Female Servants Research Articles

The Black Death, Girl Power, and the Emergence of the European Marriage Pattern in England

This article critiques the debate over the extent to which labor shortages caused by the Black Death and subsequent epidemics empowered women economically, and whether this had significant implications for overall demographic behavior and long-term economic performance. Some historians have argued that after ca. 1350 women in the North Sea region were drawn into the land and labor markets to a far greater extent than women in other parts of Europe, and in particular into employment as single live-in servants, which led to a rise in the average age of women at first marriage and the proportion of women never marrying. This in turn led to the formation of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), which is associated with fertility restriction and higher levels of household income. The evidence and arguments underpinning this viewpoint are critically evaluated for England, where by 1600 the EMP was certainly established. The extant sources do not enable us to measure the extent of women's financial gains after the Black Death, or to assess changes in their marital choices. There is no convincing evidence for any rise in the proportion of single female servants in the century after the Black Death or for the existence of the EMP before 1550. Young women did not increase their participation in the land market in order to construct a marriage fund. The article concludes by assessing the possible chronologies of England's transition to the EMP, and by suggesting new lines of enquiry about structural changes in women's work during the sixteenth century.

‘[S]he-Mercury’: Broadening Female Neighbourly Networks in The Merry Wives of Windsor

ABSTRACT Recent critical attention to The Merry Wives of Windsor has emphasised the feminist impulse of the play, stressing the way it celebrates female gossip networks. Important as they are, those studies, however, privilege the gossip network between the two prosperous, middling-sorts wives of the title, in the process marginalising the many working women the play depicts as members of a wider female neighbourly network and occluding the crucial roles they play in the success of the wives’ plots. When critics do attempt to attend to a wider female network, they often link the wives to the (off-stage) queen, thus further isolating them from their immediate neighbourly interactions. This article redresses this imbalance by showing that female neighbourly networks in the play, as they were in early modern culture, are much broader and socially diverse than has hitherto been acknowledged. Challenging dominant critical readings of Mistress Quickly as a garrulous, busybody, and drawing on the findings of social historians’ recent research into the lived experiences of early modern female servants, I argue that she is positioned in the play as a social actor, an active participant in her neighbourhood, an ingenious manipulator, and a significant member of the local female networks.

Gendering Late Medieval Habsburg Dynastic Politics: Maximilian I and His Social Networks

Abstract While gender history has developed into a powerful branch of premodern history, we still know little about gender relations around Maximilian I. One reason is that research concentrated for a long time on the individual personality of the emperor without paying much attention to the manifold relations among men and women that in fact contributed to establishing his rule. Another reason is the specific constellations of Maximilian's relationships with his wives Mary of Burgundy and Bianca Maria Sforza, with his daughter Margaret of Austria and grand-daughter Mary of Hungary, which have been mostly discussed in the framework of their personal courts and regional politics and less in a wider comparative perspective. Against the backdrop of recent approaches to dynastic politics, role models, and agency, I will, first, discuss the gendered dimensions of Maximilian's dynastic politics in their wider geo-political and socio-cultural context. I will, second, move beyond a focus on key dynastic actors to take into account personal networks as fundamental for any type of premodern rule. Following court ladies and female servants and the social networks they were part of I will outline the interrelations between social ascent, office, and the politics of kinship and gender at court.

FROM THE BLACK CAULDRON TO THE WHITE PAGE: THE WITCH AS A NARRATOR OF POE’S “THE TELL-TALE HEART”

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a famous short story of crime fiction first published in 1843. The tale starts with an unnamed and unreliable narrator addressing an unknown person, often regarded as the reader, about the details of a crime that the narrator had committed in the past. Many details such as the relationship between the narrator and the victim (who happened to be an old man), the motivation behind the crime, the gender of the narrator, and many other related issues are not sufficiently explained in the story. Nevertheless, critics have provided various ideas and interpretations as to what remained ambiguously unstated in the story. This paper aims to look at the story from a quite different perspective, that is to say, this paper will point to the possibility that the narrator could be a young female servant who is secretly involved in some witchcraft practices. This hypothesis will be established by highlighting relevant ritual elements in the tale which suggest that the narrative includes more than a mere portrayal of a perfect crime. Additionally, before launching into the examination of the story, this paper will review some critics’ significant suppositions as well as interpretations of some inexplicit notions of the story.

