Review of Susanne Scholz, Introducing the Women's Hebrew Bible (London: T&T Clark , 2007)

Like many feminist biblical scholars, I am challenged by the metaphor of Israel as God's sexually promiscuous wife as developed throughout the prophetic literature. 1 Much recent scholarship addresses the origins, rhetorical purpose, and theological relevance of this metaphor.2What follows is an examination of one feature of this metaphor that has been noted but not fully considered by scholars. Three texts personify Israel and Judah (and in the case of Ezekiel 16, Sodom as well) as sisters married to God: Jer 3:6-11; Ezek 16:44-63, and Ezekiel 23.3 I contend that the portrayal of Israel and Judah as sisters introduces a particular set of anxieties into the metaphor of the wayward wife that are an essential part of the prophets' rhetoric of horror designed to terrify their audience into reform.4 Represented as sisters within the patriarchal literary context of the Hebrew Bible, Israel and Judah pose a formidable threat. As I will show, sisters raise anxieties related to their interpersonal relationship and their sexual desire. Their sisterbond challenges the authority of the patriarchs in their lives, and their sexual promiscuity is a devastating act of externally focused sororal desire. Thus, Israel and Judah's relationship as sisters is a potent rhetorical feature of the metaphor of the wayward wife that both heightens the tensions and expresses the terrors related to Israel's demise while conveying what is necessary to secure Israel's redemption. If the sisters break their bond, maim their bodies, and redirect their desire to God, they can resume their place in God's metaphorical family. I. Sisters in Victorian Literature and the Hebrew Bible: A Theoretical Framework In order better to understand the role sisters play in the biblical texts, I draw from another literary context in which sisters also play a significant role-Victorian literature. Though at first glance, these literatures may appear too distinct in time and place to draw comparisons, Victorian and biblical literature share a focus-the family. Certainly, family is essential to the narratives, metaphors, and theology of the Hebrew Bible. The national story of Israel is, at heart, the family story of Abraham, his wives, and their descendants. Family also provides the metaphorical framework in which to understand the relationship between God and Israel. The Hebrew Bible presents God alternatively as father/mother/husband to his wife/son/daughter Israel.5 Family is central also to nineteenth-century Victorian literature.6 In fact, scholars credit Victorian literature with the creation of the domestic ideal perhaps best exemplified by the March family (a family with four sisters) in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868-69).7 Literary theory, which examines the representation of the Victorian family and, in particular, the sister, provides a helpful framework in which to understand the roles sisters play in the Hebrew Bible.8 Commenting on the critical role sisters play in Victorian literature, Leila Silvana May writes: The nineteenth century's well known fixation on the family has generally been dealt with by critics in terms of the parent-child relationship, with remarkably little attention given to the sibling bond. Yet, to a great extent, that century's obsession with the family, particularly in England, proves to be an anxiety about the horizontal line of the family axis, and, most specifically, about sisters as they relate to each other and to their male siblings.9 According to May, Victorian society perceived sisters as paradigms of sexual innocence and virtue. Deeply invested in constructing the home as a pristine if not sacred10 sanctuary from the moral ambiguity of the public realm, patriarchal Victorian society assigned women the task of maintaining and representing the domestic realm.11 Thoroughly ensconced in the household, unmarried sisters in particular embodied the domestic ideal. Unlike their mothers, who have sexual partners and interact with the outside world, these sisters are sexually unsullied, physically and morally pure. …

In the early 1980s, the Greater London Council (GLC) and a number of other London and Metropolitan local authorities introduced and actively promoted equal opportunities policies on women and race. Those were heady days for those of us who got involved. Women were being asked into town halls to comment on and input ideas on how council services and employment could better meet women’s needs. My first experience was as a member of two groups — one on women and transport, the other on women’s employment in London. Exhilarated by being involved and recognising that here was a concrete way of influencing some of the services which crucially affect women’s lives in London, I applied for and got a job as Employment Adviser in the GLC’s Women’s Committee Support Unit.

