Female Predecessors Research Articles

Jahanara Begum

Women’s visibility in both the imperial and sacred realms under the Mughal Empire (1526–1856) was often limited to traditional roles. Yet, a cursory glance at the history of imperial Mughal women reveals active engagement in politics and a public persona that complemented the empire’s religious and political rhetoric. One such woman was Jahanara Begum (1614–1681), a Mughal princess whose imperial influence was distinct to that of her female predecessors. Her biographical treatise, Risalai-Sahibiyyah, highlights the intersection between the socio-political and spiritual through a Sufistic centred approach. By publicly presenting herself through traditional modes of representation, Jahanara was able to exercise her agency through the appropriation of those modes. Subsequently, Jahanara’s agency in her religious persona lends to a better understanding of women’s navigation of religious expression.

Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes by Tara Daly

Reviewed by: Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes by Tara Daly Michelle Clayton Daly, Tara. Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes. Bucknell UP, 2019. 238 pp. Into the arena of new materialist reframings of Latin American cultural production steps Tara Daly's Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes, a lively study of material intersections between elements, bodies, and languages in a variety of twentieth-century texts, visual works, and artistic activisms from Peru and Bolivia. Taking as its animating impulse the well-known scene in José María Arguedas's Los ríos profundos (1958), in which child protagonist Ernesto lays his hands on an Incan wall in Cuzco and is rewarded with a physical intuition of the rock's living spirit, Beyond Human investigates the ways in which a series of writers and visual artists take up the materials that make up their environment to probe the relation between biological, mineral, terrestrial, and even cosmological matter—to examine the human's inscription in a network of relations underpinning the Andean concept of buen vivir. Drawing upon contemporary Indigenous and Latin American, decolonial and feminist theorists, and putting them in conversation with writers and artists across the century, Daly explores configurations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in works that determinedly inhabit what the author, following Donna Haraway, calls "natureculture." The result is a vibrant revisioning of some well-known writers from the Andean region (César Vallejo, José María Arguedas), and an illuminating attention to writers and artists past and present who are still too little-known (poet Magda Portal; visual artists Alejandra Dorado and Julieta Paredes). Two of the animating terms behind Daly's approach are corazonar, a neologism which stitches reason to affect and insists on thinking in relation and as collaboration; and pensandear, a practice of thinking while walking through a landscape that unsettles and surprises our thoughts at each step. Daly invites us to walk and think with her through a series of different yet overlapping times and spaces: the 1920s of César Vallejo, the 1920s through the 60s of Magda Portal, the 1960s of José María Arguedas, the 1990s and 2000s of Julieta Paredes and Alejandra Dorado—the first three in Peru, the latter two in Bolivia. In the case of the writers, Daly foregrounds each one's relation to a particular element—Vallejo and stone, Portal and the sea, Arguedas and air—while, in the case of the artists, she delves into their visual articulation of commonality and difference in a striated social environment. Further animating her approach is the question of assemblage, of prosthetics: the ways in which the individual is or might be augmented by the world around it, be it other humans (Paredes's reaching across lines of race, class, and gender), interspecies alliances (Dorado's collaged portraits), material surroundings (Arguedas's Ernesto), historical affiliations (Portal's elegies for female predecessors) [End Page 303] or at the level of the letter (Vallejo's addition of silent h's to words such as hombligo, underlining the common humanity of the ombligo). And, indeed, the humble belly button, which both gestures toward Cuzco—"navel of the world" in Quechua—and brings us back to a shared bodily ground, is at the center of Dorado's 2006 installation Martirio, itself a kind of Aleph for this book: between its photographic portraits of Bolivian inhabitants with their midriffs exposed, its inclusion of a little-known text by Michel Foucault on anagrams, and its invitation to visitors to stamp a combination of letters from the word martirio onto the displayed bodies, the installation, like Daly's book, weaves together text, image, and the participatory body in an active play with our makeup as humans, our makeup as community. Each of the five chapters of Beyond Human is dedicated to one Andean writer or artist. Chapter one foregrounds the presence of stones—pebbles, monumental Incan rocks, or Western statues—in Vallejo's poetry, where the body is insistently situated in a material environment with which it must come to grips and/or come to blows. As Daly notes, this poetry resolutely ties together terrestrial...

