Domestic Ideology Research Articles

States of Innocence: Harriet Beecher Stowe, London Needlewomen, and the New England Novel

States of InnocenceHarriet Beecher Stowe, London Needlewomen, and the New England Novel Gretchen Murphy While traveling through England in the wake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s phenomenal success, Harriet Beecher Stowe unwittingly sparked a scandal over a dress. She told the story in an 1853 letter to her sister Mary Foote Beecher: I have been quite amused with something which has happened lately. This week the [London] “Times” has informed the United Kingdom that Mrs. Stowe is getting a new dress made! It wants to know if Mrs. Stowe is aware what sort of a place her dress is being made in; and there is a letter from a dressmaker’s apprentice stating that it is being made up piecemeal, in the most shockingly distressed dens of London, by poor, miserable white slaves, worse treated than the plantation slaves of America! (qtd. in C. E. Stowe 237) The news item resulted in what Stowe described as “earnest missives, from various parts of the country” begging that she oppose “oppression in every form” by refusing to consume items so manufactured (qtd. in C. E. Stowe 238).1 Of course, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s rigidly ethical Miss Ophelia had already effectively answered Augustine St. Clare’s version of this argument by retorting, “it’s no kind of apology for slavery, to prove that it isn’t worse than some other bad thing” (254). And yet, Stowe’s own amused, defensive response to the news item asserts a position of blind innocence that neither the rationalizing but guilt-haunted St. Clare nor the righteous Miss Ophelia claim in her fiction. Leading with a third-person form suggesting an unprinted news report that would set the record straight, Stowe continues, Now Mrs. Stowe did not know anything of this, but simply gave the silk into the hands of a friend, and was in due time waited on in her own apartment by a very respectable-appearing woman, who offered to make the dress, and lo, this is the result! … Could these people only know in what sweet simplicity I had [End Page 278] been living in the State of Maine, where the only dressmaker of our circle was an intelligent, refined, well-educated woman who was considered as the equal of us all, and whose spring and fall ministrations to our wardrobe were regarded a double pleasure,—a friendly visit as well as a domestic assistance,—I say, could they know all this, they would see how guiltless I was in the matter. I verily never thought but that the nice, pleasant person who came to measure me for my silk dress was going to take it home and make it herself; it never occurred to me that she was the head of an establishment. (qtd. in C. E. Stowe 237–38) Stowe presents herself as unknowingly cast into the world of sweated labor, her innocence authorized by two years’ residence in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband taught at Bowdoin College and where she wrote her antislavery masterpiece.2 Small-town life in Maine offers an alibi because its village life habituated Stowe to seeing the world as a pre-industrial society of equals, where commodities were made locally by familiar craftspeople and commercial exchanges were purified by friendship. This was a vision of New England community that Stowe increasingly turned to in the next decade, beginning in her 1859 work of transitional regionalism, The Minister’s Wooing, which this essay argues responded to this embarrassing incident and the social currents underlying it. Re-imagining the dressmaking contract as a domestic exchange of love and friendship, Stowe responds to two problems: negotiating her new identity as a female celebrity philanthropist within the confines of domestic ideology, and accounting for capitalist labor exploitation in the antislavery imagination. The latter problem asked whether some wage workers were really no better off than slaves, an analogy that might diminish the abolitionist cause. Stowe raises this problem dialogically in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, airing St. Clare’s troubling, unresolved predictions of “a mustering among the masses, the world over” because American planters only do to slaves “what the English aristocracy and capitalists are...

Fortunata, L'Africaine: Slavery and Semitism in Spain's Modern Empire

This essay recasts the central ideological opposition of Benito Pérez Galdós's Fortunata y Jacinta (1887) between the bourgeoisie and the sexually deviant Fortunata, in imperial terms, by exploring the novel's complex racial discourse, which encompasses allusions to Cuban slavery, as well as to an older racial regime concerned with questions of religion and lineage. The construction of bourgeois domestic ideology functions as an attempt to secure its identity as a modern and civilizing power, and is enacted upon the transatlantic stage of Spain's last iteration of its colonial empire. However, the bourgeoisie's continued profiting from slavery and the slave trade evokes an endemic sexual degeneracy and, echoing the Black Legend, raises the specter of its own Semitic heritage, thus undermining its normative identity.