This paper aims to explore how late-Victorian working women's appetite and body was conventionally moralized and discriminated yet how they interacted with London's public eating places and further established specific experiences indicative of certain agency. In Victorian culture, the act of eating was profoundly affected by the social parameters of class and gender. Various instructions, for instances, conduct books, medical texts, and popular magazines always enforced severe disciplinary constraints on what and how women consumed, including concerns of appetite, ideal diet, and body shape. Yet for working women, food consumption, intimately linked with their specific working conditions, characterized the most frequent and immediate form of bodily experience in their city life. Appetite therefore functioned as a class marker between woman who chose not to eat and woman who chose to eat because of work. In metropolitan London, working women could seldom visit the more expensive dining places and could only order the cheapest meals even in less expensive eateries. These dining places obviously constituted a boundary to discourage them from entering. However, the act of eating out normally was necessary to support their labor and reduce their time spent on preparing food, especially for those single workers. To meet the consuming need of a growing amount of working women in late-nineteenth-century London, a new type of mass catering rose and became another alternative for public dining places: the teashop, where Miriam Henderson, the heroine in Pilgrimage, had quite a great variety of experiences and perceptions. For Miriam, dining out in public provided her with a direct way to contact and experience the city. Her dining experiences were growing wider and richer despite some class discriminations and economic limitations and interlocked with her independence and identity. Miriam's body reveals a conspicuous example of how a woman pursued her independence and identity through appetites and particular public dining space.

Background: Women of South Asian heritage are more likely to experience adverse pregnancy outcomes than White British women. Poor access and engagement with maternity services may be one reason for this. A key measure of access in relation to maternity care is the initiation of antenatal care within the first trimester of pregnancy and late initiation has been linked to adverse pregnancy outcomes. The importance of positive experiences of care is also recognised for improving outcomes. The sociological concept of candidacy was used to understand how women of South Asian heritage access and experience maternity services. Access through a candidacy lens is defined as a dynamic and contingent process, constantly being defined and redefined through interactions between individuals, professionals and the service provision. Aims: This thesis aimed to investigate factors that influence access to and engagement with maternity services for South Asian women living in a deprived, ethnically diverse urban setting. Setting: The setting for this study is an inner-city borough in the UK, one of the poorest boroughs in London. Design and methods: Mixed methods were used in this thesis. There were two components: (i) a quantitative analysis of anonymized maternity data of 11,768 women to examine the predictors of early initiation of antenatal care and (ii) a qualitative study of 30 semi-structured face to face interviews with South Asian women to examine their experiences with maternity services. Data were analysed by means of thematic synthesis of women’s journeys into and through antenatal care, labour, delivery and post-natal care. Findings: Findings from the quantitative analysis of the predictors of late initiation of antenatal care found that late initiation amongst women of South Asian heritage was linked to not being able to speak English (p=0.000 ; 95% CI: 4 0.56-0.82), higher parity (p=0.002; 95% CI: 1.31-3.47), younger maternal age (p=0.005; 95% CI: 0.42-0.86), housing status (living in rented accommodation) (p=0.000; 95% CI:1.51-2.74), being a current smoker (p= 0.010; 95% CI: 1.10- 2.31), experiencing domestic violence (p=0.021; 95% CI: 0.45-0.57), and using alcohol (p=0.047; 95% CI: 0.01-0.97). Findings from the qualitative study identified four key themes these were women’s ethnic and /or migrant identities, permeability of services (the unhelpful features of a service), adjudication (cultural biases of health providers), and the local operating conditions of the services (lack of continuity of care, shortage of resources). Explanatory subthemes related to the cultural distinctness of women where issues with access came to the fore in light of women’s diasporic and compounded identities. For women born and raised in the UK achieving access meant continuous negotiation and renegotiation of their identities in a contextual and contingent way. For recent migrants’ language was an additional barrier. Difficulties in navigating the services were linked to inability to speak English fluently, subjecting them to provider judgements. Women wanted to be taken seriously. They emphasised the importance of continuous care to enable them to develop a relationship with service providers and make informed choices. Conclusion: The candidacy frame provides a balanced platform to detect vulnerabilities associated with access to maternity services for women of South Asian heritage. Findings suggest that women’s needs were not static but are ever changing at each stage of their journey, both groups of women were faced with similar challenges when engaging with the services. This study reiterates the need to embrace the notion of super diversity and promote cultural health capital in health service settings.