Glaspell’s House of Her Own: Revisiting the Subject and Genre of Alison’s House

In a departure from previous critical approaches to Alison`s House, this study aims to move beyond their core premise that the play mainly retells the life of Emily Dickinson, redirecting its focus to the playwright Susan Glaspell invested in the play. “The play was in no way founded on the life of Dickinson,” the writer said, as “it grew out of a feeling for her work and character.” Glaspell`s empathic portrayal of Dickinson is more than a mere participation in the nationwide centennial celebration of the poet in 1930, since its conjuration of women`s literary tradition registers the playwright`s own personal urgency to locate herself in the tradition of her peers. Following up with Sandra Gilbert`s and Susan Gubar`s flitting mention of Alison`s House as one of the modern women writers` attempts to “affiliate” with their female predecessors, this study explores the biographical context surrounding the play`s composition in search of a motive for Glaspell`s affiliation with a poet mother, with a special emphasis on her dynamic with George Cram Cook, her husband, and founder of the Provincetown Players. Besides Glaspell`s subject choice, an equal weight is given to her generic form in this study. Her playwriting for the Provincetown Players was initially carried on under Cook`s insistence and she eventually felt it encroaching on her writer`s autonomy and career in fiction, which she would call “my own writing.” This study suggests a possibility that the generic form of Alison`s House, Glaspell`s first and last play to be staged and published as a solo after Cook`s death, may have been a contemplated formal maneuver to refute his control over her playwriting decision and proclaim her to be a single authority that counted in her generic choice. In this reading, Glaspell`s form resonates with the larger message of her subject, which is a matrilineal authority to support her writing as a woman.

Anna Letitia Barbauld's ‘A Summer Evening's Meditation’ and the Cosmic Voyage since Paradise Lost

AbstractAnna Barbauld's ‘A Summer Evening's Meditation’ is a late contribution to the cosmic voyage genre of poetry, which had enjoyed popularity during the first half of the eighteenth century. Studying the poem in the context of this literature calls attention to what is innovative about Barbauld's text: most notably, its allusion to Eve in introducing gender struggles to a genre that had been almost exclusively the province of male authors. In defying the cultural boundaries that had constrained the imaginations of female predecessors, Barbauld provides us with the first instance in English literature of a woman exploring modern deep space.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labor Market Outcomes in Norway.

In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the newly (post-reform) appointed female board members were observably more qualified than their female predecessors, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. While the reform may have improved the representation of female employees at the very top of the earnings distribution (top 5 highest earners) within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled-down. Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. We observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions, although standard errors are large enough that we cannot rule economically meaningful gains. Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs. While young women preparing for a career in business report being aware of the reform and expect their earnings and promotion chances to benefit from it, the reform did not affect their fertility and marital plans. Overall, in the short run the reform had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members.

Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain Representing Sylvia PlathRepresenting Sylvia Plath. Edited by Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. v+249.

<i>Sally Bayley</i> and <i>Tracy Brain</i> Representing Sylvia Plath<i>Representing Sylvia Plath</i>. Edited by Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. v+249.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labor Market Outcomes in Norway

In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the newly (post-reform) appointed female board members were observably more qualified than their female predecessors, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. While the reform may have improved the representation of female employees at the very top of the earnings distribution (top 5 highest earners) within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled-down. Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. We observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions, although standard errors are large enough that we cannot rule economically meaningful gains. Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs. While young women preparing for a career in business report being aware of the reform and expect their earnings and promotion chances to benefit from it, the reform did not affect their fertility and marital plans. Overall, in the short run the reform had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members.

Allina Ndebele's The Tree of Life: Tapestry, text andlessons from the loom

By reconstructing the context and symbolic language of artist-weaver Allina Ndebele's little-known allegorical tapestry, The Tree of Life (1986–87), this article investigates the didactic strategies in her tapestries and the texts she writes to accompany them. Based largely on a series of recent interviews with Ndebele about this work, the essay considers the roles that animals, humans and spiritual forces play in an invented tapestry story that is a departure from her narratives based on prototypes inherited through storytelling. The Tree of Life reveals Ndebele's innovation and mastery of weaving, also articulating attitudes to local customs and beliefs at Ekuhlengeni Mission in the Zulu heartland in the early 1980s. Transgressing the strictures of religious authority, this large work and the text she coupled to it challenge the limited possibilities once available to female predecessors who were the custodians of stories dense with codes of behaviour, but who exerted little social control outside ‘fireside’ teachings. Ndebele's descriptive texts and suggestive woven imagery co-exist in a complex relationship, creating tension and meaning that have implications for her didactic work and its audiences.

