Impoverished mothers and poor widows: negotiating images of poverty in Marseille's courts

In the early fifteenth century, in Marseille's court of first instance, a sailor's wife Margarida Gramone sued her son-in-law's estate to recoup money she had spent nursing her dying daughter and granddaughter. She justified her claim on the money by arguing that she had been completely impoverished by the medicine, doctors and wet nurses that her sick family had needed. She called witnesses to attest to her impoverished state and they told a story of a woman unable to pay her bills and reliant on the charity of her neighbours. Other witnesses in the same case, however, suggest Margarida was not poor, but a woman of means. Attempting to reconcile this discrepancy, this article will examine how Marseille's legally savvy citizens negotiated between at least two different attitudes towards the poor: a Christian celebration of charity and a legal scepticism of a pauper's word. The legal records from late medieval Marseille show a multivalent attitude towards the poor. They suggest that the city's citizens were able to draw on different narratives about poverty in order to win over the presiding judge. At the same time, witness testimony about the poor reminds us that the burden of charity was not always welcomed by Marseille's citizens.     

’When Men Are Weak‘: The Imperial Feminism of Frieda von Bülow

Frieda von Bülow was a colonialist woman author and activist who also engaged the bourgeois women's movement of pre-First World War Germany. She is of interest to scholars of German colonialism, racial thought, feminism, and women's literature. This article interprets her life experiences, including travel to German East Africa (mainland Tanzania) and her affair with Carl Peters, together with her feminist non-fiction and anti-feminist fiction, to argue that she developed an imperial feminism in which German women's emancipation was predicated on the subordination of racialised ‘others’.     

Agnes of Burgundy: an eleventh-century woman as monastic patron

As an eleventh-century monastic patron, Agnes of Burgundy was generous, thoughtful, and involved; she galvanized others into endowing monasteries and won the respect of the houses she supported. The association with grateful abbeys helped her and her husband, Geoffrey Martel, to establish the legitimacy of their rule. In this symbiosis, Agnes used the system for all it was worth, even eventually retiring as an old lady into one of her foundations, while religious life in west-central France flourished, aided by her support. Yet, although enormously wealthy and powerful, she did not act with full autonomy. Her life was shaped by the biological determinants of menarche and menopause; by involvement in familial strategies to advance her spouse's and children's careers; by limitations on her use of feudal power; and by gender roles that patterned behavior. She, and every other woman like her, functioned within a web of gender, class, and family constraints and expectations.     

The Queen and the City: Royal Female Intervention and Patronage in Hellenistic Civic Communities

In 196 bce , Queen Laodike III issued a decree (I.Iasos 4, I) to Iasos in Caria, Asia Minor, announcing that she was giving the Iasians a ten‐year supply of grain to alleviate their penury after her husband's conquest of their city, and she specified that the grain ought to be sold and the income used to provide dowries for the daughters of poor citizens. This and other donations were part of rebuilding efforts in the wake of military violence by Laodike's husband Antiochos III. For her beneficence, Laodike was honoured by cities with foundations of festivals, priestesses and sacred areas dedicated to preserving her cult. This reciprocity of goodwill was gendered, not only in the establishment of priestesses, but in the nature of the honours given; for example Iasos celebrated Laodike III's birthday with a procession of a maiden priestess and couples who were about to wed (I.Iasos 4, II), and the people of Teos dedicated a fountain in their city centre to Laodike and required that all brides should draw from it the water for their baths (SEG 41, 1003). Laodike's patronage and the cities’ responses to her bring to light the role of female citizens within the structures, perpetuation and ceremonial of the civic body. At the heart of honours given Laodike and her own self‐promotion was the identity of sister and mother, roles shaping her own queenship and the civic participation and power of the women she assisted.     