Focusing upon the twenty-nine female members of the London School Board, this thesis examines the position of women Involved with the institution of elementary education in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. It is usually assumed that the responsibility for mass schooling mostly lay with men working within both central and local government, I have gone beyond this perspective in order to examine the problem of class and gender as competing power structures in the development of an English school system. The Issue of gender Is addressed by investigating both gender relations on the various School Boards for London, and the relationship between contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity and elementary education between 1870 and 1904. In exploring the ways in which the social inequalities of gender shaped and influenced women's experience of public office, the study goes some way towards correcting the emphasis upon predominantly male agents in existing historical accounts of the relationship between the educational structure and society and the inter-relationship of its component parts. Focusing upon the biographies of female members of the London School Board, the thesis explores the links between private life, social networks and the entry of women to the public domain. It examines the stance adopted by individual London School Board women on the formal curriculum, the adminstration of reformatory institutions, and attitudes towards working class children In school, considered In terms of the Interplay of the social divisions of gender and class.

This thesis is a qualitative study of young women’s involvement with badness in London. It is based on semi-structured interviews with young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, youth practitioners and criminal justice practitioners. It takes a black feminist approach in order to explore the lives and experiences of those from deprived areas. Such a perspective allows for the inclusion of all respondents regardless of their social class or racial identity, and considers the intersection of class, gender and race. The purpose of this study is to address the considerable gap in knowledge surrounding young women and road culture. It builds on and extends Gunter’s (2008; 2009; 2010) work which focuses predominantly on black young men in East London who perform badness as part of road culture’s rejection of mainstream norms and values. One of the key findings of my research is that badness cuts across gender lines. Young women can adopt tough personas as a successful survival strategy to gain respect, and sustain their reputations, in similar ways to young men. Rather than ‘acting like men’ by displaying behaviours associated with hegemonic masculinity however, females are constructing their own bad ass femininity. Not content with existing on the periphery of the action, and in addition to carrying drugs and weapons, they can be involved in robberies and the sale and supply of drugs. Young women are not necessarily second class citizens in these spaces, they are hustlers and leaders of their peers. Another key finding was their capability for violence, with the potential to exhibit more vicious behaviours than their male peers, in order to be known as someone who is a bad and not to be tested.

This thesis examines the diverse lives of Japanese women migrants who live in southeast London. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork to question how social identities are shaped and framed by various relationships in and through migration, with particular foci on gender, life course and locality. The Japanese women who live in southeast London network extensively with their compatriots, reproducing a distinctive ‘Japaneseness’ and capitalise it in their everyday lives. While social and cultural reproduction —particularly as this relates to their children—is central within this, their practices are also telling of their own agency in navigating the different registers of their gendered identities. They may be mothers, but they are also daughters, roles that carry with them a range of expectations and that are enacted and performed in different locations and that have enhanced significance at different points in their lives, with both intra- and inter- ethnic communities. Underpinned conceptually by an understanding of migration as an ongoing process, the study builds on existing research on Japanese women’s migration—which highlights the diversity of this population—to demonstrate their complex and multiple community making practice and belonging in which they accumulate and deploy locally-specific values and capitals. By bringing the concepts of translocalism and biographical approach together, this thesis therefore contributes to the understanding of how gender, ethnicity and migration intersect in the everyday lives of these women. Furthermore, in disentangling their complex multi-layered lives and everyday identity negotiations, it speaks further to considerations over agency through the life course and the ways in which social world are both constitutive of and constituted by wider social structures.