Facilitating intellectual liberation, engaging the null curriculum, and WebCT

College professors seek to create intellectual experiences that free students from false perceptions and incomplete truths. This article explores one curricular decision and an accompanying pedagogical approach which, the authors argue, facilitates such a liberating experience. In the online environment of WebCT, students post their reactions to course readings, including a null curriculum consisting of a few examples of a complex body of literature by and about heretofore lost women writers. What we believe emerges from the students’ words is, first, that they feel awakened to their own unconscious complicity in perpetuating and normalising a male-dominated body of literature; second, the female students report experiencing an increased sense of empowerment because they believe that contemporary woman’s self-identity is intimately joined to the experiences and accomplishments of their scholarly female predecessors. The authors argue that the curricular choice to expose students to the women’s works, aided by the pedagogical decision to require online responses to these works, offers benefits for students and professors alike.

RECOGNIZING WOMEN'S DRAMAS AS POLITICAL WRITING: THE PLAYS OF 1701 BY WISEMAN, PIX AND TROTTER

This essay considers three plays by women playwrights produced in 1701—Jane Wiseman's Antiochus the Great, Mary Pix's The Czar of Muscovy, and Catharine Trotter's The Unhappy Penitent—to be heirs to the Restoration plays of Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, as well as the dramatic works of female predecessors Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish in their focus on politics. Although these plays have not received the attention they deserve either from contemporaries or from modern scholars, they provide commentary on contemporary political concerns, most notably the declining popularity of William (criticized for the pernicious influence of his favorites), the opposition he faced in the House of Commons from the Country Whigs, and the resulting and significant curtailment of his royal powers in the Act of Settlement of 1701. All three playwrights set their plays far away from England, examine abuses of monarchical power, and demonstrate an interest in women as political agents, anticipating the ascension of Anne as William's health was in visible decline. While it is not surprising that the plays produced or published during Anne's reign would praise women's involvement in politics, it has not been recognized that plays from the end of William's reign criticized his rule in an oblique, but still recognizable, manner.

Healthy Vocations: Field Nursing and the Religious Overtones of Public Health

This article argues that the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) field nursing program of the 1930s, which continued much of the same assimilation-style health care practices begun generations earlier by missionaries and field matrons, perpetuated the nineteenth-century link between religion and health care. Following in the footsteps of their female predecessors, field nurses targeted native women for health education, emphasizing personal hygiene and individual responsibility at the expense of socioeconomic causes of illness. Native women nonetheless appear to have maintained agency and power in negotiating health and health care. Peaking during the era of OIA Commissioner John Collier's Indian New Deal, the history of field nursing problematizes this period, particularly with regard to women's experiences. The article is significant for its exploration of field nursing as a contested site of cultural negotiation, revealing issues of power and difference in the lives of American women.

Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing by Ann Heilmann , Mark Llewellyn (review)

