The Missing Rib: Mobilizing Church Women for Change in Papua New Guinea

This paper examines the particular shape taken by a modern instance of ‘Third World’ feminism. In Papua New Guinea, an emerging nexus between grassroots female activism and Christian churches is helping to liberate and empower some female citizens in a state which in practice has neglected women's interests and gender relations despite early national rhetoric about the importance of women to nation‐building. Tracing the origins of modern women's fellowship groups to the early work of female missionaries with indigenous women, the paper considers the increasing politicization of women's organizations during the last two decades as they expand their ‘traditional’ preoccupation with spiritual, domestic, and welfare matters to embrace wider social, political, and human rights issues. In the course of surveying church women's groupings in Papua New Guinea, the paper looks specifically at the National Council of Women, women's groups in East New Britain Province, the United Church Women's Fellowship, and women's involvements in the developing ecumenical movement. The paper concludes by contrasting the class dimensions of grassroots Christian women's activism to official denial of the existence of class differentiation or exploitation in this purportedly egalitarian Melanesian state.     

Fellowship and Citizenship as Models of National Community: United Church Women's Fellowship in Ranongga,Solomon Islands

From humble beginnings in the 1960s, the United Church Women's Fellowship (UCWF) is now viewed as one of the most effective organizations on the island of Ranongga (Western Province, Solomon Islands). This essay considers reasons for the success of women's fellowship in Ranongga, focusing on the distinctive position of women in gendered local and translocal forms of social organization. Far from being isolated from the outside world, Ranonggan women have long been engaged in drawing outsiders into local communities. I explore this theme in narratives of Christian conversion and of the beginning of women's fellowship; I also consider the practices of local and national women's fellowship groups that work to constitute unified communities out of diverse groups of people. My discussion of Ranonggan women's fellowship illustrates local dynamics of community‐making that do not map easily on to dominant models of nation‐states and ethnic groups. I ask whether the UCWF provides an alternative model for thinking about larger‐scale political formations, particularly in the Solomons. This question is especially relevant considering the significant contribution that women's Christian organizations have made in efforts to reconstitute a national community in the context of the ongoing political crisis in Solomon Islands.     

Competition,cooperation and resistance: women in the political field in Iraq

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003 many women supported the process of transition and became active in political parties and coalitions. A wide range of groups were also formed which pursued women's rights agendas and, in many cases, included a call for peace and reconciliation and charity activities for women and children. However, female political action and the field of women's rights remain divided by the same multiple boundaries of belonging which affect Iraqi society itself; women operate in specific ethnic and denominational, local and regional settings, and they support nationalist, secularist, left‐wing or Islamist agendas. Women's rights—whatever the direction—can be of major or minor concern. This article outlines female political action and draws attention to the key issues which are discussed, in particular, by secular feminists in Iraq. In so doing, the article highlights how women in Iraq have not only lost, as a wide range of observers argue, but have also benefited from the restructure of the political landscape. Female political activists are still faced with old and new social, cultural, legal and political obstacles. The article argues that when women support narratives that leave men's superiority untouched, they are not simply victims of men or ‘false consciousness'; women either compete and cooperate, or they reject ideological narratives and power relations, while pursuing agendas of individual interest. Yet, despite competition among women and women's groups, and women's loyalty to agendas controlled by men, radical overtones that resist male domination can be heard— and should be supported.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.     

The care of women's health and beauty: an experience shared by medieval Jewish and Christian women

In this article I intend to elucidate the extent to which medieval western Jewish and Christian women shared customs, knowledge and practices regarding health care, a sphere which has been historically considered as part of women's daily domestic tasks. My study aims to identify female agency in medical care, as well as women's interaction across religious lines, by analysing elusive sources, such as medical literature on women's health care, and by collating the information they provide with data obtained from other textual and visual records. By searching specific evidence of the dialogues that must have occurred between Christian and Jewish women in transmitting their knowledge and experiences, I put forward the idea (developed from earlier work by Montserrat Cabré i Pairet) that medical texts with no clear attribution can be used as sources to reconstruct women's authoritative knowledge.     