Subjective belonging, defined here as emotional attachments to people and places which give meaning and security to people’s lives, is the central theme of this study. It is not simply concerned with where, or whether people belong, but how they experience belonging. The thesis argues that narrative inquiry, in the richness of the depth and detail it offers, embedded within time and social context, is a most apposite methodology for drawing out the elusive and multi-layered meanings of subjective belonging through people’s whole lives. The empirical research entails semi-structured interviews with 14 migrant and British women of diverse background, ethnicity, class and generation, all of whom live in one East London street, the one in which I also live. In a framework of childhood, citizenship, ethnicity, class, place and community, narrative interviews are used to elicit the multiple and shifting ways in which the experience of belonging is configured in the women’s life stories. The research argues that an intersectional approach relating the women’s belonging to their manifold social locations is crucial to the meaning-making of their experiences. Situating the research in its specific social and historical context enables exploration of the women’s relationship with the locality and within the changing ethnic and class demographics of the area. Differentiating between identity and belonging, the thesis proposes that, belonging, unlike identity, demands performativity. The study focuses on the everyday performative practices of custom and tradition, including language and religion, as well as food and motherhood, and explores how these practices impact on the women’s sense of belonging. Ultimately the thesis demonstrates that performativity per se cannot create belonging but that the women’s varying positionalities understood over time are critical in explaining their sense of belonging.

Every independent nation is paying special attention to the progress of women. It is not possible for a country that does not have a women’s movement to undergo extensive improvement. […] The women of our country are lagging behind those of other countries. […] There are many reasons for this, of which the lack of education is one. East Bengal is an agricultural land. […] The climate of organisation that prevails in the cities is lacking in the countryside. For this reason, the majority of the people of our country cannot become immediately familiar with the changes of the times. Women are further oppressed because they are at the back of the group […]. Pakistan needs a women’s movement. Poverty, poor health, illiteracy, and unemployment, these are the root problems of our country. Alongside our men, we too must work tirelessly to solve these problems. (Begum 2006: 925-6) This excerpt is taken from an editorial in the Bengali women’s magazine Begum, published on 23 March 1952. The piece goes on to cite examples of women’s groups and women’s meetings in the Arab world and in London as sources of inspiration for working “to improve women’s rights, rural education, and social moral standards” (Begum 2006: 926). The timing and the content of this statement raise several interesting points. Just a month earlier, women’s and human rights activist and former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had arrived in Karachi, Pakistan, for a seven-day visit as a guest of the All-Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA). At the airport, Roosevelt was greeted by “thousands of cheering Pakistanis, many of them riding elaborately decorated camel carts” that were, according to the New York Times, “something of a Karachi trademark” (James 1952a: 2).

Background: Vibrating vaginal pelvic floor training balls are available in Austria and Germany to enhance women’s pelvic floor muscles and thus prevent urinary incontinence and other pelvic floor problems following childbirth. Nonetheless, there is currently little empirical knowledge to substantiate their use or assess their relative effectiveness in comparison to current standard care, which involves pelvic floor muscle exercises [1]. Aims/research question: This feasibility trial aims at assessing practical issues and feasibility of a future randomised controlled trial (RCT) to determine the effectiveness of vibrating vaginal pelvic floor training balls for postpartum pelvic floor muscle rehabilitation, at monitoring harms of the experimental intervention, and at exploring women´s perspectives on and experiences with the interventions and the trial [2]. Methods: Design: Single blind, randomised controlled feasibility trial with two parallel groups. 56 women from six weeks until six months postpartum are recruited in Vienna and randomised into one of two intervention groups to use either vibrating vaginal balls or a comparator pelvic floor muscle exercises for 12 weeks. As this is a feasibility study, study design features (recruitment, selection, randomisation, intervention and concordance, retention, data collection methods/tools, sample size calculation for full trial) are assessed, and participants’ views and experiences are surveyed. Tested outcome measure, collected before and after the intervention, is pelvic floor muscle performance as reported by participants and measured by perineometry by a blinded assessor. Descriptive and inferential statistics and content analysis serve the preparation of the future trial. Results: The results of this feasibility trial will inform the design and conduct of a full randomised controlled trial and provide insight into the experiences of women regarding the interventions and study participation. At the conference, preliminary results concerning recruitment and participants´ opinion and experiences will be presented. Relevance: Knowledge about pelvic floor muscle rehabilitation after childbirth enables midwives to promote women´s pelvic floor health. Recommendations/conclusions: Recommendations/conclusions of this ongoing study will be available at the conference and focus on the feasibility of the planned RCT and on midwifery practice. Ethical considerations: Approved by the ethics committees of the Medical University of Vienna and City University London. Trial registration: NCT02355327. Financing: This is a PhD project, funded by a City University London Scholarship.

