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.     

Gender and poverty: what we know,don’t know,and need to know for Agenda 2030

Drawing on historical debates on gender, poverty, and the ‘feminisation of poverty’, this paper reflects on current evidence, methods and analysis of gendered poverty. It focuses on initiatives by UN Women, including the Progress of the World’s Women 2015–16. Our analysis of the data compiled by UN Women raises questions about what might account for the over-representation of women among the poor in official accounts of poverty, and how this is plausibly changing (or not) over time. The paper highlights that analysis of what is measured and how needs to be understood in relation to who is the focus of measurement. The lack of available data which is fit for purpose questions the extent to which gender poverty differences are ‘real’ or statistical. There is a continued reliance on comparing female with male headed households, and we argue the move by UN Women to adopt the notion of Female Only Households reflects available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data. Wider UN processes highlight that while sensitivity to differences among women and their subjectivities are paramount in understanding the multiple processes accounting for gender bias in poverty burdens, they are still accorded little priority. To monitor advances in Agenda 2030 will require more and better statistics. Our review suggests that we are still far from having a set of tools able to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty.     

‘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.     

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.     

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on women and citizenship

This paper aims at understanding why Rousseau excluded women from citizenship. Citizenship, for Rousseau, is not a matter of right, not even a matter of behaviour (of how to behave individually to be a good citizen). It is a matter of social condition. How should society be constituted so that there can be citizens? The answer to this question is that there must be women in the private sphere so that there can be citizen in the public sphere. The paper begins with Montesquieu's model of the republican condition of women, considers the way Rousseau updated this model, and concludes with the idea, that much more than the male figure of citizenship (which remains a stereotype), the woman, in Rousseau, is the true figure of modernity.     

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.     

殷淳《妇人集》及《妇人诗集》考论——兼与许云和《南朝妇人集考论》一文商榷

在诸史书目录志所著录的南朝共十部妇人集中,刘宋时殷淳撰《妇人集》与《妇人诗集》可以被认为是我国现存最早的女性作品总集,不仅开创了我国文学编纂史上撰辑女性总集的风气,并影响到从南朝梁至清代系列女性作品总集的编纂。《妇人集》的内容虽然只残存于《世说新语》、《太平御览》等书中,但已可见出撰者对待女性创作的肯定意识和前瞻心态,亦可见出汉魏六朝女性作者的文才文论与群体风貌。     

Tartars in Spain: renaissance slavery in the Catalan city of Manresa,c.1408

This article presents a summary and analysis of the slaves and slave owners who were living in a particular late medieval city at a particular time. The data for this overview comes from the 1408 Liber Manifesti of Manresa, a tax document which is quite similar to the Florentine Catasto of 1427. Unlike the Catasto, however, the Liber Manifesti consistently designates slaves as distinct from other servants. As a result, the Manresan document allows us to know many basic but often elusive figures such as the total number of slaves in our town, the proportion of slaves to free people, the percentage of households who owned slaves, the proportion of women and children amongst slaves, and even the market value of female, male, and child slaves vis à vis the cost of hiring a domestic servant. Access to such an unusually complete sample also enables us to make some fresh assertions about the extent and nature of renaissance slavery as a whole. Several of Iris Origo's influential observations, which still stand as a benchmark of renaissance slavery some 50 years after they were presented, are here both corroborated and challenged. For example, to what extent did renaissance slave owners pair male slaves with female slaves, as Origo's anecdotal evidence suggested? Our sample also provides invaluable data on the wealth, occupations, and family background of slave owners. We can gain some insight into the phenomenon of women as slave owners, and also coordinate slave owning with urban political power. In addition we can suggest an answer to the elusive question of just how much of a ‘luxury item’ slaves really were in the post-Black Death Mediterranean. In Manresa, as it turns out, slave owners were anything but a uniform block of ‘wealthy townspeople.’     

试析女性在基督教兴起和早期发展中的地位与作用(公元1世纪——公元5世纪)

基督教认为女性是人类原罪的罪魁祸首,对女性多持贬抑,这使女性在基督教中的影响多遭湮没。然而女性在耶稣的传教、早期家庭教会的发展和早期基督教人数的增长等方面都起到了不容忽视的积极作用,为基督教的兴起和早期发展作出了不可磨灭的贡献。