Christianity,Tradition, and Everyday Modernity: Towards an Anatomy of Women's Groupings in Melanesia

This paper approaches its central theme of women's groupings in Melanesia via critique of several longstanding shibboleths, including examples of their strategic appropriation by indigenous people. These stereotypes include the romantic image of rural dwellers as pre‐modern traditionalists on whom Christianity is an imposed foreign veneer; the hoary rhetorical opposition of ‘West’ and ‘non‐West’/modernity and tradition/individual and community; and the pervasive essentialization of Melanesian women as ‘naturally’ family‐oriented, communitarian, and less individualistic and competitive than men. Seeking patterns in regional diversity and fragmentation, the paper examines cultural, historical, and structural correlates of a wide range of women's groupings, including National Councils of Women, church women's organizations, and the largely self‐financed local church fellowship groups which are growing steadily in number and significance in the virtual absence of effective state institutions. Increasingly, women's groupings are complementing their traditional Christian spiritual, domestic, and welfare concerns with attention to global feminist, human rights, and ecological issues which are often reworked locally into scarcely recognizable shapes. Eschewing romanticization, the paper considers the potential and the problems of women's groupings in male‐dominated Melanesia, including women's own divisions and their typical aversion to assuming public responsibilities.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

For the Good of The Nation: ‘Strategic Egalitarianism’ in the Singapore Context

In this article, I introduce the concept of ‘strategic egalitarianism’ in relation to women's co‐optation into nationalist projects in Singapore. By strategic egalitarianism, I mean the granting of equality to women that is contingent upon meeting particular pragmatic nationalist objectives. For example, the granting of equal educational and employment opportunities by the government in the 1960s was necessitated by Singapore's economic survival as a newly emerging nation. By the 1980s, another pragmatic national concern dealing with rapid decline in population growth emerged, requiring that women prioritise the role of motherhood. A complicating factor in the procreationist discourse is the government's eugenic policy that favours the ‘right’ kind of women, in particular, to bear the ‘right’ kind of babies for the continued vitality of the nation. In the course of this article, I examine the problem with strategic egalitarianism, which shifts its ground depending on the nationalist goals of the day, and the implications this has for Singapore women.     

Probability and certainty in seventeenth-century england. a study of the relationships between natural science,religion, history. law,and literature

Enlightenment optimism over mankind's progress was often voiced in terms of botanical growth by key figures such as John Millar; the mind's cultivation marked the beginning of this process. For agriculturists such as Arthur Young cultivation meant an advancement towards virtue and civilization; the cultivation of the mind can similarly be seen as an enlightenment concept which extols the human potential for improvable reason. In the course of this essay I aim to explore the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘cultivation’ through botanical metaphor. By using the recurring motif of the mind's cultivation as a site from which to explore enlightenment views on female understanding, I investigate how far concerns with human progress extended to the female mind.

I examine the language of botany and cultivation in texts by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld alongside that of Rousseau and Millar. Wollstonecraft's appropriation and subsequent inversion of the conventional cultivation metaphor, for example, demonstrates her desire to draw attention to society's neglect of women's educational potential by substituting images of enlightened growth with those of luxuriant decay. By pushing this analogy further she indicates how society has cultivated women rearing them like exotic flowering plants or ‘luxuriants’ where ‘strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty’. I discuss the antipastoral rationalism which enables her to unmask the false sentiment behind this traditional metaphoric association between women and flowers arguing that such familiar tropes are the language of male desire and are indicative of women's problematic relationship to culture.     

The contested meanings of home for women caring for children with long-term care needs in Ontario,Canada

Home as a place of caring is theorized using the literature from geography, sociology, housing and feminist studies. To support our theorization, grounded theory is used to capture and interpret the experiences of women caring for children with long-term care needs in the home. Eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with women in Ontario, Canada uncovered differences in the way the women perceived their homes and highlighted their multiple and complex experiences. The findings revealed three key issues. First, women do not want their homes to be completely defined by long-term care activities as many other types of activities are situated in their homes. Second, long-term care activities and schedules are not segregated but become deeply embedded and enmeshed within the spatial and temporal practices and processes of family life. Third, the meanings, characteristics and ideal of ‘home’ portrayed in popular culture and the academic literature often clashed with what the women experienced on a daily basis. Analysis revealed the tensions surrounding ‘reconstructing spaces in the home’ and ‘the home as a private and public place’ which are indicative of the women's struggles with the disjuncture between the ideal and lived home. The women's experiences challenge us to consider new ways of theorizing the home, and the home when it is a place where long-term care is provided.     