206Reviews awkwardly appended, while Raine airbrushes out Eliot's rhymes about King Bolo and his big black queen. What Eliot needs now is a sympathetic critical biography that is addressed to the unconverted. Pithy, provocative, donnishly brilliant, Raine's is toomuch an insider's book. University of St Andrews Robert Crawford Metafictionand Metahistory inContemporary Women'sWriting.Edited byAnn Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 48.00. xi + 222 pp. isbn: 978-0-230-00504-4. Since the late 1980s,historyhas emerged as an increasinglyprominent theme incontem porarywriting, and historical literature ? a genre once dismissed as escapist pap ? has discovered a new critical and cultural respectability: what was 'then' is very 'now'. Heilmann and Llewellyn's timely collection of essays considers what is specific about how contemporary women writers represent history.Their clear and purposeful intro duction, oudining the aims and content of the volume, is followed by fourteen lively chapters thatdiscuss textsfrom North America, Australia, and the UK. Essays on canon icalwriters (Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt,JeanetteWinterson) are interwovenwith discus sions of established but neglected authors (Stevie Davies, Eva Figes, Rose Tremain, Michele Roberts, Daphne Marlatt), lesser known figures (BetsyTobin, Susan Kenney, Moy McCrory), and thosewhose work has appeared more recendy (AliceThompson, Sena JeterNaslund, Sarah Waters). As this listof names indicates, one of the strengths of thevolume lies in its scope; the essays cover popular and literarytextsand consider the representation of a range of differenthistorical periods, expanding the current critical focus on neo-Victorian literature. This scope is compromised to some degree by the inclusion of two essays on Carter. Moreover, while essays on Canadian and Australian fictionhelp togive thevolume an international dimension, furtherdiscussion of postcolonial writing and an exploration of race and ethnicity would have enabled the collection to reflecta greater plurality of historical voices. Working within the context of postmodern and feminist reconceptions of history,many of the essays employ a similar critical framework, one indebted to Adrienne Rich's notion of revision, Linda Hutcheon's definition of historio graphic metafiction, and Julia Kristeva's theory ofWomen's Time. They also cover established themes: history as a patriarchal narrative that excludes and silences female subjects; the past and literary classics (Melville's Moby Dick, de Sade's Justine, and Yeats's poetry) rewritten from a woman-centred perspective; the challenge posed to the authority and authenticity of official historical records; history as a discursive construct; the relationship between fact and fiction; and the uncertainty of historical truth. The theoretical and thematic links between chapters give the volume coherence without suppressing critical debate, and, despite a conscious effort tomake connections between the essays, some interesting and productive tensions emerge. For example, while Sherry Booth celebrates 'the role of the imagination in the creation of true stories, of YES, 39.1 & 2, 2009 207 accurate histories' (p. 45), the historian Katharine Hodgkin expresses concern about the historical accuracy of speculative fiction, highlighting a tendency for anachronism and ahistoricism. Further, while there is an acknowledgement that historical writing bywomen isnot a new genre, there isno consensus about what distinguishes contemporary women writers' engagement with history from that of theirmale peers and female predecessors. Some of the essays stress connec tions between contemporary writers and their historical antecedents (Caryl Churchill and the early nineteenth-century Scottish playwright Joanne Baillie, for example); others identify in contemporary writing a greater focus on gender, an emphasis on the fluidity of gender boundaries, the use of fairy-tale motifs, the recuperation of what has been edited out of dominant versions of the past ? domesticity, the body, desire, particularly same-sex desire (represented in Winterson, Marlatt, Waters) ? and self-reflexive intertextuality. Such points of difference only enrich the volume as a whole. As contemporary women writers' continuing preoccupation with the past demonstrates, history is far from over. By oudining key debates and critical issues, this lucid and illuminating collection of essays considers how and why women reimagine (literary) history, underlining the ways in which gender is significant to an understanding of the present as well as the past. University of Leicester Emma Parker ...

Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States: Crossing the Line (review)

Women Composers and Music Technology the United States: Crossing the Line. By Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006. 301 pp., including discography, bibliography, list of Web sites with access to recorded music, and index of proper names. On my computer desktop is a photo of the faculty and staff of the famous Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, circa 1970. The six individuals posing for the camera are arrayed a kind of hierarchy: Milton Babbitt and Otto Luening occupy the foreground, with Vladimir Ussachevsky just behind them, and Mario Davidovsky occupies the middle ground. In the background, right of center, two young women stand close together, looking formal and modest despite the long hair and short skirts typical of the era. The women are Alice Shields and Pril Smiley, who worked the center as teachers, technicians, experimenters, and collaborators; during the center's most productive period they were two of the four primary instructors electronic music. Both are prolific, accomplished, award-winning composers of electronic music, yet they never received the status and pay their work at the center warranted, and they are seldom mentioned the standard narratives of the history of electronic music the United States, as Joel Chadabe's Electric Sound bears witness. (1) This neglect is hardly surprising: women have worked in the for a common goal so very many roles and fields, yet for historical and cultural reasons men have commanded the and are thus the subjects of history. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner's greatest achievement Women Composers and Music Technology the United States: Crossing the Line is to shift background and foreground so that women like Smiley and Shields become the historical subjects and their male colleagues play supporting roles. This perspective shift makes Hinkle-Turner's book more than a compensatory history, adding women to a male narrative; rather, it is a women's narrative, attending to the ways that the particularities of these composers' lives as gendered beings intertwine with their careers, creativity, and community. The volume is the first of a series on women and electroacoustic music Hinkle-Turner plans to write for Ashgate; future volumes will address women Europe, Australasia, and Latin America. No one is better qualified to write such a book: a composer herself, Hinkle-Turner is also a university computing professional and longtime advocate of women music. These conditions give Hinkle-Turner not only the technical savvy and broad knowledge of the field required for this type of study but also awareness of and access to the composers who are the subjects of her research. She draws primarily on her own interviews with living composers and her analyses of electronic music for much of the material of the book. But she also brings to the table her feminist sensibilities and knowledge of feminist musicology, which is particularly evident the book's introduction. Of the six chapters that follow the introduction, three are devoted to women composers academic settings (chapters 2-4), while two are more topical, concerning women and technology popular music (chapter 5) and women multimedia (chapter 6); the final chapter provides a trenchant assessment of the current status of women electroacoustic music. This concluding chapter is the most theoretical of the book, for here Hinkle-Turner grapples with the reality that, after seventy or so years of breaking down barriers, forming alliances, networking, mentoring, and achieving success, women composers of electronic music find that younger generations of women are not following their footsteps. Rather, the numbers of female students university electronic music composition programs have actually decreased recent years (247), and their female predecessors doubt their own influence as role models (253). Hinkle-Turner airs several theories to explain this phenomenon, including cultural constructions of femininity, the aggressive jargon of the computer world, and U. …