Pigor i sämre hushåll

The Swedish Servant Acts compulsed everyone without an occupation to take up service as a servant. However it is unclear to what extent this compulsion was actually enforced. Repeated complaints from the authorities give the impression that it was largely ignored. One suspicion was that people chose to live with relatives rather than taking service. A list compiled by the Stockholms authorities enables a quantification of mostly women who evaded service around 1755. The study shows that up to a fifth of all female servants were suspected of being live ins rather than employed as servants, and most of them problably earned their living in the informal sector of the urban economy. A comparison with tax registers reveals that these people were accounted for. In conclusion, while historical scholarship is dependent upon ample source material, this study suggests that a good part of the servant population was recorded in tax registers, but that the nature of their service might not have been properly accounted for, and that many servants provided for themselves on an extensive informal economy of the city which is difficult to quantify.

Serving in the Household and the Imagination: The Brontës, Alcott, and the Interconnected Roles of a Neglected “Transatlantic” Female Figure

Tabitha Aykroyd, Martha Brown, Nancy and Sarah Garrs were just a few of the very many girls and women working as domestic servants in early Victorian Britain. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the precise context and conditions in which they were employed in Haworth Parsonage, where the Brontë sisters lived for most of their lives (1820–1855), and the influence that they had on the well-being of this famous family and on the imagination and literary activity of the sisters. Aspects connected with the following will be explored and problematized: the value and respect that the Brontës attributed to or showed these domestic laborers and their work, including sharing in their tasks and duties; brief but useful connections of these figures with the sisters’ own professional activities as middle-class women (namely, when serving as teachers and governesses themselves); and also comparison with some relevant literary representations of the figure and role of the “female servant” in the Brontës’ novels. A complementary purpose is of a more transatlantic nature: to compare their earlier British domestic context with Louisa May Alcott’s later American one, and their literary representations of the female servant with Alcott’s own extensive treatment of that neglected figure in some of her fictional works. The justification for this comparison does not lie so much in the known influence that the works written by the Brontës, in particular Charlotte’s, had on Alcott, but more in their sharing of very similar concerns as regards this topic, in spite of very specific (transatlantic) differences that can be revealing of their respective attitude towards servitude.

What Rats Reveal about Cooking in Late Medieval Japan

The Illustrated Rat’s Tale (Nezumi no sōshi emaki), an anonymous Japanese picture scroll created between 1550–1650, depicts a rat wedding banquet, and for a period with few other visual references of cooking, it is an important source for understanding the staff and procedures for food preparation in elite warrior households, which it emulates. The wedding party of the rat lord takes inspiration from the festivities for late medieval (1400–1600) warlords, and it includes rodent equivalents of the great performers and cultural influencers of the age. Analysis reveals the gendered division of labor and status in the duties of food preparation in a late medieval (rodent) warrior household with male chefs in charge of flavoring and carving at the top of the kitchen hierarchy and female servants performing manual labor outside at the bottom. For both rats and humans, the picture scroll further demonstrates that food played a powerful role in the representation of authority.

‘Ne vous effrayez point du costume bizarre dans lequel vous me voyez’: The Maidservant Disguise in Stendhal’s Mina de Vanghel and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s ‘Le Bonheur dans le crime’

ABSTRACT This article analyses how the nineteenth-century fictional heroines in Stendhal's Mina de Vanghel and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's `Le Bonheur dans le crime' don a maidservant disguise in order to revolt against their society's oppressive mores and subsequently reverse the power dynamics between men and women, as well as servants and their masters and mistresses. By drawing on the period's non-literary discourses that likewise depicted a fascination with the servant's appearance, this article argues that Stendhal and Barbey were creating, as well as feeding into, a particular nineteenth-century socio-cultural construct of the female servant as a rebellious, sexually promiscuous figure.