IDEOLOGI DALAM PENERJEMAHAN BUDAYA: ANALISIS PADA NOVEL TERJEMAHAN “NEGERI 5 MENARA” KARYA AHMAD FUADI

AbstractThis research aims to describe the translation procedures, methods, and ideology applied to translate novel Negeri 5 Menara,and assess the impact of the ideology on equivalence. This research is using qualitative approach and content analysis. The source of data for this research consists of documents that refer to novel Negeri 5 Menara and its translation in English. The units of analysis of this research data comprise of words, phrases, sentences, and dialogue taken from Negeri 5 Menara Ahmad Fuadi’s Work and its translation (The Land of 5 Towers) by Angie Kilbane. Findings of this research show followings. First, translation procedures were used 90 times to render Negeri 5 Menara into English. On the basis of the frequent use of each translation procedures, functional equivalent (20) appears to be first rank, followed by cultural equivalent (19), reduction and couplets (10), transference and naturalization (7), descriptive equivalent (6), notes (4), transposition (3), and modulation and compensation (2). Second, theoretically, transference and naturalisation are oriented to source language while cultural equivalent, functional equivalent, descriptive equivalen, transposition, modulation, compensation, reduction, couplets, and notes are oriented to target language. This means that the translator tended to choose adaptation, free, idiomatic, and communicative methods. Third, the use of translation procedures and the selection the translation methods tend to be based on the adoption of the ideology of domestication. Fourth, in terms of the equivalence of the translations, it was found that 80 data were accurately translated and 10 data were inaccurately translated. Therefore, the domestication ideology has a good impact to the quality of translations.Keywords: ideology of translations, translation method, translation procedure, culture.

Hawthorne's Graveyard Humor: “Chippings with a Chisel”

As both literary critics and social historians have recognized, nineteenth-century American culture was noteworthy for the prominent place of death and bereavement within its prevailing ideologies of sentimentality and domesticity. Manifestations of sentimentality thus appeared in the abundant literature of mourning, including poetry, sermons, essays, manuals, and anthologies; in the prescribed exhibition of sympathy-inducing mourning garments, which a woman wore as formal attire and a man as a crape band for hat or arm; and in the production of a plethora of memorial portraits, photographs, albums, embroidery, quilts, hair weavings, brooches, lockets, rings, gloves, spoons, and other "tokens" and "keepsakes" that commemorated the deceased. So, too, the pervasive domestication of death can be found in such developments as the rural, or garden, cemetery movement that began in the early 1830s and created a picturesque pastoral retreat for communing with the dead; in the rise of the Spiritualist movement in the late 1840s providing consolatory communication with the deceased; and in the common literary and cultural representation of heaven as a place for family reunions in a glorified celestial parlor. Integrally related to all these trends was the emphasis on maintaining a close affective attachment to the deceased and the preservation of meaningful emotional contact through memorial items and a suitably inscribed gravestone, all creating what might be called a "cult of memory" for the dead. (1) In keeping with these widespread cultural trends, a significant portion of Hawthorne's fiction performs a somber negotiation with the varied psychological, religious, and philosophical implications of human mortality. Yet in his early sketch "Chippings with a Chisel," Hawthorne presents a refreshingly humorous treatment of antebellum Americas sentimental preoccupation with death. Previous commentators on Hawthorne's distinctive variety of ironic comedy in his shorter works of fiction and non-fiction have variously characterized it with such terms as "dismal-merrymaking" (Janssen) or Calvinist humor (Dunne); but in the case of "Chippings with a Chisel," the concept of "graveyard humor"--or dark comedy framed within the existential limits of human mortality--would literally seem most appropriate. As such, the sketch merits a careful examination for its distinctive comic and satirical devices, literary allusions and associations, and cultural and biographical resonances. "Chippings with a Chisel" consists of both entertaining character delineation and a comic exercise in the moral picturesque using the versatile and popular medium of the literary sketch pioneered by Washington Irving (Hamilton). Hawthorne's sketch consists of a series of vignettes of the unnamed narrator's multiple visits, over a few weeks of the summer, to the workshop of an itinerant New England stone carver working in Edgartown on the island of Martha's Vineyard. Considering the elderly carver of mortuary art and epitaphs as a fellow artist whose trade accords with his own, the self-effacing narrator enjoys the stimulating company of the carver as well as the varied demands and attitudes of his customers. The topical nature of the sketch, which would have appealed to contemporary readers, arises from the fact that it was written in the midst of the rural cemetery movement during a period of reform in the commemoration and disposal of the dead, when Romantic and evangelical beliefs were displacing older Puritan traditions of mortality (Farrell ch 1). The product of an undocumented summer visit by Hawthorne to Martha's Vineyard in the mid-1830s, "Chippings with a Chisel" was first published in the September 1838 Democratic Review and then appeared in the second, two-volume edition of Twice-Told Tales in 1842. (2) As Arlin Turner first noted, Hawthorne's article on "Martha's Vineyard" in the April 1836 issue of The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge alludes to the writer's month-long visit to the island, which he manifestly used as the basis for both his article and his later sketch. …