A 'Female Columbus' in 1887 America: Marking new social territory {1}

As a self-styled 'female Columbus', E. Catherine Bates took a transcontinental journey across North America with a woman companion in the late 1880s and, on her return to England, published A Year in the Great Republic . This paper, following critical theory approaches to the study of travel writing, explores the ways in which several of Bates's many-layered social identities as a woman of the British e lite class came to the fore in her travel narrative. I argue that Bates constructed her narrative primarily around her shifting gender identities- as 'feminine' and 'feminist'- and suggest that imperialistic writing was less apparent because she was travelling to a place that had an 'empire-to-empire' rather than a 'colony-to-empire', relationship to Britain during its 'Age of Empire'. In this paper I am searching for a middle ground between what I have termed 'modernist' interpretations of women's travel writing and the more recent post-structural interpretations. I make the case that Victorian women travellers' revisionist commentary on gender roles, as well as their observations of domestic scenes, should remain in focus as we continue to mark them for historical study.     

Charlotte Sophia Burne: Shropshire Folklorist,First Woman President of the Folklore Society,and First Woman Editor of Folklore. Part 1: A Life and Appreciation

Charlotte Burne (1850–1923) served the Folklore Society (FLS) for forty years. She was editor of the massive Shropshire Folklore (1883–6), and the second revised edition of the FLS's only official guide, The Handbook of Folklore (1914). She authored over seventy folklore papers, notes and reviews in Folklore and its predecessors, as well as several articles in newspapers and magazines; she was the first woman editor of this journal (1900–08) and the first woman President of the FLS (1909–10). This appreciation is the first part of a two-part study of her life and works. The second part will be a provisional bibliography of her published works.     

‘She is but a Woman’: Kitty Byron and the English Edwardian Criminal Justice System

In 1902, Kitty Byron stabbed her cohabitee, Reginald Baker, on a public street. Though her murder was premeditated, and she was of a lower class than her married lover, Byron gained the sympathy of the press and public, primarily due to the gender failings of her partner. Based on the legal records of the Home Office and newspaper reports, this case study illustrates the limitations of the criminal justice system in dealing with women's violence, especially in an age of increasingly sensational press coverage. The courts showed surprising sympathy to a ‘fallen’ woman, but at the cost of simplifying her story, confirming misogynist stereotypes and underestimating the danger she posed.     

“The Most Hated Woman in America”: Madalyn Murray and the Crusade against School Prayer

Throughout her life, Madalyn Murray (O'Hair) tried to obliterate the concept of God and Christianity. She first burst onto the national stage in the early 1960s with a lawsuit against the religious exercises her son was subjected to in a Baltimore, Maryland, public school. A colorful woman who flouted convention, Murray despised religion: “If people want to go to church and be crazy fools, that's their business. But I don't want them praying in ball parks, legislatures, courts and schools. … They can believe in their virgin birth and the rest of their mumbo jumbo, as long as they don't interfere with me, my children, my home, my job, my money or my intellectual views.” At a time when religious conviction was often equated with patriotism, Murray's public statements were regarded as heretical. The media naturally sought her out and as the public learned more about her, Murray was demonized as a belligerent, loudmouthed crank—“the most hated woman in America.” She was not, in fact, the first person to challenge school prayer successfully. That distinction belonged to a fellow atheist, Lawrence Roth, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), a highly unpopular decision against a state-devised prayer in New York. But unlike the reclusive Roth, Murray gravitated to the limelight and became the leader of American atheism in the late twentieth century.     

‘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.     

Enslaved African Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life of Fezzeh Khanom of Shiraz

Fezzeh Khanom (c. 1835–82), an African woman, was a slave of Sayyed ‘Ali-Mohammad of Shiraz, the Bab. Information about her life can be recovered from various pious Baha'i histories. She was honored, and even venerated by Babis, though she remained subordinate and invisible. The paper makes the encouraging discovery that a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. Scholars estimate that between one and two million slaves were exported from Africa to the Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century, most to Iranian ports. Some two-thirds of African slaves brought to Iran were women intended as household servants and concubines. An examination of Fezzeh Khanom's life can begin to fill the gaps in our knowledge of enslaved women in Iran. The paper discusses African influences on Iranian culture, especially in wealthy households and in the royal court. The limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom when applied to the Muslim world is noted.     

