Women's Social Networks and Female Friendship in the Ancient Greek City

This paper explores how women used their social networks within the ancient Greek urban environment in two spheres: first with regard to their civic engagement, and second with regard to their social relationships. By examining the types of social networks in which women were involved, how they were used and their impact on social relations, it argues that historians should broaden their conception of women's contribution to the Greek civic environment. Such an approach shows how women negotiated social and economic status within the polis community, how they used their social capital as a resource for social and civic engagement and sheds light on their personal relationships. These relationships not only enhanced women's well‐being and allowed them to determine their own roles in community life, but also formed the basis of their engagement with the polis. Considering the social networks to which women belonged, and the differing types of social capital embedded in them, further enables an examination of female friendship. Recognising the contribution of women to the polis community is necessary in order to understand the wider social and civic relationships within the ancient city.     

The Misinterpretation of Women's Status in the Muslim World

Spiritual equality, responsibility, and accountability for both men and women are well‐developed themes in the Qur'an. Spiritual equality between men and women in the sight of God is not limited purely to religious issues, but is the basis for equality in all aspects of human endeavor. This article's main interest is in the woman's status, and her role within the Arab countries. Islam is the main religion—its principles, values, and practices are dominant in the region. Therefore, this article introduces and discusses the misinterpretation of women in Islam, with special consideration of Muslim women's rights and their roles within the Muslim society. This will help to enhance future discussions of social behavior, values, and attitudes toward women in Islam. In the last few decades there has been a great misunderstanding in many aspects of public consciousness about the role of women in Arabic society. There is a significant gap between the status of males and females. However, this gap is more evident in rural areas. The level of women's rights and roles in many Arabic countries prevents women from improving their economic growth and development. This gender gap is the result of social, religious, cultural, and gender inequality. More specifically, it results from structural constraints faced by women. Gender inequality is not a new issue, nor is it only Muslim women who are suffering from this inequality. There is gender discrimination almost everywhere. The Qur'an is the basis of Islam, and encompasses rules, legislation, examples, advice, history, and system of the universe. It draws a picture of the earth and describes the roles of human beings. The Qur'an is the answer to the spiritual and material needs of the Islamic society, and is an exposition and an explanation of all aspects of life.     

Pre-colonial Ethnic Wars and the Colonization of Northern Tanzania from 1800 to 1950 CE: The Case of Chagga of Kilimanjaro

In the late 19th century, the various chiefdoms of the Chagga people of Mount Kilimanjaro, in north-eastern Tanzania, engaged in continuous warfare among themselves. While the Mangi (chiefs) sought to expand their areas of domination and strengthen their chiefdoms with the wealth acquired through warfare, they also provided an opening for foreigners to become involved in these local conflicts. This paper examines the role and impacts of the Chagga wars in the German colonization of Chagga land. In the initial stages of the colonization process, the Germans could not know where to start or who to partner with in order to facilitate this process in Kilimanjaro. With the entire Chagga community at war, one chiefdom against another, and the axis of power moving from chiefdom to chiefdom, it was not very easy for colonialists to determine which one was dominant. Although Rindi, the Mangi of Moshi, convinced the Europeans that he was the most powerful chief in Kilimanjaro, the ceaseless wars made the Germans aware that there were other more active and even stronger chiefdoms than Moshi. For the Germans to get into Kilimanjaro, and secure a future for themselves there, the solution was to wage war against the Chagga. Hence they engaged in war with the Kibosho Chiefdom which, under Mangi Sina, was by then the most powerful and prosperous chiefdom. Although Karl Peters had signed a treaty with Mangi Rindi of Moshi in 1885, the country was brought under complete colonial rule by Germans in the early 1890s, after subduing the long-running local wars in the area. This paper draws on the author’s research into oral history in Chagga land, and his archaeological survey of the area, to explore the unintended consequences of involving Europeans in the Chagga chiefdom’s local wars.     