Women's Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy by Adalgisa Giorgio, Julia Waters

MLR, 104.1, 2009 149 Manson:AmericanIcon'(Stephen Perrin). A lesscontroversial andmorediscursive workshopconsiderstheroleof theacademyas a cultural ambassador, withpapers on theimpact ofstudy-abroad programmes (Mark Bernheim),faculty and student exchange programmes (Giovanna Franci),andnewAmericanstudies programmes inEastern Europe (Rodica Mihaila). One workshopbears theprovocative title'What Was Modernism?'. Itspapers offer theoretical perspectives (Jonathan Culler, RonaldBush,AndersonAraujo) as well as practicalreadings of MarianneMoore (PaolaNardi),Mina Loy (Antonella Francini), DerekWalcott (Andrea Molesini), and 'contemporary modernist' Amy Newman (Paola Loreto). But the reader will seek invain for a simple answer to the title question. The lasttwo workshopsare more compact, oneof them considering 'TheImpact ofAfrican AmericanStudies'(Annalucia Accardo onGrace Paley) and theother addressing from a historian's perspective thetimely issueof 'Democracy in Amer icaafter TwoCenturies'. As an indication ofhowAmbassadorsoftensucceedsin surprising thereader, thelatter workshopcontains a paper inItalian byFerdinando Fasce,ominously entitled'Esportare lademocrazia?', which,however, turns out to be devoted to an important radio show of the 1950S, America's Town Meeting of the Air,a programme thatfostered faith inUS democracy bystimulating exchange. Fasce'spaperconcludes withananecdote aboutanoccasion when the Americansin volved with theradioshowfound that they couldnotdinetogether ina Washington hotel,someofthem beingblack.Fascequotesfrom a report: InEurope,the MiddleEast,in Asia and Africathetwenty-six Americans couldassociate together incomplete democracy-in Washington they couldnot. Onewonders whatthe episode willdo totherecently renewed faith in US democracy whichthe Town Meeting party created. One can only hope that along with the news of discrimination by the Hotel Carlton will travel the fact that rightacross the street theStatlerHotel served the party promptly andcourteously. (p.509). CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OFMILAN FRANCESco ROGNONI Women's Writing inWestern Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy. Ed. by ADAL GISA GIORGIoand JULIA WATERS. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2007. xi+463 pp. ?44.99. ISBN 978-1-84718-165-7. In a lecture givenat the University of Warwickon 16 June 2007,entitled'Wanted Dead orAlive:LocatingContemporary Women'sWriting', Mary Eagletondrew attention tothefactthat while thecategory of 'Women's Writing'seemstobe dying inbookshop managementand academicpublishing, and inconsciousopposition to the'death of theauthor'proclaimed byRolandBarthesand embraced bypost structuralist thought, individual womenwritersarevery much aliveandpromoted bycritics and reviewers. Thisvolume-collectingtwenty-seven papersdelivered ata conference held in2005-is testimony totheimportant workstill beingcarried out onwomenwriters as a field ofenquiryinliterary studies. Itsaim isto 'draw compar isonsandcontrasts between different generations of writers andcritics andbetween 150 Reviews different countries, and toexamine howwomen's literary production has responded tothesocio-political anddemographic changesthat have shapedan ever-evolving Europe' (p. 1). In the wake of literary-critical feminist projectsandothertheoreti callyinformed work,the volumeposesquestionsconcerning contemporary women writers'relationship with their female predecessors asevidencedinthetexts, aswell as their self-identity aswriters'of a truly international women'sculture acrossever more fluid national borders'(p.xi),who repeatedly distancethemselves from a now established line of women's writing andabodyoffeminist criticism outsidethetexts. Afterintroducing thevolume'skey areas of commonconcern-'gender', 'ge neration', and 'legacy'-theeditors definetheseterms. The chapters fromthefirst section cover Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (Nancy K.Miller);Colette'slegacy(Diana Holmes); parodyandpasticheinthereworkings ofaGerman feminist text byIrm traud Morgner (Lyn Marven); foremothers inItalian women's fiction of thel990S (ClaudiaBernardi);PascaleRoze's explicit acknowledgement ofdebtto Marguerite Duras (Julia Waters); feminist reinterpretations ofcanonicalBritishtexts bymale authors(Monica Germania); howexplicit disavowal ofdebttofemale precursors and disconnection from politicsarecontradicted bytextual evidencein worksbyJudith Hermann,SarahKirsch,andChrista Wolf (ClaudiaGremler)and in thenew ge neration ofFrench womenwriters(Shirley Jordan); ElsaMorante's legacy(Adalgisa Giorgio). The first four chapters whichmake up thesecondsectionreinvestigate thecen trality of the mother figure in feminist theories and inwomen'swriting. Maggie Humm examinestheintertextual influence ofVirginia Woolf on SimonedeBeau voir. Heather Ingman applies French feminist theories of thematernal to three contemporary Irishnovelsbywomen.NicolettaDi Ciolla investigates female sub jectivity incrimefiction by Italian womenwriters, andElianaMaestri showshow Irigaray's theories of the maternal influenced theItalian Diotima group'snotion of 'female realism', and how this in turn informs the representation of themother in the Italian translation of works by A. S. Byatt. The texts covered in the sub sequentthree chapters-which bypassthevexed mother-daughter relationship in favour ofa re-evaluation ofthefather figure-areconcerned with therepresentation of illegitimate daughters intwentieth-century Portugueseliterature (ClaudiaPazos Alonso); maternal and paternal paradigms in Sibilla Aleramo and Dacia Maraini (UrsulaFanning);and intertextual links betweenJulia Kristeva'sTalesofLoveand Nadia Fusini'sI voltidell'amore (Elena Minelli). The remaining chapters fromthis sectionfocus on the grandmother as analternative modelof intergenerational influ ence:Claudia Capancioni explorestheinfluence of...