Dorcas Martha Higgins (1856-1920) W omen were often excluded from scientific societies in the 19 century. Nevertheless, they contributed actively to natural history and botanical exchange clubs (see New Journal of Botany 4.2, pp. 95–103). These contributions are evidenced by their numerous herbarium specimens. We know very little about the lives of these women, but unlike many people of the time their handwriting and signatures are preserved, as are the plants that they collected on their travels. B elow we name some of the active female botanists of the 19 and early 20 century. They were active in all areas of botany: they collected plants, exchanged specimens, named new taxa, wrote books and led botanical organisations. These are only a selection of the women involved in botany at the time, but by the 1930s almost 20% of botanists active in Britain and Ireland were women. Despite the social restraints on the activities of women at the time, they were still able to make an important contribution to botany. M arian Sarah Ogilvie Farquharson (1846 – 1912) deserves particular mention. She campaigned for the admission of women to the Linnean Society of London. She achieved her goal in 1905, when 15 women were admitted, even though it wasn’t until 1908 that her own application was accepted. T he participation of women in botany has increased steadily since the 19 century, but, even in the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland there are still only about 40% female members. Women are still in the minority in the society's governance and among vice county recorders. P romoting gender equality in science is a slow process requiring both men and women to change their perceptions of science and scientists. There are several initiatives to promote gender equality in science. For example, the STEMettes (www.stemettes.org) aim to inspire females into Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. There are many other organisations supporting and promoting women in science; a comprehensive list can be found on the WISE Campaign website:

The politics of race and Black representation now centre on contestations over the meaning of Black identity, and of freedom, in a postcolonial world. Whilst the end of formal colonialism has not eradicated racism, postcoloniality has unsettled Black identity, producing new struggles around gender, sexuality, and class. These internal struggles increasingly contest the both the terms and conditions of contemporary Black freedom and the meaning of Blackness. This study explores these themes using interviews with Black Caribbean women in London and analyses of Black women's cultural practices. It addresses these as practices of freedom through which women have sought to re-define themselves and govern their lives through the idea of freedom. Secondly it uses genealogy to historicise and critique these practices and to undertake a critical ontology of the figure of the Black Caribbean women within liberalism. This reveals the mutual constituitiveness of metropolitan and colonial liberal formations through three moments in the post-emancipation histories of Black Caribbean women and British liberal state reform. These are: - the post-war mass migration to the U. K. of Caribbean women between 1948 and 1962; the reformation of the British Caribbean from slave economies to free societies following the Abolition of slavery in 1834, and finally political decolonisation by Britain of its Caribbean territories between 1934 and 1962. These moments permit a critical history of our present, in which we encounter the traces of Britain's colonial past in contemporary social formations. This study concludes that the traces of colonial liberalism remain in contemporary advanced liberalism. Secondly that the category Black Caribbean woman is a category of liberal government, but also available as an ethical identity from which Black Caribbean women have and continue to both resist the governmentalities of race and gender, and use their liberties to expand the limits of freedom.

Background: In England, influenza and pertussis vaccinations were recommended to all pregnant women from 2010 and 2012 respectively. However, in some areas, vaccination uptake rates have been low. The aim of this study was to gain a contextualised understanding of factors influencing vaccination acceptance during pregnancy in Hackney, a borough in north-east London, UK. Methods: Hackney was chosen as the study site because it has one of the lowest vaccination coverage rates in pregnancy in the UK. A maximum variation sampling method was used to recruit 47 pregnant and recently pregnant women from a wide range of backgrounds, as well as ten healthcare professionals from three general practices; two community antenatal clinics; nine parent-toddler groups; and four community centres. In-depth interviews and a focus group discussion with pregnant and recently pregnant women, as well as a video-recording of a pregnant patient’s consultation, explored experiences of care within the National Health Service during pregnancy, and women’s views about maternal vaccination. In-depth interviews with healthcare professionals explored their views towards, and how they discuss and provide maternal vaccination. Study data were analysed both deductively, through drawing on insights from anthropological works that address diverse conceptualisations and practices around vaccination as well as on notions of governmentality, biopolitics and relational autonomy; and inductively, with a thematic analysis approach. Findings: Reasons for hesitancy surrounding maternal vaccination are complex. The findings of this study indicated three broad themes influencing acceptance of, and access to maternal vaccination. These include; the various constellations of governance involved in vaccination; the socio-economic positions of both pregnant women and healthcare professionals; and patient-healthcare professional relationships. A major finding was that while many participants had received no recommendation to vaccinate during their pregnancy (and often instead were just provided with an information leaflet), they said that if a conversation with their healthcare professional had taken place, where their concerns could be discussed, they would have been likely to accept the vaccines.