Notizen zu Johanniterschwestern in Mitteleuropa (außerhalb von Friesland) während des Spätmittelalters

Notes an Hospitaller Sisters in Central Europe (outside Frisia) during the later Middle Ages The military-religious orders were supposed to fight and shed blood for the faith. Nevertheless, the Hospitallers included women, similar to the Teutonic Order. This should not be a surprize because both military-religious orders upheld caring for the needy and sick as important tasks. In Upper Germany, however, there were no convents of Hospitaller sisters. This was different from Frisia, where special socio-political conditions produced Hospitaller nunneries, and it was also different from other European countries where there had been enough female Hospitallers to concentrate them in special houses. Yet according to a list of 1367 the southern part of the Priory of Alamania had four commanderies where, in each case, seven sisters were supposed to live alongside with knights and priests: Heimbach, Dorlisheim, Freiburg im Breisgau and Villingen. From documents it is known that in many other commanderies married couples, widows or single women bought for themselves life-rents from and maintenance in Hospitaller houses. The legal status of such females was not always clear. Some of them may have hoped to be recognized as fully-professed sorores, in order to enjoy the privileged status of religious persons, whereas others may only have been consorores or donate. Others may have been female servants or just members of ecclesiastical fraternities.

Kosztolányi Dezső „Édes Anna” című regényének színpadi adaptációja a Marosvásárhelyi Nemzeti Színház Tompa Miklós Társulatának előadásában

“Édes Anna”, the novel by the famous Hungarian writer Dezső Kosztolányi, written in 1926, has had twenty-seven stage adaptations throughout the Carpatian Basin in Hungarian. It is about a female servant in the 1920’s in Budapest, who serves at a middle-classed family, and finally she kills her masters. On the 19th of September 2003, the Miklós Tompa Company of the National Theatre of Târgu-Mureș staged their own adaptation of the novel which was directed by László Gali, based on the script by Tibor Solténszky. This adaptation had already been staged in Komárom two years earlier. What were the particularities of the performance in Târgu-Mureș? In my paper I will outline this question in the context of other Édes Anna adaptations and show the peculiarities of this one in light of Hungarian theatre history, that are not sufficiently visible at first sight.

Female “Singleness” in the Urals around 1900

This paper studies female “singleness”, which is defined as the status of being non-married, in the cities of Perm Province. Emphasis is placed on the two largest cities — Perm and Ekaterinburg — compared with the entire urban and rural population. The authors refer to aggregates from the city censuses taken in Perm and Ekaterinburg as well as the national censuses of 1897 and 1926 as the main sources. The study quantitatively analyses women’s marital status in relation to age, place of residence, ethno-religious, and social affiliation, and calculates the rate of women who never married and singulate mean age at marriage. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in Perm and Ekaterinburg, the authors observe stability in the marriage structure among the female population. Over 50% of urban women and 33.6% of rural women aged 15 and older were not married: in the group under 30 years old, female “singleness” was determined by the fact that some girls were unable to marry. By the age of 40, a significant part of those “single” women were widows, and in the age group of 40–49, they made up the majority. Divorce was significantly less likely to be the cause of female “singleness” than non-marriage while still fertile. The differences in the level of female “singleness” in the Perm cities were influenced by the in-migration of female servants, whose background was often rooted in the peasant class, and the presence of a large monastery. During the new Soviet reality, renunciation of marriage as a life trajectory became infrequent, while the proportion of divorced people among those “single” increased noticeably.