‘I Heard Her Murmurs’: Decoding Narratives of Female Desire in Jane Eyre and Secresy

Ellen Moers, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar all validate the idea that the Brontës could have engaged in a literary dialogue with some of their female predecessors, thereby contributing to early feminist discourse. Reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as a companion text to Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy [sic] (1795) offers a new perspective on various elements in the novel, including female friendship and Bertha’s laugh. Ultimately, this author suggests that, in the featured texts, there is both a narrator and a listener, with the greater responsibility being on the latter. In Jane Eyre and Secresy, Jane and Caroline must decode the language of women imprisoned by the patriarchy and attempt to free them. Caroline is more successful than Jane, not simply because Sibella’s narrative is more coherent than Bertha’s, but because Caroline is more willing than Jane to challenge the prevailing practice of male domination and female repression.

Zamiatin's 'We' by Robert s&gt; Russell (review)

330 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 Each of the last two chapters finds similarities between a writer and a painter. Pamela Chester finds in Tsvetaeva's prose and Goncharova's landscape paintings 'a sense of constricted space', an 'anti-Eden' tendency, not common in male artists but noted in two female predecessors, Maria Bashkirtsevaand Evgeniia Tur. Whether or not the illustrationsquite prove this, the essay itself, not constricting its attention to analysis, encompasses a wide ephocal landscape in which Tsvetaeva and Goncharova are rightly prominent. As distinctfrom symbolic constriction,AndrewWachtelwriteson 'MeaningfulVoids',arguingthatthe Sovietexperience hasbeen bestexpressed in the faceless human figuresMalevich produced after I928 and the faceless charactersin Platonov's Chevengur (I 928) and Kotlovan (I 930). All these imply a 'worldin which bodies arepresentbut minds have no place' (p. 255), the new obligatory happiness being linked with psychological emptiness. This is cogently demonstrated, yet an attractive quality of the essay is that, while forceful, it is declarativelytentative (see p. 265), so that alternative,perhaps simultaneously valid, interpretationsare provoked: for example, should 'no face' notimply 'no mind'?It might signify,in Platonov, a socially unmediated merging of mind with environment, oriented less to the Soviet scene than to the hope for a new kindof existence altogether. Wachtel'scontributioncomes second to last, but I would have placed it last to create a frame: its facelessness theme so eloquently balances Barsht's concern with Dostoevskii'sadmirationfor the face. Wachtel even reproduces the Perovportraitof Dostoevskiias that of a face which, unlikeMalevich'sand Platonov's depictions, can be read psychologically. We recall, moreover, Barsht's telling us how fascinated Dostoevskii was by the one Repin bargehaulerwhose face could notbe seen! University ofEssex ANGELA LIVINGSTONE Russell, Robert. Zamiatin's 'We'.CriticalStudies in Russian Literature.Bristol Classical Press, Bristol and London, 2000. vi + 13I pp. Notes. Bibliography .Index. ?7.95 (paperback). ZAMIATIN's novel Weholds a special place not only in Russian, but also in world literature,in that it marksthe beginning of a new genre of anti-utopia, which went on to achieve spectacular growth in the course of the twentieth century. The novel shared the fate of many other great worksof literatureof the period: it was banned, and any reference to it in Soviet criticism was impossible for a period of seventy years. Its author was more fortunate than many of his contemporaries, as he was given permission to move abroad permanently in 1931. Wehas been fairlywell known in the Westsince itspublication in a number of languages in the nineteen-twenties, and particularlysince it was acknowledged by George Orwell as a majorinfluenceon his I984. There is, therefore, a considerable history of western criticism on the novel. Part of Robert Russell's book's great merit as an introduction to Weand to Zamiatin is the author's broad familiarity not merely with western criticism, but with the more recent examinationsbypost-Soviet critics,andwith contemporaryviews REVIEWS 33I of the work from I920S Russia, before almost all reference to the novel was outlawed entirely. Western commentators have tended to focus upon Weas being an anti-utopian and anti-collectivistnovel only in general terms, and as a premonition of Stalinism, overlooking the resonances which the novel has always had for Russian critics, of the very particularperiod in which it was written (that is, the Russia of War Communism, revolutionaryrhetoric and the Civil War). Russell's book begins with some brief explanation of the somewhat convoluted historyof the emergence of varioustexts of Wein print, and some commentary on the various English translations, before embarking on an extensive overview of the trendsin criticismof the novel. The entire spectrum of views is covered, includingreferenceto the novel's social,historical,cultural and philosophical origins in utopia and anti-utopia, science fiction, the modernist aesthetic, early Bolshevik ideology, Proletkul't and the Russian Civil War, and the influence of such figures as Andrei Belyi, Dostoevskii, Hegel, Nietzsche and Frederick Taylor. There are also sections on the mathematics in We,on speculation regarding the use of onomastics in the constructionof the names of the novel's characters,on the narrativestructure and on feministinterpretationsof the novel. The second chapter is devoted to specifically contemporary references in Zamiatin's novel. These include the modelling of the Benefactor (blagodetel...

Career Patterns of Executive Women in Finance: An Optimal Matching Analysis

This article examines the objective and subjective facets of female finance‐executive careers. Optimal matching and qualitative analyses are used to show how the careers are shaped by workplace structures and by the early 1970s enforcement of women's employment rights. Changing opportunity structures in turn shaped respondents' perspectives. Many younger respondents were unaware that their mobility was partly due to the creative action of their female predecessors and took personal credit for their own rapid progress. Finally, it appears that as women have experienced more freedom in pursuing finance careers, their career trajectories have become more rigid.

Enlarging the Heart: L. E. L.'s “The Improvisatrice,” Hemans's “Properzia Rossi,” and Barrett Browning'sAurora Leigh

Elizabeth barrett browning's relation to her female predecessors was complex, conflicted, and rewarding. InAurora Leighwe see both the heroine and her creator grow from poets who attempt to prove themselves in traditionally masculine terms, into poets who engage with a feminine tradition of sentimental verse which they resist and criticize but nevertheless find of essential value. Only by viewing the poem against the backdrop of the sentimental tradition can we fully appreciate Barrett Browning's challenge to the cult of privacy and the doctrine of separate spheres, her dual emphasis on poetry as at once a job requiring doggedness and a vocation requiring wide social and religious vision, and, finally, her sense of the connection between herself and her female predecessors. Such poets as Felicia Hemans and L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) stand in a relation to Barrett Browning which resembles the unsentimental aunt's relation to Aurora in Book 1 ofAurora Leigh: there is more conflict than sympathy in the relationship; the older woman represents a version of femininity which the younger must at all costs resist; and yet the older woman leaves the younger a legacy which is both narrow and enabling, an essential basis for the young poet's future achievement.