ANALISIS TERJEMAHAN KALIMAT DALAM SURAT SPONSOR COMPASS INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION (KAJIAN IDEOLOGI, METODE, TEKNIK PENERJEMAHAN DAN KUALITASNYA)

<p><em>The aims of the study are to identify types of sentences in the CIF sponsor letters and the text function or translation purpose in target text; to describe the translation techniques, methods, and ideology in achieving the translation purpose; to identify the impact of the translation techniques, methods, and ideology applied to the translation quality in terms of the accuracy of the accuracy, acceptability and readability; and to assess the translation techniques, methods and ideology selected in achieving the translation purpose.</em></p><p><em> </em></p><p><em>This study is a descriptive, qualitative research and focused on a single case. Sources of the data were 10 pairs CIF sponsor letters and the informants who gave information about accuracy, acceptability and readability of translation. Techniques of collecting data were document analysis, queestionnaires and FGD. Purposive sampling was applied in this research.</em></p><p><em> </em></p><p><em>Findings of this research show the followings. The types of sentenses are declaratives,interrogatives, imperatives and exclamatives. The result shows 15 functions of illocutionary act. There are 14 kinds of translation techniques to overcome the translation problems, 13,67% tends to the source text and 86,33% tents to the target text. The translation methods tends to communicative translation method and free translation method with domestication ideology. The impact of the the application of those translation techniques, methods and ideology toward the quality of translation is satisfactory with the average score of 2,84. This value indicates the accuracy, acceptance and readability of this translation is satisfactory. Related with the purpose of translation, the translation in this research successed in achieving text function or translation purpose.</em></p><p> </p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong><em>Translation, Translation technique, Translation method, Translation ideology, Translation quality</em></p><p><strong> </strong></p>

On the conduct of sociological warfare: A reply to the special section on Economy of Force

It is an honour to receive commentaries on Economy of Force from these four distinguished scholars. I am grateful to Tarak Barkawi, Patchen Markell, Julian Go, and Vivienne Jabri for devoting precious scholarly time to this book. Economy of Force is not about the ‘economics of war’, or not in any straightforward sense. Rather it retrieves the older, but surprisingly neglected, history and theory of oikonomia, ancient Greek for household governance. The book is a study of oikonomia in the use of military force, but also as underlying distinctly social forms of governance more broadly. There is a very long tradition of thinking about households-as-government and a great deal of scholarship in literary and gender studies on practices and ideologies of domesticity. Oikonomia is the origin of the language of modern ‘economics’, but more importantly and revealingly almost all writing about government in the West. International and much political theory is out of touch with these literatures resulting in blindness to a crucial reality about modern governance forms. The large-scale household administration of life processes plays a remarkably central role in international and imperial relations. Economy of Force illustrates this through a history of so-called ‘armed social work’ in counterinsurgency, beginning with late-nineteenth-century French and American colonial pacification and then detailed case studies of two late-colonial British emergencies in Malaya and Kenya, US counterinsurgency in Vietnam, and US-led multinational campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. In each case, to varying degrees and in different ways, the civilian base of armed resistance was weakened through the forcible removal and mass concentration of civilians; the selective delivery and withholding of humanitarian supplies; the empowering of local collaborators to rule ‘their population’; detention without trial and exemplary massacres; and the opening of markets and new schools. If insurgents and counterinsurgents are in a competition in government, then what is the nature of government under counterinsurgency rule? Through violence and control over life, through the management of gendered and racialised bodies in their extreme and irreducible vulnerability, counterinsurgents were seeking to create units of rule in which populations could be domesticated. That is, they drew on and innovated different forms of household management.