Man,Woman and God in Judg 4

This paper attempts to explain the peculiarities of the Deborah narrative. In contrast to other savior- judges, Deborah is a prophetess, a judiciary, and a woman. Her role as a savior differs from other judges in that she is a high commander, but Barak carries out the actual task of battle. Deborah's rule conveys the lesson that God is responsible for victory. This is why she is presented as a prophet and a messenger of God and her personality is not portrayed in the story at all; rather, she is shown as a well-established judge and therefore an anti-charismatic figure. The emphasis on her status as a woman is meant to prevent her from becoming involved in an actual battle; this is left for Barak to carry out. When Barak demands the presence of Deborah on the battlefield, it might be thought that her presence is necessary to gain victory; then, as in the Ehud narrative, an unhealthy dependency between the people and Deborah might have been produced. Deborah responds with a prophecy that a woman will kill Sisera; in this way she reinforces her prophetic role rather than her personality, rectifying the damage caused by Barak's request.     

Poison and romance: Oscar Wilde and the strange case of Edith Thompson

Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847) allowed him to demonstrate. English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell's cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in early 1923. Thompson's preoccupation with poison was entangled with her preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of Wilde. She quoted Hichens's novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover, including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt. Her trial, like Wilde's trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were Thompson's own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience, Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an inescapable reality.     

‘My Lord Sue’: Lady Susan Keck and the Great Oxfordshire Election of 1754

As one of the most memorable campaigners for the New Interest whigs in the Oxfordshire election of 1754, Lady Susan Keck inevitably became the subject of press ridicule and criticism. Undaunted and irrepressible, she not only continued to campaign, but also turned the criticism back on the Old Interest, effectively neutralising it. This detailed examination of Lady Susan's electioneering illustrates the possibilities for electoral involvement at mid‐century that were available to a woman of rank and spirit who was determined to make a difference. Propelled into action by sheer frustration with the poor planning and lacklustre campaigning that had marked the New Interest campaign in the 1751 election, Lady Susan put her, not inconsiderable, energy into securing a victory for the New Interest. Driven by ideology rather than by family interests, she used her age, rank, sex and connections, to political advantage. Confident and characterful, she was ideally suited to the rumbustious, personal politics of the age. Most importantly, her canvassing achieved results and the eventual New Interest victory owed, at least in part, to her efforts.     

STALINISM IN RETROSPECT: HANNAH ARENDT

Established writers whose reputation is affixed to a particular line of argument are typically ill disposed to change their minds in public. Some authors sincerely believe that the historical record vindicates them. Others are determined that the historical record will vindicate them. Still others ignore the historical record. Among students of totalitarianism, no one had more at stake reputationally than Hannah Arendt. It is not just that The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) established her as the premier thinker on its topic. It is also that totalitarianism, as she understood it, ribbons through all of her subsequent books, from the discussion of “the social” in The Human Condition (1958) to the analysis of thinking in the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978). How ready was she to adapt or to change entirely arguments she had first formulated as early as the mid‐to‐late 1940s? “Stalinism in Retrospect,” her contribution to Columbia University's Seminar on Communism series, offers a rare opportunity to answer, at least partially, this question. Arendt's foil was the publication of recent books on Stalin and the Stalin era by three Russian witnesses: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roy Medvedev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to Arendt, the books meshed with her own theoretical conception of Bolshevism while changing the “whole taste” of the period: they contained new insights into the nature of totalitarian criminality and evil. “Stalinism in Retrospect” documents Arendt's arguments and challenges to them by a number of the seminar's participants. Of particular note is the exchange between her and Zbigniew Brzezinski, an expert on the Soviet Union, a major interpreter of totalitarianism in his own right, and soon to be President Carter's National Security Advisor (January 1977–January 1981). Notes by the editor, Peter Baehr, offer a critical context for understanding Arendt's argument.     