‘On a nos mots à dire’: Kanak Women's Experience of Bridewealth in Lifou

Bridewealth in Lifou cannot be discussed on its own; rather it should be considered within the plurality of ceremonial acts which are needed to legitimize a marriage as customary. What do these transactions mean? Where does women's agency lie? Through a longitudinal analysis of ethnographic materials from my fieldwork in Lifou, Loyalty Islands, I consider how Kanak women are engaged in and perceive these ceremonial and cultural processes through a declared women's perspective that highlights their ability to make autonomous choices in an open ended historical context. I argue that it is a case of ‘positive agency’. I emphasize that local categories (june hmala and wenehleng) which define specific moments in this process can be subsumed under the anthropological term ‘bridewealth’. Further, I examine the meaning of money in bridewealth and the fact that the monetary contribution keeps increasing, raising local concerns about the need to regulate the amount circulating in marriage exchanges and its dispersion. Furthermore in Lifou there is no indication that the assembling of the bridewealth by the grooms implies a commoditization and (later) exploitation of women.     

Global Agendas,Local Norms: Mobilizing around Unpaid Care and Domestic Work in Asia

This article explores the articulation and framing of unpaid care work and the mobilization around it at two spatial scales, the global and national. For the latter it focuses on three of the largest and most diverse countries in Asia — India, China and Indonesia. While the concept of unpaid care work has received considerable attention in international development discourse, it is rarely found in feminist mobilization and advocacy across these countries. The article asks why this issue remains largely excluded from women's political agendas. It also explores how it is framed when it is included. While most organizations recognize women's double burden and the importance of domestic labour, they do not consider ‘unpaid care work’ as a legitimate political issue around which to mobilize. Rather, it is framed, if at all, as part of other political agendas, such as the rights of the elderly (in China), the rights to social protection, especially childcare and maternity entitlements (in India), or the right to equal opportunities within marriage (in Indonesia). The study analyses the differences in framing, the conceptualization of gender equality embedded therein, and the implications for policy.     

Bridewealth1 and the Autonomy of Women in Melanesia

Considering bridewealth in Melanesia from the angle of women's autonomy, in this introduction we review and analyse the various elements of this marriage practice that reveal its place in the symbolic, social and economic worlds of women. With an accent on social transformation, we discuss women's autonomy and agency in relation to the constraints that bridewealth puts on their lives, and on how they engage with it. Knowing what bridewealth is, and how the rules of reciprocity that it indexes obligate married women, the focus is on women's ability to act within these constraints or to redefine their contours, particularly with regards to economic and reproductive agency. The article, which serves also as the introduction for the special issue on bridewealth in the journal Oceania, discusses themes analysed in the collection, such as the moral prospects of bridewealth today, its relation to ‘capital’ in twenty-first century Oceania, the triad value/valuables/valuers, and the empowerment of women. It concludes with thoughts on gender inequality.     

Nunneries,Communities and the Revaluation of Domesticity

This is a review of three books: a collection of essays edited by Diane Watt on medieval women in their communities, and two monographs, by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Marilyn Oliva, on nunneries in late medieval Germany and England. All three suggest in different ways that women's activities are regularly undervalued by the assumption that women try to do the same things as men, and fail. Hamburger argues that the artistic production of late fifteenth‐century nuns has been dismissed because it does not satisfy the criteria of (male) ‘high’ art. He shows that ‘nuns' work’ is in fact the product of a complex symbolic visual and textual culture. Oliva argues that the study of nunneries has been neglected because it is assumed that, since they were not rich and powerful like the monasteries, there is no evidence about them. She shows that it is possible to undertake a detailed prosopographical study of a group of nunneries from a single diocese. I argue that when in this context we talk about ‘women’, we are often in fact talking about the domestic sphere, with which women were so strongly associated. A revaluation of women's activities entails a revaluation of domesticity and the home.     