International Alignment between Interests and Ideology: The Case of China's Partnership Diplomacy

This paper examines the determinants of alignment in bilateral partnerships. While it was impossible to think about international cooperation without referring to the term “alliances” during much of the Cold War period, strategic partnerships have taken a central place in many states’ diplomatic tool kits over the past two decades. This paper sheds light on such international alignment decisions by examining the case of China’s partnership diplomacy in the period from 1990 to 2014. Theoretically, the analysis draws on scholarly insights about alliance formation and international cooperation to formulate two broad assumptions about partner choice, which are based on interest‐driven and ideology‐based rationales of alignment. Binary regression estimations highlight the importance of economic interests in explaining partnership onset. In contrast to common arguments about alliance formation, partnerships seem to be less driven by shared domestic ideologies. In fact, bilateral partnerships help bridge ideological gaps, enabling the partners’ pursuit of economic gains and diplomatic preferences, at least in the case of China.

The Foreign Policy Attitudes of Indian Elites: Variance, Structure, and Common Denominators

Foreign policy belief systems have received much attention. Yet nearly all work examines attitudes in western democracies, chiefly the United States. The current security environment requires that we ask whether the foreign policy views of individuals in other nations—particularly regional powers—are similar in structure to those found in the US case. This article does so for the Indian case. Drawing on studies of US opinion, we develop a set of claims and test them on an original data set on Indian elites. We make four contributions. First, we show that Wittkopf’s framework applies to the Indian case. Second, we demonstrate how this framework can be made more generally applicable by revising its emphases on different types of internationalism and on rethinking the meaning of isolationist preferences. Third, we place the Indian case in comparative perspective. And last, we model the dimensions of Indian attitudes as a function of domestic ideology. Results of our analyses provide insights into the structure of foreign policy belief systems outside the Global North.

“Our Girls Have Grown Up in the Family”: educating German and Chinese girls in the nineteenth century

ABSTRACTIn this article, we examine and compare historical changes in girls’ home-based education in nineteenth-century Germany and China. In many ways, girls’ home-based education in these two historical contexts exhibited differences, including the relationship between formal schooling and home education, and the role that new genres played in shifting tradition and structuring girlhood. However, we argue that more commonalities between the German and Chinese cases emerge. By analyzing the relation between talent and virtue, the writing of exemplary lives, and family dynamics, we see that in both cases the home was the critical site for valorizing and reproducing the class-bounded ideology of domesticity and identification for girls as home-based education constituted the means by which knowledge, morality, and practical skills were produced and transmitted from generation to generation.