Political Image Making in Portraits of Isabella d'Este,Marchioness of Mantua

Isabella d'Este (1474–1539), marchioness of the northern Italian city state of Mantua, commissioned portraits of herself from some of the foremost painters of her day, including Titian and Leonardo da Vinci. These works have mostly been analysed through the prism of artistic connoisseurship and Isabella's motivations for commissioning them have been seen in gendered terms as idiosyncratic and trivial. This article explores the ways in which Isabella deployed portraiture as a political tool and investigates how she integrated this avenue of self-fashioning with other forms of identity branding to underpin her reputation as a woman capable of exercising authority and deserving of respect for her administrative and diplomatic skills. By analysing the trajectory of Isabella's portrait commissions in the context of her changing levels of political influence, and by considering them as a group, I aim to make sense of their iconography and show that the idea that she merely wished to be memorialised for a beauty she never possessed in reality fails to take into account the sophistication of her political image making.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 4. August 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 4 Front cover India's godly democrats In 2007 a temple priest designed a poster depicting the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, as the bread‐giving goddess Annapurna. Miss Raje appeared crowned and mounted on a lotus throne, from which she showered an assembly of parliamentarians, legislators and ministers gathered below with rays of light and golden coins. The poster sent ripples of nervy amusement through the Anglophone press, which saw in this a spectacle of all that is ludicrous and embarrassingly backward about India's popular politics today. Speaking to Anastasia Piliavsky, whose narrative is featured in this issue, the priest turned out to be neither a kook nor a serf, but a man strikingly astute, witty, assertive, and conspicuously sane. He explained that he depicted Miss Raje as the bread‐giving Goddess because she expanded the midday meal scheme in primary schools. ‘In India’, he said, ‘we respect seniors and people who have the power to bring good to people. This is an old Indian tradition. Worship is a way to show our respect’. Indeed, the worship of politicians as kings, heroes and gods is widespread in India: Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi; the head of the People's Party Mayawati; Bengal's Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee; and the Tamil Chief Minister Jayalalitha have all attracted colourful forms of mass devotion. External observers and India's cosmopolitan elite see this as a sign of a political malady, a degeneracy of their most cherished political values, most of all the equality and autonomy on which modern democracies ought to rest. But the very citizens who worship their political representatives as gods and goddesses have proven exceptionally good at democracy, both in the scale and the intensity of their involvement, and in their remarkable political choosiness. Their story – full of colour and fun as it is – holds serious political and intellectual lessons whose implications reach far beyond the subcontinent. Back cover LAW IN MYANMAR Open‐air displays of cartoons and caricatures are new to Myanmar since press freedom was introduced in 2012. Recently, Aung San Suu Kyi, the ‘icon of democracy’, has become a favourite target. This cartoon, which was displayed during a cartoon festival in 2013, depicts Suu Kyi staring at the country's constitution while a famous love song plays in the background. With parliamentary elections due later this year and presidential elections next year, the former prisoner of conscience has devoted much of her energy – so far, unsuccessfully – to campaigning for an amendment to the 2008 constitution, which in its current form prevents her from being nominated as presidential candidate. The army, which dominates the legislature, has refused to accommodate her demands. Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of much‐loved General Aung San, who played a crucial role in the country's independence from British colonial rule in 1948. Having spent much of her life under house arrest in her family home in Yangon, she returned to the political sphere in 2010 as the head of her party, the National League for Democracy. Since then, the Nobel Peace Laureate has pushed for legal reforms. Meanwhile, in spite of some hard‐won liberties, human rights violations continue. In this issue, Judith Beyer examines the difficulties citizens experience in locating the specifics of their legal rights amidst a confusing array of legal texts, many of which they do not have access to.     

