“Women in Charge” and Empires in Change – the Lives of Ordinary Women during the Qin-Han Transition

A Study on Women Work-Life Balance with Reference to Three Dimensions: Personal Life, Work Life-Educationist (Faculties) and Work Life- Research in Bangalore Colleges

Menopause is a natural phenomenon occurring as women approach middle age, the transitional period in a woman's life when her ovaries start producing less of the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone marking the end of her reproductive years. Due to a growing aging population and longer life expectancies, globally women will spend a significant portion of their lives in post-menopause. Women’s experiences, views, and responses to menopause that influences women’s daily life and well-being, may vary between different societies and cultures. Aim: To assess the prevalence and experience of menopause symptoms of university faculty members in RAKMHSU and INDIA. Cross sectional survey was carried out among thirty nine-university faculty by using purposive sampling technique. Menopause specific quality of life questionnaire was used for collecting the data and was analysed by using SPSS version 25. A total of 39 women participated in the study, the majority of women (76.9%) reached menopause after 45 years of age. Muscular and joint pain was experienced by majority (74.4%) of participants, followed by weight gain (71.8%) and insomnia (66.7%), the least reported symptom were ‘being dissatisfied with personal life’ and “Feeling depressed, down and blue” both at 10.3%.

Why do women start their own businesses? Is it solely because they are searching for financial success, or for other reasons? On the basis of detailed interviews with a number of women who have started their own businesses, this book, first published in 1985, reveals the significance of factors that are directly related to women’s experiences at home, at work, and in the wider society. The author’s analysis shows how business start-up enables many women, but not all, to achieve forms of economic and social independence that they would not otherwise enjoy. Further, they illustrate ways in which business proprietorship has a wide variety of effects upon individuals, and upon their personal relationships and life styles. They refute the notion of a single entrepreneurial experience and argue that the causes and consequences of business start-up are highly conditioned by the extent to which women are committed to traditionally prescribed roles and to profitability. The findings of this book will have important implications for the formulation of small business policies. It will also be of particular value to those interested in women’s studies and small business management.

The difference between transitional and stable states of the legal system is necessary for understanding the dynamics of the development of law. In the unstable (transitional) period, the components of the legal system (law, legal consciousness, legal institutions) undergo changes, reacting to social, political and economic changes. This period is characterized by value changes, contradictions and legitimacy problems that arise during the formation of new legal norms. Important features of the transitional legal system are: structural transformation, when the components of the legal system undergo qualitative changes, adapting to new social requirements; legal crisis and contradictions, because in the transition period there are legal uncertainties, collisions of norms and problems of legal regulation; crisis of legitimacy, when perception and acceptance of new legal norms require time, which leads to tension in relations between the society and the state; slow adaptation of the legal system, since political and social changes occur faster than adaptation of the legal system; formation of new legal institutions, because in the transition period new legal phenomena and institutions are formed, which in a certain period can become part of stable legal regulation. Thus, the transition of the legal system is an inevitable process caused by changes in society and accompanied by both the reorganization of legal structures and the crisis of legal regulation.

The wedding ceremony is one of the integral stages of a person's life, richly saturated with traditions. A wedding is on a par with such events in a person's life as birth and death. For many centuries, the peculiarities of its conduct, rituals that should be observed, have been formed. Textiles occupied an important place in the wedding tradition. It was not only part of the bride's dowry, but also accompanied the entire procession, being an integral part of it. At the same time, the wedding textiles had to be decorated with a certain ornament bearing a sacred meaning, since pagan beliefs played an important role in the wedding process. With the adoption of Christianity, wedding customs have changed, but the importance of textiles in wedding activities has remained the same. Embroidery and weaving were an ordinary women's needlework and a kind of entertainment, in which the principle of “copying” was preserved, that is, sewing according to the pattern, the canon. When creating a dowry and, in particular, towels, young girls copied the drawing and ornament of an earlier period. That said, Slavic pagan symbols were able to find their place in Orthodoxy and were copied from generation to generation. The original semantic load that the Slavs put into reproducible patterns was eventually forgotten. But the repetition of ancient ornaments continued on wedding textiles, namely on towels. Thus, it was believed that these symbols protect a young family from the evil eye and help to find happiness. An important place in the design of wedding textiles is occupied by such symbols as “orepey” (or “burdock”), “World Tree” (or “Tree of Life”) and “Great Goddess” (or “Great Mother”, “Makosh”), depicted as a female silhouette.