The Problem that Had a Name: French High‐Rise Developments and the Fantasy of a Suburban Homemaker Pathology, 1954–73

Within Western Europe, France had the largest and longest postwar commitment to private social‐market housing inside dense residential suburbs called grands ensembles d'habitation (GEs). Social‐Catholic activists and planners viewed the GEs as facilitating women's maternal mission within egalitarian communities, but others across the political spectrum saw them as pathological spaces, especially for women who supposedly contracted a psychological disease dubbed ‘sarcellite’, after France's flagship GE of Sarcelles. This article analyses how a phantasmatic gendered discourse of housing disaster, first circulated by the media, strategically influenced gendered actors’ residential desires and legitimised policy shifts toward single‐family housing. The discourse of sarcellite reveals how housing realities and imaginaries shaped gendered claims to housing as an evolving aspect of social citizenship. The article considers both suburban women's demands for subsidised childcare and other services and the nuances and contradictions of the evolving discourse of sarcellite.     

(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts a gendered analysis of the ongoing Maoist insurgency in India, particularly focused on women’s position within the movement, the continuum of gender based violence that they experience and the potential for transformative politics. The contemporary Maoist movement in India has been informed by a stated commitment to ‘progressive’ gender politics and social transformations; in that it marks a departure from the Naxalite movement of the 60s and 70s. Yet women remain concentrated in the group’s lower ranks and are absent from leadership positions. In addition, sexual and gender based violence and discrimination within the movement further undermine the commitment of the revolution to create opportunities for transformative politics including gender justice and equality. We consider it important that women’s lived experiences of the conflict - as combatants, supporters as well as civilians affected by it - are brought to the foreground. Drawing from postcolonial feminist approaches, we reflect on the challenges and possibilities for feminist politics and ethics within the Indian Maoist movement. We conclude that the rhetoric and reality of gender equality within the Maoist movement provides a unique opportunity to further investigate and analyze the ways in which feminist activism and the women’s movement in India have alienated the concerns of marginalized women from dalit and adivasi communities.     

Gendering the Black Death: Women in Later Medieval England

This review article of Mavis Mate's Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (1998) locates Mate's work within the broader context of the debate about changes in women's social position caused by the collapse in population following the Black Death. Was demographic decline accompanied by growing social and economic opportunities for women or should historians emphasise the continuity of female work as low‐skilled, low‐status and low‐paid throughout the late medieval and early modern periods? How did women's role in the labour market affect the age of marriage, fertility rates and long‐term population change? In general, Mate's conclusions offer support to the ‘pessimists’: women's work was vital to the household but economic centrality did not bring a commensurate social power or legal rights and the ideology of female subordination remained firmly in place. The main problem with Mate's case is, inevitably, a lack of evidence, for family structure, for the sexual division of labour and, above all, for affective relations. Nevertheless, this detailed, empirically based local study shows how successfully women's history has moved into the historical mainstream.     

Female Icons,Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China

This article examines the construction of female subjectivity in emulation campaign materials of early Maoist China. Through critical examination of ‘nüjie diyi’ (the first female) model workers, I argue that Maoist proletarian subjectivity reflects a situated agency produced through empowerment and salvationist impulses. As the first women to engage in traditionally male professions like tractor driving, ‘nüjie diyi’ models can be read as objects of CCP policies and ideology. At the same time, however, their public presence challenged gendered conceptualisations of workplace, technological competence and proletarian identity. Moreover, their close ties to Soviet experts located these women within a geopolitical structure that occasioned alternative sites of female agency. As icons of socialist China and representatives of state‐sponsored feminism, ‘diyi’ women embodied historical progress and social change. Through these women multiple contending subjectivities emerged which simultaneously promised and delimited national feminist rhetoric and agency.     