The Women’s National Indian Association: A History ed. by Valerie Sherer Mathes

Reviewed by: The Women’s National Indian Association: A History ed. by Valerie Sherer Mathes Mikaëla M. Adams The Women’s National Indian Association: A History. Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. vii + 340 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth. The post–Civil War years marked a turning point in federal Indian policy. Whereas some Americans called for the annihilation of the country’s indigenous people, others wanted “to replace policies of removal, confinement, and extermination with homes, Christianity, and even citizenship” (2). Leading this reform impulse was a group of Protestant middle-class white women who created the Women’s National Indian Association (wnia). In Valerie Sherer Mathes’s edited volume, nine historians evaluate the mixed legacy of this organization. Although it provided certain women with an outlet for political participation, the wnia promoted a strident policy of assimilation—one that had devastating consequences for Native communities. Founded by Mary Lucinda Bonney and Amelia Stone Quinton in Philadelphia in 1879, the wnia started as a petition drive to pressure Congress to uphold Indian treaties. Auxiliary branches sprung up in the 1880s, although regional understandings of race and power (particularly in the South) limited the wnia’s work in certain areas. In 1882 the male-dominated Indian Rights Association took over the lobbying function of the wnia. To remain relevant, the women refocused on missionary work. Taking a “maternalist” approach, wnia members endeavored to spread “the values of white Christian society” by transforming Indian homes, families, and economies through projects such as the Home-Building and Loan Department and the field matron program (68). wnia members also participated in the annual Lake Mohonk conference on Indian reform and began publication of The Indian’s Friend in 1888. Although funding cuts and policy shifts eventually undercut the organization (it disbanded in 1951), in its heyday the wnia included ninety branch organizations in twenty-eight states and supported fifty-six mission stations on reservations. Through appealing to Victorian “domestic ideology that made women into the moral caretakers of the nation,” the wnia claimed authority to enact social change at a time when women lacked full rights in the United States (72). Yet even as these women enhanced their own political life, they treated Indians as “children” who needed to be taught to become “civilized” adults. Ultimately, the wnia [End Page 154] supported destructive legislation such as the 1887 Dawes Act and federal Indian boarding schools. According to contributor Lori Jacobson, wnia members “remained largely untouched by a sense of responsibility for their role in the violent cultural genocide enforced by an assimilationist agenda” (281). Instead, through what Jacobson calls the “erotics of reform,” they imagined Indians as willing participants and counted as a moral victory every conversion from “savage” to “civilized,” no matter “the personal and cultural traumas such conversions could enact” (281). As this volume shows, historians can no longer ignore the wnia since it offers one of the strongest examples of “women’s associational and maternalist political power in the nineteenth century” (212). Yet the volume also acknowledges its limitations. As Mathes points out, “one finds little Indian voice in the wnia literature, making it impossible to measure individual Indian’s responses to the efforts of these women reformers” (40). Future researchers, one hopes, will build upon this work to include indigenous perspectives. Mikaëla M. Adams Department of History University of Mississippi Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

"Marie Howland-19th-Century Leader for Women's Economic Independence

Marie Howland (1836–1921) was an important working-class figure in the early U.S. women's movement who mounted an inspired challenge to separate spheres and the prevailing domestic ideology. Well before Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she called for domestic work to be respected, paid, and collectively organized. Howland made it her life's work to remove barriers to economic independence for women through the overhaul of social and economic institutions that posited the home as the center of female existence and exploited workers. She wanted women to have the economic freedom to marry for love, not economic necessity, leave a bad marriage, survive widowhood, or not marry at all. By delving into Howland's early years in rural New Hampshire and the Lowell textile mills, her close association with radical bohemians in New York City, and her later participation in experimental communities, the following treatise provides a long overdue, comprehensive account of her life and work. My inquiry reveals how Marie Howland promoted women's freedom within a class analysis, rejecting Marxism and embracing the utopian socialist theory of Charles Fourier. It also offers an in-depth look at her popular utopian novel, Papa's Own Girl, where a cooperative community of economically independent women and enlightened men replace the patriarchy and individual competitiveness of the emerging, but by no means entrenched, industrial order. In addition, my treatise focuses on Howland's efforts to put ideas into practice. Unwilling to limit her activism to intellectual discussions, she lived in a Fourierist household in New York City, a cooperative settlement in western Mexico, and the single-tax community of Fairhope, Alabama. She pushed the Grange and the International Workingman's Association to focus on women's issues. She also made sure that her personal relationships with men were based on free love and mutual respect, not economic necessity and legal contract. I also examine how Howland dedicated her life to changing gender and class relations, but made little effort to improve conditions for African Americans. Like many white reformers, she drew on popular scientific theories of biological difference to justify the unequal treatment of African Americans. Besides shedding light on important intellectual and social developments, like phrenology, free love, Fourierism, the Grange, and theosophy, this examination of Marie Howland reveals the complexities, possibilities, and limitations of the women's rights movement before the passage of the 19th Amendment.

‘What is a wife’? Reconstructing domesticity in postwar Britain before The Feminine Mystique

This article investigates the relationship between the lived experiences of housewives in 1950s and early 1960s Britain and their portrayal in The Feminine Mystique and popular women’s magazines. Through a study of four housewives’ associations, the Women’s Institutes, Mothers’ Union, Townswomen’s Guilds and the National Council of Women, it is argued that they rejected the prevailing ideology of domesticity and challenged the myth of the ‘happy housewife’. As a result housewives’ associations presented a modern interpretation of domesticity where wives and mothers not only cared for their husbands and children but also made an important contribution to wider society. As equal citizens women were entitled to state support and housewives’ associations were successful in articulating the demands of women as wives, mothers and paid employees. In doing so housewives’ associations presented a much more nuanced account of women’s everyday lives illustrating that not all women succumbed to the feminine mystique.