This thesis is the first legal-historical study of male-perpetrated child homicide cases tried in the Central Criminal Court of London between 1889 and 1913. It examines how concepts of masculinity and fatherhood were mobilised in representations of men accused of killing their children in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. The research draws upon a dataset of 306 homicide cases involving victims under fourteen years of age tried at the Central Criminal Court of London between 1889 and 1913. The 120 homicide cases involving male defendants are the specific focus of the study and select cases are analysed using gender as the primary category of analysis. Divergent representations of men indicted for the death of their child within legal and social contexts are examined within a post-structuralist theoretical framework. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies are employed to analyse archival material produced by the Criminal Court and Home Office, and relevant cultural discourse within the printed media. This study finds that constructions of male-perpetrated child homicide in nineteenth and early twentieth-century England were highly gendered and culturally specific. It argues that contemporary cultural expectations of working-class masculinity played a decisive role in determining verdict and sentencing outcomes in trials of child homicide. The first chapter establishes the research design and conceptual framework of the thesis and positions my thesis in relation to existing literature on child homicide in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. In chapter two I explore how cultural assumptions about masculinity and fatherhood were bought into play within criminal trials of women accused of killing their children. Chapter three considers how cultural assumptions about class and gender underpinned spousal provocation as a mitigating defence for men and women accused of killing their children. Chapter four examines the construction of masculinity and fatherhood within insanity defences of paternal filicide. My fifth chapter demonstrates the extent to which perceptions of men’s guilt and culpability in cases of child homicide were shaped by cultural expectations of class, gender and sexuality. The final chapter analyses how contemporary understandings about paternal responsibility and authority played out in trials of homicidal paternal negligence. The willingness of the Court to accept socio-economic explanations of male- perpetrated child homicide was underpinned by late Victorian and Edwardian understandings of class and gender. Rulings recognised working-class men’s ability to attain full masculine status was subject to a range of external social and economic forces beyond their control. Juries repeatedly showed their willingness to extend mercy to men who killed their children out of desperation when they tried and failed to provide for their family. The strength of cultural associations between child homicide and the economic marginalisation of London’s poor lent credence to men’s appeals to socio- economic circumstance to mitigate acts of child homicide.

In this thesis I critically explore processes of educational exclusion experienced by black working-class young women in an inner-London 16-19 college. I also present and critically evaluate a pedagogical response that I hoped might disrupt such processes. These discussions emerged from a year of qualitative research praxis I conducted with a small group of students and staff within my own workplace in 2014-15, and throughout I consider the compromised and complicated possibilities of doing such research as a white middle class woman, and in the context of a contemporary neoliberal institution. Drawing on black feminist thought and its aligned research, I argue that the exclusions my research participants faced often emerged in relation to their own deeply embodied forms of social and educational striving within systems shaped by intersecting racist, heterosexist and classist discourses. One system I discuss in this respect is the media and image saturated discursive terrain the young women navigated in constructing their social identities and peer relationships. A second is an increasingly neoliberal education system that sidelines attention to embodiment, cultural difference and structural inequality, places acute pressures on students and staff, and works to covertly reinforce white middle-class patriarchal norms against which my research participants were judged. I also, however, explore spaces and practices for resistance: those mobilized by the young women and their teachers in their daily lives at college, and also my attempts to develop an embodied, critical and emotionally engaged pedagogy of hope with this group of people. This pedagogical approach centered around the liberatory potential of young black women’s dance practices and critical voices, and the coming together of women across difference. I critically evaluate this pedagogical project, its ‘successes’ and ‘failures’, with the intention of developing future practice.