Gendered struggles over land: shifting inheritance practices among the Serer in rural Senegal

Although women’s land rights are often affirmed unequivocally in constitutions and international human rights conventions in many African countries, customary practices usually prevail on the ground and often deny women’s land inheritance. Yet land inheritance often goes unnoticed in wider policy and development initiatives to promote women’s equal access to land. This article draws on feminist ethnographic research among the Serer ethnic group in two contrasting rural communities in Senegal. Through analysis of land governance, power relations and ‘technologies of the self’, this article shows how land inheritance rights are contingent on the specific effects of intersectionality in particular places. The contradictions of legal pluralism, greater adherence to Islam and decentralisation led to greater application of patrilineal inheritance practices. Gender, religion and ethnicity intersected with individuals’ marital position, status, generation and socio-ecological change to constrain land inheritance rights for women, particularly daughters, and widows who had been in polygamous unions and who remarried. Although some women were aware that they were legally entitled to inherit a share of the land, they tended not to ‘demand their rights’. In participatory workshops, micro-scale shifts in women’s and men’s positionings reveal a recognition of the gender discriminatory nature of customary and Islamic laws and a desire to ‘change with the times’. While the effects of ‘reverse’ discourses are ambiguous and potentially reinforce prevailing patriarchal power regimes, ‘counter’ discourses, which emerged in participatory spaces, may challenge customary practices and move closer to a rights-based approach to gender equality and women’s land inheritance.     

‘I Am a Slave Not a Wife’: Slave Women in Post‐Proclamation Gold Coast (Ghana)

This article contributes to the recent wave of historical studies that have examined the immediate social transformations implied by slavery abolition on gender relations. It highlights slave women's attempts to alter their status and the personal agency they displayed in the immediate post‐proclamation period in the Gold Coast (present‐day Ghana). During this very early period (1874–1877) women were quite an active presence in the colonial court and the percentage of cases discussing the right of women to leave their husbands increased. Traditional and colonial powers soon reacted to this changing situation. There were two main constraints to women's emancipation. On one hand there was a general confusion on the legal status of wives within traditional family, and on the other, the logic of debt concealed within the repayment of dowries tried to force women back into bondage even when they succeeded in changing their status from slaves to free women.     

Spatial imaginaries and collective identity in women’s human rights struggles in Honduras

In recent years, geographic analysis on social movements has emphasised the influence of actors’ concepts, lived experiences and perceptions of space on the emergence of collective action. Cultural approaches to social movements in Latin America as well as feminist scholarship have revealed that women’s collective action is shaped by their perceptions of institutional and societal challenges, which are rooted in authoritarian and patriarchal culture prevalent in their society. This article combines geographic and cultural approaches to social movements as well as transnational feminist theories to explore women’s human rights mobilisation in Honduras after the coup d’état in 2009. It investigates how a group of urban and rural activists that included feminists, rural women, students and community leaders, adopted human rights discourses and practices to respond to the coup. The article draws on interviews and focus group discussions to suggest firstly, that protests in response to the coup shaped the interviewees’ spatial imaginaries and particularly considers how urban feminists’ spatial imaginaries were merged with those of rural women under the collective framework of human rights. Secondly, the study demonstrates that a collective identity as women human rights defenders was crucial for the emergence of collective action and also prompted the establishment of a national network. This case study contributes to research on women’s collective action to negotiate women’s rights, human rights and social justice in changing political processes.     

Male ‘Providers’ and Female ‘Housewives’: A Gendered Co‐performance in Rural North India

Problems of measuring and public recognition of women's work are not merely statistical. This article highlights the co‐performance of stereotypical gender roles, where men and women jointly seek to establish the status of women as housewives rather than as farmers and of men as providers, thereby upholding a particular social order and simultaneously reinterpreting the meanings of existing norms to include new realities. Evidence from rural north India demonstrates the discernable disjunctures between social norms, narratives and action. Conscious of the growing insecurities faced by their husbands in the context of a rapidly changing economy, women try to allay rather than aggravate them. Instead of asserting their identities as ‘workers’, their strategies for gaining recognition and reciprocity from their husbands focus on reconstituting gender relations in the household, by expanding individual spaces and making incremental gains within the existing social order, rather than struggling for wider transformative changes.     