Idolatrous Reading

Timothy L. Carens, “Idolatrous Reading: Subversive Fantasy and Domestic Ideology” (pp. 238–266) In nineteenth-century Britain, patriarchal culture revealed its anxieties about female subjectivity and anxiety through an extensive debate about what young women should read. As critics have already shown, many writers in the period disparaged romantic novels by comparing them to unhealthy food, addictive drugs, or even illicit sexual encounters. The figure of idolatry played a significant role in this debate as well, suggesting that young female readers might betray the true god of the middle-class patriarchal order by worshiping more gratifying alternatives. If the language of idolatry generally connoted heretical transgression, emergent feminist writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon found that they could also use it to articulate a woman’s longing for the power to shape her own dreams. In Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), a figure used to disparage women who neglect their role within the domestic order thus acquires a new and intensely ironic life as a way to imagine an escape from it.

“The ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on”: Specters of Servitude in Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe House of the Seven Gables

In his remarks on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, D.H. Lawrence quips, "No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner" (104). Lawrence's implication that the ghosts of the Pyncheons' ancestral estate would be antedated by household appliances explicitly connects the performance of domestic labor with supernatural hauntings. This association between domestic labor and the novel's spectral presences is later echoed in Gillian Brown's seminal work, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (1991), which argues that, "[w]hat haunts the House of the Seven Gables" are "not only the sins of the fathers but also the disembodiments of the present, the ghosts of feminine labor" (81). While Brown's intriguing study draws attention to Hawthorne's use of domestic ideologies, no scholar has yet analyzed the portrayal of domestic servants in The House of the Seven Gables. Domestic servants haunt the periphery of the novel, and Hawthorne's romance is mired in contemporary anxieties about the so-called "servant problem." The narrative thus participates in the cultural work of domestic literature by engaging with nineteenth-century anxieties regarding the ambiguous social status of domestic servants and their employers within a democratic but slave-owning nation. Ultimately, Hawthorne exposes the oppressive nature of domestic work by connecting servants to the spectral in The House of the Seven Gables-, however, his critique is limited by his prejudices as a middleclass employer. Thus, while acknowledging the servant problem, The House of the Seven Gables also reflects frustration at the proposed methods to correct what employers saw as a flawed system that failed to provide them with competent, complaisant domestics. Amy Schrager Lang identifies the eponymous estate of Hawthorne's romance as "the locus of a conflict between wealth and poverty, prominence and obscurity, that unresolved and apparently unresolvable, binds generation after generation of Pyncheons and Maules to one another" (33). While Lang's analysis focuses primarily on the conflict between middle-class domesticity and the "new social order" of the capitalist "laboring man," this essay will focus on the conflict that occurred within the home itself--the nineteenth-century skirmish between the serving and the served (33). After an introduction to the reoccurring image of the ghostly servant in the fiction, I will explore the racial and class anxieties of the "servant problem," which Hawthorne saw in his own personal and domestic life and which are interwoven in the narrative of The House of the Seven Gables. My analysis also draws on cultural historians' accounts of domestic service, as well as on nineteenth-century domestic service manuals, which I posit are texts that should not be considered merely as repositories of cultural practices as they were typically performed, but rather as useful records of a culture's domestic ideologies and aspirations. (1) While these manuals proffer possible solutions to the servant problem, their potential strategies for overcoming employer/servant tensions are, we will see, ultimately undercut by the novel's pessimism. Hawthorne exposes the oppressed ghosts of servant and slave laborers haunting American domestic spaces, but offers no possibility of a national exorcism. The haunting of the Pyncheon house by the unrecognized labor of the family's domestic servants is made manifestly clear in the novel when Phoebe, in Chapter VII, begins to make a simple Indian corn cake. The narrator speculates, Perchance, amid their proper element of smoke, which eddied forth from the ill-constructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cook-maids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish. (2:99) Despite his facetious tone, the narrator's description of the "ghosts of departed cook-maids" contains hints of smoky, unpleasant working conditions and difficult culinary preparations, a troubled domesticity much different from the idealized housewifery performed by Phoebe. …