Improving the Experiences of Sexual and Gender Minority-Identifying Trainees in Gastroenterology and Hepatology

Transitional period (TP) is the time of several years in a person's life after reaching of final body height, spanning from about the age of 16 to about the age of 26 years. In this period the person reaches a peak in muscle mass and bone mineral density. Growth hormone deficiency (GHD) in the TP leads to reduced bone mineral density and inadequate body composition with reduced muscle mass and increased abdominal fat mass. GHD in TP is also associated with impaired lipid profile, increased insulin resistance and risk for metabolic syndrome. GH replacement during TP has a favorable effect on bone density and quality, on body composition and on cardiovascular health, thus reducing future morbidity and mortality in adulthood. GH replacement is of particular importance for quality of life improvement in the young patients. To facilitate and optimize the continuance of GH replacement in the TP for the patients treated with GH in childhood, we have comprised these guidelines aimed to improve the communication between pediatric and adult endocrinologists. A closer collaboration between these two services would ensure easier continuance of treatment and follow up for the patients with hypopituitarism in transition to adulthood. The goal of presenting these guidelines is to prevent the drop out of patients with GHD in TP from continuing GH replacement and other relevant hormonal replacement.

For 18 months in 2007 and 2008, the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the obstetrics clinic of a large, public hospital in Manhattan, New York. The large majority of patients who receive their prenatal care from this obstetrics clinic rely on the Medicaid-funded Prenatal Care Assistance Program to cover their medical expenses. As a condition of receipt of this aid, women are required to meet with a battery of professionals—namely social workers, health educators, nutritionists and financial officers—who are legally obliged to inquire into areas of women's lives that exceed the realm of the medical. The author finds that, in demanding patients to meet with a constellation of officials who inquire into women's personal lives, Medicaid mandates intrusion into women's private lives, and it produces pregnancy as an opportunity for state supervision, management, and regulation of poor, otherwise uninsured women. Thus, Medicaid may be understood as an occasion for the initiation of poor women into the state regulatory apparatus and a circumstance for creating disempowered legal subjects of poor women.

An Examination of African American Women's Lives in Postwar Philadelphia Lisa Krissoff Boehm (bio) Lisa Levenstein . A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 199 pages. Illustrations, tables, maps, appendix, bibliography, and index. $35.96. This work, a part of the prestigious John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, edited by Waldo E. Martin and Patricia Sullivan, makes a noteworthy contribution to the growing yet still underserved field of African American women's urban history. Levenstein's work is heartening on a number of levels, and we need more scholars to consider undertaking projects of this type. As I have argued in the Journal of Urban History's special January 2010 edition on teaching ("Adding Gender to American Urban History"), urban historians ought to produce works that cross subfields with greater frequency. Urban historians tend to craft books aimed at a narrow audience and seem hesitant to make theoretical or narrative leaps between genres. This hesitancy denies the field greater readership and historiographical impact. Urban history can be successfully merged with political, economic, environmental, gender, labor, immigration, African American, and other types of history. A Movement Without Marches is simultaneously a book about poverty, African American women, public policy, and postwar Philadelphia. The book openly draws inspiration from the likes of Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and Arnold R. Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1840-1960 (1998). Levenstein makes a very important contribution by studying what she terms "the gendered construction of racialized urban poverty" (p. 5). Levenstein writes about African American women in poverty, a topic that has proved onerous for many academics due to the stereotypes that must be confronted. Levenstein rejects the term "underclass," which "not only paints a false portrait of poor women's goals and values, but it also severely misconstrues their work habits. Regardless of their employment status, women who sought and retained assistance from public institutions were workers, first and foremost, because they labored to care for their households and [End Page 556] their families with few financial resources" (p. 24). Levenstein is upfront about addressing the ways in which the women may have exhibited traits commonly attributed to the underclass, admitting that the women "received public assistance, became pregnant unintentionally, suffered from depression, or used drugs and alcohol" (p. 24). Levenstein could point out here that these traits can be applied to a broad number of Americans—middle class as well as working class—especially when one considers how many Americans have relied on unemployment assistance at some time in their lives or made use of child tax credits or other financial relief. The author notes on page twenty-six that any study of African American women in poverty runs the risk of misinterpretation, given the broad range of negative stereotypes attributed to these women. The nature of the book necessitates a thorough exploration of the women's personal lives, and the author must divulge some unflattering stories. Extensive reliance on court records unearths very sensitive tales; however, Levenstein approaches her work with the utmost sensitivity and need not worry about being misinterpreted. In a clearly prepared table, Levenstein notes how the black population of Philadelphia expanded from 219,599 in 1930 to 529,239 by 1960. Much of this notable increase is due to the movement known as the Second Great Migration, which Levenstein does not refer to by name but mentions fleetingly in a few places in the book. The economic, cultural, and political aspects of the city that lured hundreds of thousands of southern migrants to settle there ought to be contrasted with the startling conditions the migrants encountered in their daily lives in Philadelphia. As return migration remained low, the North must have remained preferable in some ways. Migration studies and narratives, although there are relatively few focused strictly on women, have been a staple of postwar urban and African American history and ought to be further incorporated into this work. Reference to the conclusions of sociologist Stewart Tolnay, who refutes...