Moore, Bishop, and Oliver: Thinking Back, Re-Seeing the Sea

Several poems by Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Mary Oliver offer an extended and illuminating example of what it might mean, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, for women writers to back through our mothers (79), or, in Alicia Ostriker's terms, to re-think ourselves by re-thinking (475). friendship of Moore and Bishop is well documented.(1) Although exists to date no definitive, explicit evidence of connection between Oliver and either Bishop or Moore, a deep responsiveness to Bishop's work, and through it, to Moore's, resonates from many of Oliver's poems. Thus Mussels and The Fish, from Twelve Moons, and The Fish, from American Primitive, recall Bishop's The Fish; Postcard from Flamingo, from American Primitive, and At Loxahatchie, in Dream Work, recall Bishop's Florida. Further, the recurring, clear indications in her poetry that Oliver conceives of her own poetic voice as a woman's voice invite us to look at her work in relation to that of other women writers.(2) Questioning the appropriateness to women of the Bloomian of influence as the son's struggle against his poetic fathers, some feminist critics have proposed an alternative paradigm as describing the relationships more common between women writers and their female predecessors. This paradigm essentially thinks back through Woolf's observation that think back through our mothers: it describes the younger writer as seeking out her poetic mothers, whose example and works nurture and support her, and whom she affirms in her own work. Betsy Erkkila, while acknowledging the presence of ambivalence in such relationships, argues that there is a primary sense of identification and mutuality between women poets that sets them apart from the more agonistic relationship between precursor and ephebe in the Bloomian model (335). Erkkila uses this paradigm to examine, in Bishop's poetry, a pattern of seeking a powerful woman figure and a matrilineal heritage, both associated for Bishop with Marianne Moore. In the poems by Moore, Bishop, and Oliver that I have chosen to discuss we can see the poet answering her forebears or inviting her successors. Including Oliver in this family of women allows us to consider how a poet of a new generation might enter (adopt herself into?) and hence enlarge the circle of influence. Two of the poems I will consider here, Moore's A Grave and Bishop's At the Fishhouses, have received much critical comment but have not been considered in relation to each other. absence of such a discussion is surprising. A Grave is often thought of as uncharacteristic of Moore's poetry; it is also a poem that Bishop identified late in her career as one of her favorites.(3) These facts, together with Moore's unquestioned influence on Bishop, and the equally unquestioned and important differences between the two poets' work, demand that we inquire where Bishop's high regard for her friend's atypical poem might be evident in her own poetry. Once we inquire, At the Fishhouses reveals parallels and differences that suggest the poem is a meditation on and a response to Moore's. Similarly, through parallels and divergences, and in the context of an apparent responsiveness to Bishop's work, Oliver's Sunday Morning, High Tide, The Sea, The Swimmer, and The Waves seem to carry on a familiar conversation with At the Fishhouses and, through Bishop's poem, to think back to A Grave. In the process Oliver deepens her conception of the self's relation to nature and suggests new perceptions of Moore's and Bishop's seas. One could think of these poems as representing two parallel movements - from Moore's apparently genderless to Oliver's overtly gendered response to nature, with Bishop, between them, more or less covertly identifying her voice as a woman's, and from Moore's depiction of the sea as genderless to Oliver's identification of it as female, with Bishop again playing somewhat ambivalently upon a middle ground. …

Why so Few?: Women Household Heads in Osaka Chônin Families

Women house heads were uncommon among Osaka chônin (urban ite) households. Despite the assumed importance of assuring family continuity, there were legal and customary barriers to women succeeding to family headships. Fifteen hundred seven records of household succession for Osaka in the period 1707-1872 include only twenty-two cases of female predecessors and thirty-seven cases of female successors. Given the number of households which disappear after failing to find a suitable successor, why were women generally excluded? Why were women less frequent than minor males as intermediary successors? Why were employees and distant male relatives more attractive than women as successors? Female househeads are less frequent after 1730 than before. The change resulted from fears of excessive business competition from branch households. This served to restrict the candidates for succession and increased the failure rate of Osaka merchant houses.