Structures of Feeling

Did sentiment ever go out of style? Certainly, a classic account of literary history made it seem so. According to this once prevailing view, the discourse of sentiment first appeared in the eighteenth century, emerging in the philosophical writing of Lord Shaftesbury and Adam Smith and in the novels of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Henry MacKenzie. Although gently mocked in Jane Austen, its range only expanded alongside the nineteenth-century growth of the novel, reaching the apogee of its influence in the Victorian era, when, especially in the US, it became the province of women writers and a prime vehicle of domestic ideology. By the later third of the nineteenth century, however, the decadence of sentiment finally became too much to ignore and first the realists and then their heirs among the modernists came forth to vilify and dispatch it. As Werner Berthoff explained in his once canonical history The Ferment of Realism (1981), the innovative writing of the Gilded Age and of the Progressive Era sprang “out of professional distaste for a polite literature that was rotten ripe with idealizing sentiment and genteel affectation” (4).

“The heart and soul of patriotic America”: American conservative women crusading for the “Bricker Amendment” (1953-1957)

This paper will examine the crusade that a group of conservative women, the Vigilant Women for the Bricker Amendment (VWBA), active in the Republican Party and conservative women’s clubs, carried out to pressure politicians and sway public opinion in favor of the so-called “Bricker Amendment,” devised to limit the treaty-making powers of the President in the 1950s. The VWBA, born out of the efforts of influential anticommunist conservative organizations, successfully promoted anti-statist and anti-internationalist ideas at the local level: in their neighborhood, in women’s clubs, at church or in the local press. A case study of Vigilant Women reveals the prominent role these women played in the formation and activation of a large conservative grassroots network. I will examine the prevalence of the domestic ideology and populist rhetoric in the discourse of VWBA and their allies, and try to demonstrate how resurgent domesticity in the post-WWII period shaped these women’s activism as they engaged primarily in home-based political action.

Book Review: Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age, by Brooke Erin Duffy

Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age. Brooke Erin Duffy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 208 pp. $85 hbk. $25 pbk.Women's magazines-those overtly gendered media spaces-have played a role in shaping concepts of female identity since Godey's 's Lady's 's Book began offering advice on domestic ideologies in the 1830s. But what is a woman's magazine in an age of iPads and tablets, social media, and fashion blogs? How are convergent media technologies and their concomitant economic pressures reshaping the industry? What happens when a woman's magazine positions itself as (to use the industry's new mantra) a brand rather than a physical text?In Remake, Remodel: Women's s Magazines in the Digital Age, Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor in the School of Media and Communication at Temple University, surveys the shifting media landscape of today's women's magazines, skillfully tracing the recent seismic shifts in the industry, including the rise of participatory culture, the need to produce copy for multiple platforms, and the pressures convergent technologies put on the magazine industry's already-close relationship with advertisers. Looking largely through the lens of magazine producers-publishers, digital directors, editors, graphic designers, and other creatives-Duffy blends theory with extensive field interviews, attendance at trade shows and professional conferences, and a thorough review of the discourse on digital disruption found in the industry's professional and trade publications. In doing so, she provides a thoughtful-and thought-changing-look into a specific segment of a specific media industry as well as a compelling case for a research methodology that blends political economy with cultural studies.The early chapters of Remake, Remodel establish the necessary context for Duffy's analysis, both in terms of media theory and magazine history. Later chapters-the most compelling of the study-focus on the complexities of the industry as it works to incorporate digital practices. For example, Chapter 4, Rethinking Readership: The Digital Challenge of Audience Construction, explores one of the industry's formerly unassailable principles-audience segmentation. Relying heavily on demographic and psychographic data, consumer magazines in general ( and women's magazines in particular) have long targeted niche audiences based on factors such as age, marital status, and household income, building the magazine's content and tone around those specific readers and, perhaps more importantly, attracting advertisers based on that reader profile.But new digital technologies, Duffy shows, have put pressure on the way magazine publishers think about their audiences. Thanks to digital technologies, for example, today's magazine publishers can combine demographic data with detailed information about consumer purchases (so-called transactional data) from sophisticated customer databases, making cross-marketing opportunities easier to sell to advertisers, but also raising issues of editorial creativity and reader privacy. …

