiring has overtaken more overt forms of racial and sexist discrimination to limit the number of women of colour hired. More fundamentally, a lack of mentoring discourages women of colour from entering the discipline from undergraduate studies onward. We now face the ironic situation that as more and more studies of racism and other forms of discrimination appear in the geographical literature, the number of women of colour doing those studies remains static.

¿Por qué mujeres de color en geografía?

Las cifras deplorablemente bajas de mujeres de color en la disciplina de geografía anglo-americana pueden ser explicado por varios característicos sistemático de la disciplina. La evidencia sugiere que una cultura de blancura en la contratación académica ha alcanzado formas más explícito de discriminación racial y sexual que limita el número de mujeres en la disciplina. Más fundamental, la falta de dar consejo disuade mujeres de color de abrazar la disciplina desde los estudios universitario no graduado hacia adelante. Nos enfrentamos con la situación irónica que mientras se publican más y más estudios de racismo y otras formas de discriminación en las revistas geográficas, el número de mujeres de color que produce estos estudios queda estático.     

A secular shift in Carolingian history writing?

This article explores a series of Carolingian historians, writing in the early ninth century, who marginalized the role of God’s agency, in sharp contrast to the pattern established by the Annales Regni Francorum. Where this has been noted before, largely in relation to Einhard’s Vita Karoli, it has been explained either as a clash between lay and monastic ideals or as a by-product of the classical renewal at the Carolingian court. Examining this process across multiple texts suggests, however, that these historians can be understood as self-consciously ‘secularizing’ in response to contemporary crises.     

Racial Stereotyping: A Hidden Factor in the Vietnam War?

Book reviewed in this article:
Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950     

Construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history and the turning of modern history

The construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history has combined the indigenization of Western historiography and the modernization of traditional Chinese historiography, which reflects the characteristic of a change towards modern historiography. The academic sources of Yan’s view on social history include some Western thoughts such as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist theory, Edward Jenks’ patriarchal clan system theory, John Seeley’s political historiography, etc.; and also many indigenous sources such as Yang Zhu’s self benefit, Mozi’s selfless love, Buddhist views on mood, etc.     

Promoting the Advancement of Women: Baha'i Schools for Girls in Iran, 1909–35

In the early twentieth century, Iranian Baha'is were at the forefront of efforts to promote modern schooling for girls in Iran. Using previously untapped published primary sources and archival records, this article examines the history of the Baha'i schools for girls in the context of modern schooling of Iranian girls and assesses their contribution to female education in Iran. This contribution was significant and all the more remarkable considering the Iranian Baha'is’ numbers and resources and the restrictions under which they operated. Most notably, in the spring of 1933, less than two years before the forced closure of Baha'i schools by the Pahlavi state, 4 percent of all females in Iran's accredited schools were enrolled in Baha'i schools. The Baha'i community's most prestigious school, Tarbīyat-i banāt in Tehran, was by this time Iran's largest girls’ school. Outside Tehran, in some localities, the only girls’ schools were run by Baha'is, and in others a significant portion of all female pupils were enrolled in Baha'i schools.     

Biography without history?

Kevin Perkins: Menzies: Last of the Queen's Men, Rigby, Adelaide, 1968, pp. 264, $5.50.