Biographies Of Women Research Articles

The Female Chastity Cult in Huizhou during the Late Imperial Era: Demographics, Books, and Monuments

This essay introduces the region of Huizhou famed for its scenery, its commercial agriculture, its merchants who traded local products all over the empire, and the lineages to which these men belonged. Huizhou was also known for the high numbers of its chaste women who during the Ming dynasty came under the scrutiny of the local community. The female chastity cult in Huizhou was manifested in various ways, and the three articles in this special Nan Nü theme issue examine how demographic data based on lineage records, special Huizhou printed editions of the classic ‘Biographies of Women’, and chastity arches built during the High Qing era (1680–1830) reveal the endorsement, complexities, and contradictions of the cult in this locale. The Appendix to this issue reviews the historiography of Huizhou studies in Chinese.

Paid Caregiving in the Gendered Life Course: A Study of Czech Nannies in Vietnamese Immigrant Families

Vietnamese immigrant families in the Czech Republic often recruit Czech women to look after their children. Seen in the context of the dominant scholarship, this is a quite unique case in the field of care work where the employers are immigrants, while the employees are women of the host country. Drawing upon fifteen in-depth interviews with Czech nannies, this article analyses the motivations to become a nanny in a Vietnamese family. It employs the perspective of the life course in order to understand what changes in women's biographies lie behind these decisions. The author focuses on the transitions in nannies' life cycles at the crossroads of three aspects of their biographies: the family caregiving role, position in the labour market and the welfare state, and the meaning of paid caregiving. By looking at how women experience and attach meaning to transitions and phases in their life, which lead them to take a gendered job as a nanny, the author sheds light on the dynamics of the complex processes (taking place in families, the labour market, or the welfare state) that constitute these changes. This article-through the analysis of the motivations to become nannies-illuminates the broader issues of how gendered biographies are shaped under particular socio-economic and historical conditions, as well as by particular cultural expectations of caregiving.

Wearing Memories: Clothing and the Global Lives of Mourning in Swaziland

This article situates a cultural phenomenon of women’s memory work through clothing in Swaziland. It explores clothing as both action and object of everyday, personalized practice that constitutes psychosocial well-being and material proximities between the living and the dead, namely, in how clothing of the deceased is privately possessed and ritually manipulated by the bereaved. While human and spiritual self-other relations are produced through clothing and its material efficacy, current global ideologies of immaterial mortuary ritual associated with Pentecostalism have emerged as contraries to this local, intersubjective grief work. This article describes how such contrarian ideologies paper over existing global aspects of people’s entangled relations with the dead – in three biographies of women and their objects – thus showing that memory work is not limited to people, goods, or ideas that flow between nations and expanding notions of the global and gendered practices of personhood.

Biography and the Black Atlantic. Edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 370 pp. $55.00

This exceptional set of essays explores the “Black Atlantic” through biography. The volume is organized around particular life stories that illustrate the implications for interpreting the interconnected histories of Atlantic societies. Generally, these fine contributions raise issues of how to reconstruct biographies to determine their significance as individualized glimpses into patterns of history; responses to enslavement; and the quest for liberty, dignity, and meaning. Implicitly, biography is interdisciplinary because it draws on written and sometimes oral texts that have to be examined through the lens of literary criticism while explaining the context in terms of historical methodology. This volume addresses this dual orientation carefully and thoroughly. Suitably critiqued, it can help to propel the genre even further as a historical tool of analysis. The book is divided into twelve chapters and an afterword. A number of contributions summarize or extend earlier studies of individuals.One of the great achievements in this volume is the focus on the biographies of women, who are seldom seen or heard in the history of slavery, particularly those women who were enslaved in Africa. Jon Sensbach discusses the lives of Rebecca Rotten and Maria, the “Mooress,” both of whom were Moravians. Cassandra Pybus looks at Jane Thompson, who escaped to British forces in Virginia and ultimately found her way to Sierra Leone in 1791. Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard follow the path of Rosalie of the “Poulard Nation,” identified as Fulbe, during the era of the Haitian Revolution.Martin A. Klein provides a marvelous overview of African biographical studies, as well as an introduction to the problem of finding the voices of the enslaved; he gives particular attention to scholarship about slaves born in Africa that has often been overlooked. Sheryl Kroen uncovers the ideological underpinnings of Atlantic history through the British animated character “Robinson Charley,” who personified the “North Atlantic” community during World War II and the subsequent Cold War. João José Reis reconstructs the story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, who left Hausaland in 1806/7 and, after gaining his freedom in Brazil, became a wealthy merchant and slaveholder who traded in West Africa. Lloyd S. Kramer follows the path of David Dorr who traveled from North America to Europe during the 1850s. Similarly, Roquinaldo Ferreira studies Francisco Gomes, a merchant and colonial official in the Angolan seaport of Benguela, who in the early 1820s was accused of plotting a rebellion to free the colony from Portuguese rule. Gomes was born in Rio de Janeiro, possibly as a slave; in 1800, he was exiled to Benguela as a criminal.Inevitably, a few caveats are warranted in measuring the success of this volume. Vincent Carretta repeats his well-known arguments about the methodological issues concerning the reconstruction of the life of Gustavus Vassa, whom he prefers to call Olaudah Equiano without exploring whether the individual in question was known, or preferred to be known, by that name at the time. Unfortunately, his methodology does not take into account either recent research of others or previous criticisms of his own work. Lisa Lindsay examines the mythology of “tribal marks” in her investigation of James C. Vaughan’s Yoruba background without raising questions about the meaning of facial and body scarification and the inappropriate use of the term tribal in discussing its significance. Nor does Lindsay question the application of the ethnic name Yoruba in the context of Egba history and its relationship to the collapse of Oyo.Jane Landers applies ethnic terminology from the Americas, specifically Mandinga, to ethnicity in West Africa, where the term was not used, without fully comprehending the antiquity and centrality of Islam in the Senegambia region of West Africa. She does not explain who the “Muslim converts” were in the Gambia; in the early eighteenth century, Muslim identity in Senegambia had more to do with the emerging age of jihad than with matters involving conversion to Islam per se.Reis is incorrect in claiming that kola was made into a drink when it was chewed. He also overlooks the practice of murgu in West Africa in the “hiring out” of slaves in Bahia. His subject of study was not “probably” enslaved during jihad; no other explanation is even plausible. Like Landers and Scott/Hébrard, he fails to place jihad in its proper context. Hence, on the one hand, these explorations in life histories reveal interconnections within the trans-Atlantic world, but, on the other, they sometimes betray weaknesses in comprehending the historiography of Africa during the period of Atlantic slavery.