Courtesans Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

This essay provides a reassessment of the view that the young wives of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata are modeled on hetaeras. It begins by examining a parallel debate in contemporary Attic red-figure vase paintings of women at home to show that displays of female sexuality are not incompatible with marriageable maidens and free citizen wives. Aristophanes similarly situates his female characters within a domestic context as the site of sexual and social legitimacy. A detailed analysis of clothing, footwear and grooming practices deployed in the sex strike demonstrates that they represent the standard accoutrements of housewives rather than of hetaeras. Their domesticated eroticism, while enabling the male spectators a voyeuristic glimpse of other men’s wives, reinforces their procreative function as mothers and producers of future Athenian citizens. The importance of sexual desire within marriage for the production of legitimate offspring is dramatically reinforced by the onstage presence of the boy child in the thwarted sexual encounter of Myrrhine and Cinesias. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata fits with a pattern of heightened interest in women and domestic ideology at the end of the fifth century BCE. The centrality of marriage in the play may represent a response to the erosion of Pericles' citizenship law in response to the depletion of Athenian men in the waning years of the Peloponnesian war.

Explaining the evolution of contestation in South Asia

India’s claims for regional hegemony have regularly been contested since its independence in 1947. The self-proclaimed emerging power is locked in an enduring rivalry with the South Asian secondary power, Pakistan. This article outlines the evolution of Pakistan’s contestation since independence and seeks to demonstrate how, when and why Pakistan adapted its foreign policy toward India. While the goals of Pakistan’s contestation remained constant, its means varied at two points in post-independence history. From 1947 to 1971, territorial disputes combined with a nascent nationalism drove the secondary power’s foreign policy elite to engage in war and open resistance, and the divergent domestic political ideologies of both countries complicated conflict resolution. With Pakistan’s devastating war defeat in 1971, direct means of contestation were no longer an immediate option, and a period of reluctant acquiescence ensued. The alleged involvement of Pakistani intelligence proxies in a crisis in Jammu and Kashmir in 1987 marked the beginning of a renewed phase of resistance, though now through indirect means of nuclear coercion and subconventional warfare. This form of contestation has increasingly manifested itself in bilateral crises with high potential of escalation and primarily targeted symbols of India’s South Asian hegemony, including its political and commercial centres in Delhi and Mumbai in 2001 and 2008 respectively or India’s diplomatic representations in Afghanistan. The article concludes that the current conditions of regional contestation in South Asia, most importantly the persistent revisionist versus status-quo domestic agendas, the presence of growing nuclear arsenals, and multi-tiered Asian rivalry constellations, undermine prospects for conflict resolution and complicate modelling future strategic behaviour in the region.

Home Stories: Displacement, Domestic Labor, and Narrative in California, 1848-2007 (Dissertation)

“Home Stories” looks at how stories about domestic labor define land rights in the context of racialized displacement in California. California’s histories of displacement include genocidal violence against Native Californians, freeway building and urban renewal, and the early twenty-first century foreclosure crisis. Displacement often violates communal home spaces such as tribal lands and neighborhoods by pushing people into dispersed, interchangeable units assigned to nuclear families, thereby privatizing and intensifying domestic labor for the sake of profit. While literary scholars have done extensive work on how domestic ideologies reproduce settler-colonial, racialized space, domestic workers engage with these ideologies in very different ways. Domestic labor can be exploited in order to support settler-colonial and profitable spatial production; however, it can also rely on, return to, and reconfigure communal and countercultural spaces. texts within each chapter share similar formal representations of domestic labor: as private support for manifesting borders in John Rollin Ridge’s Adventures of Joaquin Murieta and Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance; as haphazard claims to white property in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the work of Joan Didion; as gathering in the autobiographies of Lucy Young and Delfina Cuero; as a triple shift of housework, paid work, and activism in Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and the 2006 film Maquilapolis; and as intimacy Hector Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Hotel. project shows how these forms of domestic labor respond to racialized histories of displacement, thereby expanding the scope of domestic fiction in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature. In doing this comparison and translating divergent experiences of displacement through the concept of domestic labor, I hope to map out what coalitional, everyday practices of homemaking might look like, rather than simply trace historical fights over land as an object to be owned as property. Such coalitional practices would negotiate between culturally-specific forms of domestic labor tied to one place — for example, tribal gathering practices, unpaid privatized housework, and community building — in order to reformulate property rights as equitable but different rights to presence, mobility, social reproduction, religious practice, and ecological management.