Church Women's Groups and the Empowerment of Women in Solomon Islands

Throughout the Pacific, church women's groups play an important social and spiritual role in the lives of many indigenous women. However, these groups rarely attract the interest of development practitioners or theorists concerned with the empowerment of women, largely because of their outwardly conservative stance. Preoccupied with sewing classes, pastoral care, and social work, church women's groups appear to epitomize a welfare approach to women's development. Yet, while welfare concerns remain central to the activities of many such groups, by drawing on case studies from Solomon Islands in the period leading up to the onset of political crisis in 1999, this article demonstrates that a welfare approach does not preclude women's groups from engaging in strategic activities for the empowerment of women. Such activities include support for logging protests, workshops to affirm the importance of women's roles and develop their confidence, and opportunities for them to travel and expand their knowledge basis. Furthermore, the process of coming together to engage in welfare activities which many women enjoy greatly can provide opportunities for confidence‐building, income generation, and networking.     

Black sisterhood: The situation of urban aboriginal women and their relationship to the white women's movement 1

The article argues that Aboriginal women in urban aboriginal society experience very different oppressions than do white women in urban white society. Aboriginal women believe that their greatest oppression is racism not sexism. When their objective conditions are examined it becomes obvious that this is indeed so. In fact Aboriginal women are statistically better educated and better employed than are Aboriginal men. Other economic and societal factors combine to produce a situation whereby a black woman's status within her own society is very different to that of her white sisters. Black women are more likely to be heads of household; more likely to be political leaders and less likely to be child‐burdened than their white counterparts. Consequently women's movement demands such as abortion, child‐care, the right to work and sexual liberation are not given high priority by the Aboriginal women's movement. Aboriginal women's demands stem from the politics of poverty and discrimination. These are caused by racism not sexism.     

‘The Conscience of the Community’: the Au Vaine of Rarotonga

ABSTRACT

The Au Vaine (‘several women’ in Cook Islands Māori), grassroots women’s committees, worked to promote agricultural efforts and food security in Rarotonga during the 1920s and 1930s. A unique organization, the Au Vaine actively encouraged the growing of commercial crops alongside subsistence plantings at a time when women were being pushed towards the home and hearth, and men pulled to wage labour jobs. These women illustrate the powerful and often unheard voices Pacific women retained throughout this period, as well as the critical role of food in Pacific history. In this article I examine the context within which the Au Vaine emerged, discuss what distinguished them from other women’s committees in Polynesia, highlight their purpose and impact on Cook Islands foodways, and explore some of the reasons they declined by the 1940s.     

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.     

Brideprice and Prejudice: An Audio-Visual Ethnography on Marriage and Modernity in Mt Hagen,Papua New Guinea

The relationship between bridewealth and women's autonomy is not only discussed amongst anthropologists, development practitioners and other scholars but also amongst brides themselves. Women continue to embrace such marital exchanges, despite their knowledge of ‘modern’ development discourse about the constraints of the practice on women's status and its links to gender-based violence. This paper provides a visual exploration of contemporary brideprice practices and women's autonomy in Mt Hagen. We draw on scenes from our ethnographic film (An Extraordinary Wedding: Marriage and Modernity in Highlands PNG) to explore deliberations and developments that occurred in the case of a particular marriage that took place in 2012. We argue that the institution of brideprice has the potential to enhance the visibility of some women and the importance of their contribution to their own and husbands' kin groups. Despite current tensions regarding brideprice, it can serve as an avenue for the enhancement of women's political participation. The particular brideprice exchange featured in our film, raised concerns for the participants, which we consider in terms of three questions: Does brideprice commodify women? Does it play a role in gender-based violence? Is it inimical to aspirations for modernist individuality? We discuss the importance of bekim (‘return gift’) and suggest that this practice challenges the notion of brideprice as a commodity transaction. We argue that, while there may be an association between brideprice and gender-based violence, brideprice, in and of itself, is not causative of violence. The marriage represented in the film, and discussed in this paper, reveals the creativity of participants in adjusting the values inherent in the customary practice of brideprice to their contemporary aspirations.     

Personal lives: narrative accounts of Irish women in the diaspora

The burst of writing about Irish women in the diaspora after the 1980s, led by Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O'Brien's Across the Water: Irish Women's Lives in Britain, coincided with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and literary representation. This paper uses Carol Smart's concepts of Personal Life (2007) – memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and the imaginary – to examine a range of ways in which personal narratives have become central to our understandings of Irish women and their descendants in both written and visual representations. It interweaves disciplines, bringing together a wide range of sources including academic and public accounts in which Irish women appear both as main characters and in walk-on parts. It explores constructions of these ‘fictions’ and their connections with the biographies of authors.     