Saberes e práticas de cura nas igrejas neotradicionais em Luanda: carismas, participação e trajetórias das mulheres

O presente artigo analisa as visoes da doenca e as trajetorias de vida de mulheres carismaticas observadas em algumas igrejas neotradicionais localizadas no espaco urbano e periurbano de Luanda. As profetisas tem um papel central no espaco sociocultural ecumenico da capital, realcando como a (re)interpretacao das suas biografias no contexto religioso permite criar dinâmicas sociais inovadoras que sao engendradas nos campos da saude e da religiao. Estas igrejas ergueram templos e casas de oracao e de cura, convertem e arrastam multidoes, refizeram codigos de etica e de conduta religiosa e moral, e tem um papel central na renovacao de certos rituais, com particular acuidade para a cura religiosa.

Unsupervised Discovery of Biographical Structure from Text

We present a method for discovering abstract event classes in biographies, based on a probabilistic latent-variable model. Taking as input timestamped text, we exploit latent correlations among events to learn a set of event classes (such as Born, Graduates High School, and Becomes Citizen), along with the typical times in a person’s life when those events occur. In a quantitative evaluation at the task of predicting a person’s age for a given event, we find that our generative model outperforms a strong linear regression baseline, along with simpler variants of the model that ablate some features. The abstract event classes that we learn allow us to perform a large-scale analysis of 242,970 Wikipedia biographies. Though it is known that women are greatly underrepresented on Wikipedia—not only as editors (Wikipedia, 2011) but also as subjects of articles (Reagle and Rhue, 2011)—we find that there is a bias in their characterization as well, with biographies of women containing significantly more emphasis on events of marriage and divorce than biographies of men.

Biographies of Women: A Selection of Significant Choice Reviews

Biographies of Women: A Selection of Significant Choice Reviews

Behind “Burning”: Women Writers’ Self-Censorship and Self-Promotion

This article examines the phenomenon of women writers burning their own manuscripts, which took place during the Ming-Qing period. By analyzing women’s poems and biographies of women, this study explores the reasons and implications behind “burning.” The self-censorship embodied by “burning” was geared towards protecting female virtue or enabling women writers to express their intense personal emotions while promoting an ideal public self-image. For example, due to their gender and class-consciousness, upper-class women tended to portray themselves as virtuous ladies, whereas, in contrast, courtesan writers were fascinated with the power of love. However, the act of burning manuscripts could both lead to partial loss of an author’s works and imbue her writing with the tantalizing aura of an unfulfilled promise, thereby immortalizing the manuscripts that had almost been turned to ashes and publicizing the work of the formerly obscure author. In this sense, the “burning” is transformed into a literary conceit which promotes women’s writings instead of destroying them. This article demonstrates the dual functions of manuscript burning by Ming-Qing women: self-censorship and self-promotion.