Rethinking Twentieth‐Century Guadalajara

This paper discusses the impact of the conference ‘Las Olvidadas: Gender and Women's History in Post‐Revolutionary Mexico’ that took place at Yale University in May 2001, into my own work on women's political mobilisations. It points out from where I departed and how it changed my perspective from women's history to gender history by focusing on women workers in the tortilla industry, a union cacicazgo (political bossism), civic culture, narratives, cultural memory and female political trajectories after the granting of women's suffrage in 1953 in Jalisco.     

‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

In this article, I consider the kitchen as domestic space that is at once gendered and gendering in its construction and use by women as they negotiate their social position across the life course. Deeply rooted patriarchal values structure Konkomba society in northern Ghana, and a woman's role is to be a wife, to prepare food in support of her husband's family and community. Although the normative definition of woman's role in society stems from a clear-cut division of labor between women and men, a woman must negotiate her social position and ability to fulfill these labor obligations; she becomes a woman and wife by working to gain access to and control over resources and labor. I explore the shifting dynamics of women's work and social position across the life course, emphasizing the transition from young woman to woman-as-wife-as-cook in her husband's community. These negotiations take place in the kitchen – a fiercely feminine space in which a woman becomes a wife when she earns the right to place hearth stones and prepare a ceremonial ‘first meal’ for her husband and his community.     

Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum

In this article, I examine cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness in the commercial Hollywood film: Girl Interrupted (1999). In contrast to most of the disability studies literature concerned with cultural representation, this article explicitly examines how the spatiality of ‘mad women's’ lives is constructed through film. Drawing on post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives on disability, and on conceptual ideas from the limited social geographic literature concerned with the lives of persons with mental illness, I explore the contradictory cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness constructed through this film. This approach recognizes that representations of ‘mad women’ and their places in society and space involve contradictory, tension-laden relationships between spectator and cultural product, complex discursive negotiations of meaning, and gendered processes of meaning-making, in some ways affirming mad women's lives and in others perpetuating negative stereotypes about women with mental illness and where they belong.     

‘The women's lobby’: Networks,coalition building and the women of middle Australia

The ‘women's lobby’ or the ‘powerful feminist lobby’ has been held responsible for a range of evils including the undermining of the traditional family, public expenditure on community services, social engineering and the imposition of ‘political correctness’. To what extent is there a ‘women's lobby’ working from inside or outside government to influence public decision‐mating? In this paper we explore this question, using data from a social network analysis of the Australian women's movement conducted in 1992–3.

Our findings are that there is a large, very loosely connected network of organisations engaging in advocacy on behalf of women. Density of ties is less than is found in a comparable study of the Canadian women's movement but there are more ties between non‐government groups and government agencies. Issues of organisational philosophy have inhibited the development of a ‘peak body’ for the non‐government women's movement and led to reliance on issue‐specific coalitions. Latterly, awareness of increasing fragmentation has led to a series of attempts to create more effective national networking.     

‘Mountain women’: silent contributors to the global agenda for sustainable mountain development

In this article, we examine the transnational and international discourses and initiatives focused on and/or carried out by the so-called ‘mountain women.’ Tracking the growing reference to ‘mountain women’, we analyze the way in which the construction and the claim of a gendered identity has developed within the general debate on the international recognition of the global importance of mountain environments that emerged about 20 years ago. Drawing on documents, a survey and interviews, our main objective is exploring how such a reference could lead to the making of an imagined community of ‘mountain women’ offering opportunities for political action. This article concludes that, though women are identified in international discourses as essential contributors to sustainable mountain development, the social identity ‘mountain women’ has not yet evolved into a collective identity around which political solidarities and strategies coalesce to ultimately ground collective action. Indeed, women's organizations have other themes on their agendas and are active at other scales apart from the global one. Indeed, few are willing to identify themselves as ‘mountain women.’ For the time being, ‘mountain women’ remain silent partners in the global agenda for sustainable mountain development.