The story of women's participation in the ecumenical movement can indeed be described as a pilgrimage of justice and peace, as well as a story of mission. From the earliest days of ecumenism--whether in its formal, institutional structures or in the lively work and witness of local communities around the globe--questions about women's role in the churches have been intertwined with questions about the social, economic, and cultural forces that affect women's lives. With changing emphasis shaped by particular time and context, the consistent thread in the journey has been a will to respond to the call to participate in God's mission in the world in ways that contribute to wholeness and fullness of life for all God's people and to the flourishing of creation. While not always named or recognized as such, gender justice has been at the heart of this journey. Consistently, women have been seeking ecumenical space in which the diverse experiences of women, their voices and visions, and the conditions of injustice and oppression that have been the lot of many women around the world can be lifted up and addressed. And in that space, women have claimed their own agency of resistance and transformation. The story of women's work and witness in the World Council of Churches (WCC) is only one facet of this journey. Each church family and world communion could tell its own story and each local context has had times of ecumenical witness and action--often connected with global programs, but also representative of particular local needs and issues. Nevertheless, the WCC has played a key role since its inception in linking ecumenical women in local contexts with international networks and global currents. A review of WCC programmes and structures committed to the journey of gender justice reveals both the rich heritage of ecumenical women's work and the challenges and gaps that continue. Affirming the "service and status of women" In the 1940s, when the WCC was still in the process of formation, Twila Cavert, a Young Women Christian Association (YWCA) leader from the US, together with other women, gained the support of WCC leaders for a pre-assembly women's meeting and a survey of woman leaders worldwide about their vision for the work of women in the whole church. (1) The questionnaire netted detailed replies from women in 58 countries, and prompted the Reformed Church of France to request that the question of women's role be placed on the agenda of the first assembly in Amsterdam in 1948. There, the study report on "The Life and Work of Women in the Church" was received and its recommendation for a permanent commission to undertake ecumenical inquiry into issues related to women's ministry was accepted. Susannah Herzel writes of the significance of these first steps for the participation of women in churches around the world: "So the infiltration had begun. Member churches of the ecumenical movement had agents of change in their midst, and the troubling questions would be increasingly difficult to ignore." (2) The material generated by the study was developed into a book by Kathleen Bliss, published in 1952 as The Service and Status of Women in the Churches, (3) Interpreting the reports through the framework of women's various types of service--voluntary, full-time and professional, ordained, and participation in church governance--Bliss examined the contributions and limitations of each area of endeavour. She asked whether the churches were making the best use of women's gifts, or helping women to participate as Christians in the changes taking place in society as a whole. Writing during a period of flux in women's public and private roles, Bliss urged churches to recognize the implications of changing family and employment patterns. She asserted that "what is needed is ... an imaginative act of understanding ... [of the] ... revolutionary change in the place of women in society." (4) These reports from around the world provided evidence that responses to women's ministries ranged from indifference to active opposition. …