A German-Christian Network of Letters in Colonial Africa as a Repository for ‘Ordinary’ Biographies of Women, 1931–1967

This study explores the possibilities of extracting biographies of ‘ordinary Africans’, especially women, from the epistolary networks of a transcontinental Lutheran community of readers. Due to the enthusiastic efforts of a number of German deaconesses, women from British colonial Africa whose narrations might otherwise not have been recorded, participated in conversations with women in Nazi, and thereafter West as well as East Germany. Mission evidence supports the argument that in colonial Africa religion opened up one of the few spaces for African and European women to collaborate in an otherwise segregated society. While the network was initiated in the name of their common faith and sustained with German church funding (and British colonial infrastructure), the content of the letters was far from restricted to religious matters. The article contends that these epistles reflected an awareness amongst rural female African participants of their position in a much larger geopolitical space – and even a world church. Thus the label ‘ordinary’ refers to the status of the African women writers in their local communities and church congregations rather than their horizons of expectation. Their fragmentary biographies or life-histories, from both colonial Tanganyika and the Transvaal, need to be viewed within the context of their interaction with their German facilitators and the members of the female Christian reading community in Europe – who were the intended audience envisaged by the African women narrators.

Reading Race through U.S. Women's Biographies

Per http://sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/1042-7961/, authors may archive publisher's version/PDF on author's personal website, departmental website or institutional repository

Creating continuity out of the disruption of a diagnosis of HIV during pregnancy

To understand the uniqueness of the experience of testing HIV positive from the perspective of pregnant women. As more people learn of their HIV diagnosis through routine screening processes, it is timely to reflect on the impact of receiving an unexpected positive result. A prospective qualitative study. This paper draws on the case studies of four women who were participating in a larger prospective qualitative study of reproductive decision-making, pregnancy and childbirth following HIV diagnosis. Multiple interviews were conducted following diagnosis during pregnancy, and, after the birth of their babies. Thematic data analysis was undertaken. Drawing on Becker's theory of disruption, we document the 'sudden disjuncture' of their antenatal diagnosis and the embodied emotional struggle the women engaged in to create continuity in their lives. A diagnosis of HIV disrupted the women's biographies in terms of their health, relationships and social identity. As pregnant women, the threat of HIV was experienced most significantly in relation to their unborn child. However, their narratives also revealed how a diagnosis of HIV in the context of pregnancy, whilst traumatic, provided a focus for regaining continuity in their lives, as the baby became a metaphor for hope and orientation toward the future. As HIV testing becomes more 'routine', the findings of this study serve to remind health professionals that a positive diagnosis continues to constitute a major trauma to individuals and families. We propose that appropriately educated nursing and midwifery staff could facilitate the 'meaning making' process that is required for newly diagnosed HIV positive persons to find a subjective sense of well-being in their lives.

Thinking Through the Mothers: Reimagining Women's Biographies

Thinking Through the Mothers: Reimagining Women's Biographies

Collective Biographies of Women

Collective Biographies of Women

‘A’isha Abdel Rahman: An Unlikely Heroine A Post-Colonial Reading of Her Life and Some of Her Biographies of Women in the Prophetic Household

This paper examines the work of Egyptian ‘A’isha Abdel Rahman (who acquired the pen name of Bint al-Shati’ in the 1930s) on the tarajim (biographies) of women of the prophetic households published in the 1950s and the 1960s. It begins by shedding light on personal and intellectual histories of the biographer that have not received their due attention. It argues that Abdel Rahman’s independent views regarding the role of religion and modernity in colonial and postcolonial societies made her the unlikely heroine of the post-1952 republican regime. These views also shaped her constructions of the biographies of the Prophet’s mother, Amena bint Wahb, wife, ‘A’isha bint Abi Bakr, and granddaughter, Zaynab bint ‘Ali. A critical discussion of these works poses interesting questions for the postcolonial Islamic feminist enterprise.

WRITING AS FEMALE NATIONAL AND IMPERIAL RESPONSIBILITY: FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE'S SCHEME FOR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REFORMS IN ENGLAND AND INDIA

Florence Nightingale, who becamea national heroine after the Crimean War, was the most popular subject in hagiographical collective biographies of women during the mid- and late-1850s. However, her life can be regarded as a resolute resistance to conformity with the ideal of womanhood in the Victorian era. She recognised the chasm between her popularity and reality:Good public! It knew nothing of what I was really doing in the Crimea.Good public! It has known nothing of what I wanted to do & have done since I came home. (Private note from 1857; Nightingale,Ever Yours177–78)This statement implies the resistance to the misrepresentation of her, which is indicative of her inner struggle to search for a means to express her vision.

