Sociopolitics in Southeastern Archaeology: The Role of Gender in Scholarly Authorship

We explore the relationship between gender, authorship, and editorship in conference presentations and publications as a lens to examine current disciplinary sociopolitics and the relative contributions of men and women to southeastern archaeological research. We also report on the results of a survey on publishing trends in southeastern archaeology that we circulated to the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) membership in March 2014. The evaluation of publishing trends serves as a means to investigate academic merit and visibility, along with the production and validation of knowledge in southeastern archaeology. We document a strong gender imbalance in publication rates across a range of publication venues, including regional journals, state archaeology journals, and edited volumes, despite growing numbers of women presenting research at SEAC meetings. We discuss possible reasons for these gender disparities based on survey response data from members of the SEAC community. Despite a current culture and context of women's advancement in southeastern archaeology, many challenges and obstacles remain.     

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.     

‘Like man and wife’: clerics’ concubines in the diocese of Barcelona

Clerical concubinage was a persistent problem throughout the Middle Ages, but scholars have largely ignored the historical experience of the women involved. Parish visitation records from the early fourteenth-century diocese of Barcelona reveal a wealth of information about these women. Although their lives were in part circumscribed by an inherently gendered legal category, their day-to-day lives and interactions with other members of their communities depended on more than their legal status, and were in fact as diverse as those of women in legitimate marital unions.     

近代江南乡村妇女的"财产权"

在近代江南乡村,尽管妇女对家庭生计有着重要的贡献,但家产的男系传承原则使她们基本上没有财产权可言。在家庭结构健全的场合,妇女根本就无权获得家产份额。寡妇相对而言有一定的家产处置权,但那仅仅是代儿孙监管而已,在寡妇无子的情况下,还要将家产捐给族里。出嫁女获赠“奁田”,娘家有随时收回的权利。因此,妇女的所谓“财产权”是残缺的,在家族共财制的农业社会的历史场境中,这是很容易解释的。     

Attiudes towards public debt in medieval Genoa: the Lomellini family

Genoa is well known for its characteristic public debt system, yet there has not been a great deal of research on this subject. This paper focuses on the creditor, and seeks to investigate why and under what circumstances people accept public debt. The significance of public debt for creditors in Genoa in the later middle ages will be examined through a case study of the Lomellini family, analysing colonne (a register made at a bank concerning creditors’ accounts), statutes, notarial acts, and in particular, testaments. The purpose of the purchase, use, and disposition of a share in the public debt is categorised as follows: (1) the purchase of real estate or of another public debt; (2) the property of women and minors; (3) the salvation of the soul. Through each analysis, we shall examine what influenced the creditors in their attitude toward the public debt. Public debt was not only a system of credit for the city state, but also something which penetrated into every part of people’s lives in Genoa.     

A matter of fact rather than principle: women,work and property in papal Rome (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries)

During the last few decades, many studies have documented the considerable participation of women in the economy of past societies, even though women were bound by rules and laws that discriminated against them and denied them the rights of citizenship. Thus historians, and especially those in the field of gender history, have increasingly recognized the importance of interweaving two realms, those of work and of property. As part of this effort, this article focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rome and shows that over a long economic period, women's position was defined by a complex interaction between their status as workers and as owners of property.     

Mapping the unknown: Gendered spaces and the oriental other in travelogues of Egypt by U.S. women, 1854-1914

The diaries and personal correspondence of U.S. women who travelled to Egypt as tourists, archaeologists and missionaries during the latter half of the nineteenth century both reflect and deviate from traditional Orientalist discursive patterns. Tourists who briefly visited Egypt to observe monuments and sites relied heavily upon conventional authority prescribed in guidebooks of the time. Women with careers in the nascent Orientalist sciences of Egyptology and archaeology often identified with male explorers and adopted the language of colonialism. However, women who spent a considerable tenure in Egypt, such as career missionaries, presented a more complex observation of indigenous peoples, partially because success in their careers depended upon a more intimate study of the host culture. Despite the use of Orientalist narrative devices and the tendency to obfuscate the real purpose of their writing, women travellers imparted gendered ways of seeing that drew on experience rather than conventional authority.     

International Women’s Day in China: Feminism Meets Militarised Nationalism and Competing Political Party Programs

This article examines the contested history of International Women’s Day (IWD) in China during the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the processes of cooption and subsumption that have diminished the “international” in IWD in the Chinese context as the feminist movement confronted powerful forces of nation building, party building and militarised warfare as battles waged between Japan and China, and between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party. It argues that IWD was put to use by myriad competing groups and these appropriations diminished the event’s original goal of forging international solidarity among women around the world.     

Drawing (on) women’s military experiences and narratives – Israeli women soldiers’ challenges in the military environment

This article utilizes arts-based methods as a feminist methodology for understanding women’s experiences in military service, according to theories of feminist security studies. It explores how non-combatant women in the army retrospectively narrate stressful situations that happened during their military service. Using arts-based methods, we examine how they derive meaning from their experiences in a masculine, military environment, affected by ongoing conflict. This article analyzes twenty images drawn by Israeli women who served in the army in the previous 2–4 years. The women drew a stressful event from their military service, explained the image, and elaborated on how they coped with the situation. A content analysis of the pictures and the narratives produced three themes: the responsibility for others in life threatening situations, the military as a first professional work experience and the interaction between military and gender hierarchies. In general, women soldiers experienced the army as complex as they encountered their first adult work space in which they learned responsibility and skills of the ‘adults’ world’. However, they were also exposed to a rigid hierarchy and to stressful security situations typical of army contexts. While non-combat women soldiers were allegedly protected from the violence of the army, they are also indirectly exposed to the danger inherent in an army context. This analysis goes beyond the hero narrative, and moves into taboo territories of young women’s narratives and experiences in the military.     

‘I am here’: women workers’ experiences at the former Cibali Tekel Tobacco and Cigarette Factory in Istanbul

This study presents oral history research which investigated the experiences of surviving women workers from the former Cibali Tekel Tobacco and Cigarette Factory in Istanbul, Turkey. For most of its history, the factory was home to thousands of workers, many of who were women and, at times, outnumbered men two to one. While the site is now known for the university that it houses, photographs and archival records from the early twentieth century reveal the centrality of women in the process and production of tobacco and cigarettes until the factory completely shut down in 1995. Using oral history methods, we recorded the memories of 17 women who worked in the factory. A multi-faceted analysis reveals the gendered nature of the space at the time as well as the importance of the factory as a place in the lives of these women.