Alongside Violence: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia

The naturalization of violence in Colombia has made gory testimonies a common yet counterproductive product when creating narratives that reproduce some of the violence they attempt to scrutinize. This article explores women’s activism as an everyday survival practice, as well as the ethics of researching and writing about survival in Chocó. I focus specifically on two groups of Chocoan women activists and their counternarratives of violence: (1) the group Vamos Mujeres founded by women from the rural community of San Francisco de Ichó and (2) the members of the Gender Commission of a farmworker’s organization, both groups belong to Consejo Comunitario Mayor de la Asociación Campesina Integral del Atrato (COCOMACIA), the Main Community Council of the Integral Peasant Association of the Atrato River. Based on my ongoing collaboration with COCOMACIA’s Gender Commission since 2010, I argue that everyday practices reflect an ‘alongside’ (which is neither oppositional nor resistant) narrative of violence that challenges linear explanations of survival within the Colombian armed conflict. Centering survival narratives allows us to move from gory memories that reproduce violence, to an ethical rehearsal that recognizes the utopian potential of moving beyond victimhood.     

The Social and Legal Status of Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its Influence on the Status of Tatars and Karaites

Abstract

At the end of the fourteenth century, when Lithuania was baptized, three non-Christian communities — Jews, Tatars, and Karaites — began to settle in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and their legal and social status began to take shape. The segregation of Jews from Christians was legitimized in the first privilege granted for the Jews of Brest in 1388 by the Grand Duke Vytautas (Witold, Vita&?t) the Great. This privilege, which adapted Western variations of the Judenrecht to Lithuanian realities and introduced some local improvements, began the process of the formation of the legal and social status of non-Christians in the Grand Duchy. The expulsion of Jews to the margins of the estate system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the establishment of the incumbency of the iudex iudeorum and internal community court, and the fully formed relations between the Jews and the legal system of the Grand Duchy were used as reference points in trying to define the legal status of the Tatars and the Karaites. In the case of Karaites, Magdeburg law, which was already known in Lithuania, was adopted. Grand Duke Casimir Jagiellon granted such a privilege to the Trakai (Troki) community in 1441, and the Karaite community’s life was organized according to the principles of the existing model of urban self-government. For some time the legal status of the Karaites differed from that of the Jews. Despite its uniqueness, Magdeburg law was not applied to the community’s everyday life, and the Karaites gradually absorbed the privileges granted for the Jews (especially that of 1646). The Tatars, who were socially stratified within their community and thus had different interests, were never granted a common privilege. Those ‘Jewish’ legal and social models, which were adapted for the Tatar community, were best revealed in the Third Lithuania Statute of 1588, which contained more regulations for non-Christians than its two predecessors. The content of its articles shows similarities of the social and legal status of non-Christians and the entrenchment of the social strata of non-Christians. The features of the model applied for regulating the state’s relations with the Jewish community might also be observed in the state’s relations with the Roma (Gipsy) community, which, although Christian, was considered unacceptable in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania because of its way of life.     

Multiculturalism and the immigrant “Irish woman” after the Celtic Tiger: marginalisation,gender-based violence and family dysfunction in Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls

This article breaks new ground in examining how “new Irish” immigrant women have responded to the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy and the different forms of gender discrimination and marginalisation they face both within their minority ethnic communities and the Irish host society. It approaches Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls (2013) as an exemplary work of fiction which exposes unresolved injustices and inequalities suffered by immigrant women. Akpoveta creates a narrative that complicates previous representations of cultural encounters between newcomers and long-established members of Ireland’s host society, not least because her Nigerian female protagonist arrives as a postgraduate student rather than an asylum seeker or refugee. She fictionalises female experiences of marginalisation, gender-based violence and family dysfunction within an all-Nigerian family that outwardly appears to be a model of integration and social inclusion in an open and welcoming Irish multicultural society.