Forced Migrants, Active Mothers or Desired Wives: Migratory Motivation and Self-Representation in Kosovo Albanian and Russian Women's Biographies

All forms of migration have fundamental repercussions in terms of family networks and obligations. This article investigates how women of refugee and migrant background view their deliberative capacities in making choices and how this combines with their self-representation as mothers, daughters and wives. What are the fundamental motivations immigrant women represent as legitimate explanations for their migrancy, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the receiving society? The material consists of biographic interviews carried out in 2006 with Kosovo Albanian and Russian women who have settled in Finland. Kosovo Albanian refugee women prefer to explain their migratory motivation as a result of their role as dedicated mothers rather than as people forced to flee. In turn, many female immigrants of Russian background have adopted a tendency to represent themselves as ‘passive migrants’ pushed by others' actions to leave Russia. This study shows that the ways in which immigrant women understand their womanhood and initiative in the migratory process not only reflect the socio-cultural characteristics of the sending society they have been socialised in, but also the available migratory channels and attitudes towards them in the receiving society.

Collecting Women’s Lives in ‘National’ History: opportunities and challenges in writing for the ODNB

Until recently the range of cogently analysed biographies of women was relatively small. Even the Dictionary of National Biography, the most prestigious biographical reference series we have in Britain, had few biographies of women beyond the very famous and royalty. One of the aims of the new and ever extending Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), published in 2004, is the inclusion of more women and it does have an ever expanding number of biographies. This is at a time when there is increased interest in and subtle explorations of biography as a form of historical writing which can illuminate women’s lives. It is worthwhile exploring, therefore, how the ODNB’s tightly constructed way of telling life stories fits into the historiography of writing women’s lives. This article investigates this through using a recent case study.

Daniel A. Vallero, P. Aarne Vesilind, Socially Responsible Engineering: Justice in Risk Management

Daniel A. Vallero, P. Aarne Vesilind, Socially Responsible Engineering: Justice in Risk Management

Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women's Biographies

Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women's Biographies

Where Do We Go From Here?: Reading “Arab Women’s Writing” Today

Al-Hassan Golley, Nawar, ed. 2007. Women's Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing. New York: Syracuse University Press. $45.00 he. $22.95 sc. xxxvi + 271 pp.Mehta, Brinda. 2007. Rituals of Memory In Contemporary Women's Writing. New York: Syracuse University Press. $45.00 hc. 303pp.No one today is purely one thing.(Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism)Who is writer? Both Nawar el-Hassan Golley s edited collection and Brinda Mehta's book confront us with this label. Indeed, category of often functions as a stock subset of both postcolonial and studies. The classification Arab may expand into North African and Eastern, women's studies into gender studies.These represent slightly more pertinent, but still extremely general categories. In aftermath of pan-Arabism, rise of Islamism, and increasing examples of sectarian conflicts throughout region, usefulness of term Arab must itself be interrogated. As example of Morocco perhaps illustrates best, women who under current theoretical paradigms fall under Arab or Middle Eastern umbrella may, in fact, define themselves as neither, choosing simply Moroccan or Amazighii instead. However, as is usually case, categories remain maddeningly hard to shift. Indeed, at its worst category writing serves to sell odalisque back to (ex)colonizer, giving us opportunity to once again turn a sexualized yet politically correct gaze on orientalized Other. In this way, socio-political and economic consequences of decolonization have created a curious reversal: Oriental woman has too-often become (writer), who now sells her story of brutal opression, followed by liberation and realization of Western values, to ex-colonizer.In this light, entire category of writing can be seen as a kind of literary prostitution in which teller performs empowerment of Western reader. Ayan Hirsi Alis Infidel provides a recent, popular example of this new genre, whilst highbrow literary texts such as Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Tresspass or Assia Djedbar's L'amour, la fantasia take a second path, attempting to correct Western misperceptions of their oppression by offering a more complex narrative framwork. Both narrative types enjoy a new popularity in wake of post-September 1 1 politics. Also building on interest in grouping of texts we call writing are critical works such as those by al-Hassan Golley and Mehta. Academic work on as it appears most often today tends to overlap a great deal with discourse of postcolonial studies, both in its choice of primary texts and tendency to rely always on same three theorists (Said, Homi Bhaba, Spivak).We also find a marked tendency to focus on autobiographical writing, or at least to point out way in which a given fictional text exemplifies lived reality. In all fairness, as Lydie Moudelino has pointed out, this is in part due to production of a large quantity of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical material as a necessary first step as those whose voices have been silent begin to write (Moudelino 2006, 13).With its choice of subject matter, Women's Lives Retold follows in steps of its predecessors, such as Cooke and Badran's Opening Gates (2004) or Fedwa Malti-Douglas's Women's Body, Women's Word (1991), or even alHassan Golley's previous book Reading Women's Biographies (2003). In her introduction to new collection, Golley lays out four main theoretical areas anthology will address: cultural hybridity, transnationalism, communal identity, and the personal and political (xxviii). All four areas are hotly contested in this critical moment for postcolonial studies, where many are trying to write a way out of more traditional theoretical paradigms. …