Menopause is one of the most significant phases in the life of a woman which brings about various physiological changes called postmenopausal syndrome. A health programme catering to the needs of postmenopausal women is lacking in our health system. A cross-sectional study was conducted in an urban health and training centre. Sample size of 171 was taken by simple random sampling. Women of age more than or equal to 45 and having 12 months of amenorrhea were enrolled in the study after obtaining their consent. The mean age of menopause was found to be 45.31 years. In the vasomotor domain, the most common postmenopausal symptom was hot flushes (47.95%) followed by sweating (25.73%) while in the psychological domain it was seen that the most common symptom was feeling depressed down or blue (37.43%) followed by being dissatisfied with personal life, feeling anxious or nervous (36.26%) and being impatient with other people and feelings of wanting to be alone (34.50%). In physical domain, the most common symptom was ache in muscles and joints (92.98%) followed by low backache (86.55%), feeling tired or worn out (84.80%), decrease in physical strength (83.63%) and aches in the back of neck or head (81.87%). The other domain was the sexual domain in which the most common symptom was a change in sexual desire (93.57%) followed by avoiding intimacy (92.98%). It was found that the domain, most severely affecting quality of life was sexual followed by physical and psychological domain. Awareness should be created regarding the psychosocial, physical, nutritional and sexual needs of postmenopausal women.

The image of women in the late Qing Dynasty has always been enigmatic due to the custom in Canton that virtuous women rarely left their chambers. The book Fourteen Months in Canton, however, contains Mrs. Gray’s insights during her residence in Canton, including her extensive records of both upper-class and ordinary women in Canton at the time. Her accounts are valuable historical sources for the study of women in Canton in the late Qing Dynasty. At present, there are few academic studies on the topic of women in Canton in the late Qing Dynasty and the works by Mrs. Gray. Through a textual analysis of Mrs. Gray’s Fourteen Months in Canton, and supported by relevant historical sources from the same period, the paper aims to collate and analyse the images of upper-class and ordinary women in Canton, and thus explores the daily life, survival, and inner world of women in Canton in the late Qing Dynasty.