Irrefutable arguments: Teresa de Cartagena defends her right to authorship

Teresa de Cartagena wrote a masterful text of consolation for all who suffer illness or impairment entitled Arboleda de los enfermos [Grove of the Infirm] in which she recounts her spiritual response to the onset of deafness. The work was maligned, not for its content, but rather because detractors refused to believe that Arboleda could have been penned by a woman, especially one who suffered from a physical impairment. Teresa responded to those who doubted her authorship by writing a second text, Admiraçión operum Dey [Wonder at the Works of God]. She felt compelled to respond to her critics in order to assert a single, and irrefutable, truth: God gave her the ability to write Arboleda, and, since anything is possible for God, to deny her authorship is tantamount to denying the omnipotence of God. She declares that any reader who doubts her authorship does not believe that God is capable of miraculous deeds. She argues that it is rare for a woman to write but certainly not impossible if God so wills it. This article explores how Teresa constructs and builds what, on the surface, appears to be a simple, in not outright indisputable, tenet of Christian doctrine, i.e., God’s unlimited and inscrutable power.     

Book Reviews

Letters from the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson Alvin O. Turner (Ed.), 2001 Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press 320 pp., $34.90 hardback ISBN 0-8061-33-3 hardback The American ‘Dust Bowl’ landscape of the 1930s has been etched into the global imagination through powerful narratives: Farm Security Administration photography (1935-43), Per Loretz's film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, historians such as Donald Worster (1979) have constructed their own narratives of this time and place. Caroline Henderson's Letters from the Dust Bowl, edited by Alvin O. Turner, provides a counterpoint, in the form of a first-hand account and a woman's voice, to the news stories, government propaganda, and historians' analyses that construct our understanding of the Dust Bowl. Henderson's letters reveal not only the ‘real’ experience of living in that place during a particularly difficult time, but also the ‘before’ and ‘after’–what led these individuals to the Great Plains and what became of them afterward. Educated at Mt Holyoke, Caroline Henderson ventured out onto the panhandle of Oklahoma to homestead in 1907 as a single woman, who ‘hungered and thirsted for something away from it all and for the out-of-doors’ (p. 33). She met her future husband Will when she hired a crew to dig a well on her land. Letters from the Dust Bowl captures Caroline's transformation from an idealistic young woman to a woman ‘worn by years of struggle with land and life’. Caroline's ‘letters’ are an amalgamation of letters to family and friends, and letters and essays written for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly. Letters begins with Henderson's optimism and delight in both life and landscape. Caroline's early writings capture the excitement of homesteading, of marriage, of being a young mother. Her writings eventually shift from purely personal letters to family and friends to being a source of additional income. Drought and failed crops led Caroline to begin writing for publication in 1913; her first published article was on her first years homesteading. She became a regular contributor to Ladies' World magazine, as their ‘Homestead Lady’, until its demise in 1918.     

Woman's Work in the Service of Empire: Lady Margaret Field (1905–94) from School Teacher to Governor's Wife

The presence of single and also of married British women in overseas colonies, especially those employed by or married to men in the Colonial Service in the later colonial period, has been the subject of scholarly enquiry. Their lives, roles and values and their distinctive contribution, if any, to the development of empire and of its ending have been debated. Their gendered roles were usually subordinate in a masculine culture of empire, and especially as wives they are commonly regarded as marginalised. The archived records left by Lady Margaret Field reveal her commitment as a single woman to a colonial mission and her sense of achievement as a school teacher and educational administrator, while also acknowledging the independence and career satisfactions she subsequently lost when she married a senior Colonial Service officer who rose to be a governor. But it is also apparent that, though incorporated and subordinate as a governor's wife to her husband's career, she was not marginalised to a separate sphere. As is evident from this case study, governors’ wives had important and demanding political duties, and such responsibilities need to be acknowledged.