Reviewed by: Stories of Women in the Middle Ages by Maria Teresa Brolis Jessica L. Minieri Maria Teresa Brolis, Stories of Women in the Middle Ages ( Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 2018) xviii + 187 pp. Maria Teresa Brolis argues in her monograph Stories of Women in the Middle Ages that late medieval ideas on gender, sexuality, and religion shaped the ways in which women could participate in both elite and non-elite spaces from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries in Europe. To illustrate this point, Brolis divides her monograph into two sections, "Famous Women" and "Ordinary Women," each highlighting the lives and afterlives of sixteen individuals. The first eight will be familiar to scholars of the European Middle Ages, as they include Hildegard of Bingen, Raingarde of Montboissier, Heloise of Argenteuil, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Clare of Assisi, Birgitta of Sweden, Christine de Pizan, and Joan of Arc. By beginning with these figures, Brolis brings her readers' attention to the lives of women in different social positions and geographic locations than those in the second section on "Ordinary Women." This second section, with chapters on Flora, Agnesina, Ottebona, Grazia, Gigliola, Bettina, Margherita, and Belfiore, focuses on economic activity, marital practices, religious life, fashion, medicine, and travel in the Lombard town of Bergamo during the fourteenth century. With this division, Brolis provides her readers with a necessary and fascinating look at life for medieval women across regions, centuries, and social strata in order to "investigate the female condition at the centre and on the periphery of the medieval word" (3). [End Page 247] Brolis thus juxtaposes the eight queens, saints, and writers featured in the first half with the seamstresses, businesswomen, and abbesses in the second section as their lives overlapped in terms of geographic location, participation in social and economic life, and relationship to the Church. The success of this monograph therefore lies not in its individual narratives but in the ways in which these stories raise new questions about the role of gender in European life in the late medieval period. Specifically, these stories ask how geographic location and social position affected the place of women within their communities across the continent. One of the main points of connection between these "famous" and "ordinary" women derives from their shared experiences in the Italian Peninsula. This geographic focus complicates the role of women in classical Renaissance republics and kingdoms throughout the peninsula, as many of these case studies, particularly those north of Rome, lived differently than their counterparts in Angevin Naples and Aragonese Sicily. These comparisons are most apparent in the chapters on Clare of Assisi, Birgitta of Sweden, Grazia d'Arzago, and Agnesina of Bergamo, as their different experiences demonstrate that for women across Italy, the variants in governmental structure (i.e., republicanism vs. monarchy) and corresponding beliefs about gender affected the ways in which women could be active participants in their communities. The complicated relationship between Birgitta and Johanna I of Naples illustrates that women, particularly in elite and royal circles, participated in political spaces within Angevin Naples in ways that their counterparts in Bergamo, Milan, and other northern Italian cities did not. Birgitta's connection to Johanna allowed her to speak publicly about several social ills that she observed while in the city, most significantly the enslavement of Muslim women, which she described as a "scandal to witness the slave trade in a Christian country" (61). While her words did not lead to a cessation of the practice, her arguments, particularly those recorded in her Revelations, brought wider attention to the enslavement of and sexual violence perpetrated against Muslim women in the region. While Naples was not the only city she visited on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, it was among the most significant cities she traveled through due to her involvement in local politics, the abolition of slavery, and her connection to the House of Anjou. In conjunction with the chapters on Clare of Assisi and Grazia d'Arzago, the histories of these figures as advocates for women inside of religious spaces (e.g., in the Bridgettine Order, Poor Clares, and the Santa Grata abbey in Bergamo) raise significant questions about ecclesiastical structures, both inside and outside...

Although the female population was preponderant in Boston, Salem, Newport, and Portsmouth, Elaine Forman Crane finds that women of this period gradually became less autonomous and more dependent on men than they had been in the early years of English settlement. Challenging the prevailing notion that women's lives improved during the revolutionary era, the author convincingly argues that women's voices grew weaker and their presence dimmer as the market economy and government expanded. Drawing from census lists, church records, merchants' ledgers, newspapers, town records, and family papers, Crane traces the evolution of religious, commercial, and legal institutions to show how women suffered a deterioration in economic standing, a growing public invisibility, and a heightened reliance on male decision making. She frames her narrative within the context of European women's experiences, revealing a parallel decline in status as the patriarchal structures of church, state, and market became more elaborate and interconnected. Ebb Tide in New England offers a fresh perspective on ordinary women's lives in the colonial and revolutionary periods, and it makes a strong case for viewing the feminization of poverty in contemporary America as a product of these historical origins.

Not all the time … but mostly … is the outcome of collaboration across the genres of ethnographic research, and visual and performing arts. In exploring renewed methodologies for social research Maggie sought to develop a methodological model (ethno-mimesis) rooted in feminist thought and practice, that represented in visual artistic forms the multiple standpoints of women working in prostitution. Ethno-mimesis is a combination of ethnographic research and the representation of this work in visual/artistic form. Introduced by a mutual friend in 1997 our collaborative work began with Sara reading and interpreting the ethnographic work with a view to developing a performance text, as an exemplar of ethno-mimesis. In the collaborative work presented here the hybrid texts that emerge are an outcome of the inter-relationship between ethnographic research and the re-presentation of women's life stories through live art forms – video, and two movement based performances. Through this work we hope to reach a wider audience, beyond academic communities, facilitating understanding, interpretation and maybe even action/praxis in relation to prostitution as a social issue. In representing ethnographic data in artistic form it is hoped that we can access a richer understanding of the complexities of women's lived experiences that can throw light on broader social structures and processes. Such hybrid work may also help audiences to see that women working in prostitution are ordinary women; and that ‘prostitutes’ are indices for all women.