Doria Shafik: A Staunch Egyptian Feminist Ahead of Her Time—Damnatio Memoriae

Doria Shafik:A Staunch Egyptian Feminist Ahead of Her Time—Damnatio Memoriae Samia I. Spencer (bio) I was getting more and more conscious that Freedom is one entity—Freedom of Women being inseparable from Freedom of the Nation. I was convinced that there would be no free women in an occupied country and no occupied country with free women. Doria Shafik1 I decided to fight to the last drop of blood to break the chains shackling the women of my country in the invisible prison in which they continued to live, a prison, which being invisible, was all the more oppressive. Doria Shafik2 Today, if you ask educated and well-informed Egyptians who is Doria Shafik (1908-1975), no one is likely to know. If you ask the same question of Middle Eastern scholars or international feminists, the great majority will also have no idea. Yet in the middle of the twentieth century, Shafik was a household name in Egypt and beyond, not only as a dashing and controversial figure but, more importantly, as a renowned journalist, published poet and novelist, militant feminist, and political activist. Unlike [End Page 39] her distinguished mentor Huda Shaarawi (1879-1947)—the eminent grande dame of Egyptian and Arab feminism, and founder (1923) of the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU)—whose name has made it into academic circles and textbooks, Shafik has gone from the pinnacle of celebrity to the oubliette of history.3 This article will focus on the consistency of Shafik's principles and action throughout her life, and her unparalleled determination and courage as she sought to achieve equality, freedom, justice, and political rights for Egyptian women. The Early Years (1908-1928) Doria was born at the dawn of the twentieth century, December 14, 1908, when harem life was nearing its end and slavery recently banned (1889) and totally abolished (1904), yet her grandmother still owned two slaves. The third of a brood of six, she grew up in a middle-class Muslim family, her childhood spent between two provincial towns in the Nile Delta: Mansoura, where her father, a civil engineer, worked for the railroad; and Tanta, with her grandmother, to attend Notre Dame des Apôtres, the same French school where her mother was educated. In this conservative environment, the precautious and perceptive child developed the unique aspects of her identity: aesthetics and feminism. A gentle and affectionate daughter, Doria was close to her mother with whom she shared an appreciation for beauty and the arts. Watching the Nile from her window, she bonded with the river, its eternal flow arousing in her a yearning for the absolute and enhancing her predisposition for poetry. Socially, she was surrounded by women: a score of female servants, including her French-speaking Syrian nanny, and numerous relatives, friends, and family members. The conversations they shared and the stories they told raised many questions in the mind of [End Page 40] the bright young girl: Why were boys always more privileged than girls? Why did women resort to witchcraft to have sons, not daughters? Why was she not allowed to go to mosque, but her brothers could? Why did husbands take second wives? Reflecting on her observation of the prejudice, humiliation, and injustice experienced by women, especially within the institution of marriage, she hoped to evade that fate. Early on, the seeds of feminism were rooted in her mind and continued to grow as various events and encounters magnified it. Shortly after the traumatic experience of losing her mother at age thirteen, the teenager went to live with her broadminded and understanding father, whose job had taken him to the port city of Alexandria, Egypt's commercial and financial capital, its most modern and most cosmopolitan center.4 Discovering a different world and starting a distinct chapter of her life, Doria relished a newfound freedom in a vibrant multicultural urban setting. Moving to another French school, Saint Vincent de Paul, she focused on her studies, passing the Brevet national exam—equivalent to ninth grade in the United States—with highest honor. Beyond that level, no secondary education was available for girls.5 Undeterred, Doria and a friend decided to study on...

THE TRADITION OF NGEMBLOK IN NGREJENG VILLAGE GRABAGAN TUBAN REGENCY IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF 'URF

This article discusses the Ngemblok Tradition in Ngrejeng Village, Grabagan District, Tuban Regency in the 'Urf. This study aims to: 1) Knowing the Ngemblok tradition in Ngrejeng Village, Grabagan District, Tuban Regency 2) Knowing 'Urf's Review of the Ngemblok Tradition in Ngrejeng Village, Grabagan District, Tuban Regency. This research uses a qualitative case study method and uses data collection methods in the form of observation, interviews and documentation. Then the data analysis techniques used in this research are data reduction, data presentation, conclusion drawing and or verification. The results of this study are'Urf's review of the Ngemblok Tradition in Ngrejeng Village, Grabagan District, Tuban Regency that women as blockers are not prohibited in Islam. This is based on the time of the Prophet Muhammad, who was also proposed by Siti Khatidjah through his trusted female servant, Nafisah. The goal from a religious point of view is to get a husband who is pious, and good for marriage. The legal basis for blocking is on the rules of العادة (‘urf) and the rules of fiqh المحُاَفَظَةُ عَلَى القَدِيْمِ الصَالِحِ الأَخْذُ باِلجَدِيْدِ الأَصْلَحِ (maintaining good old things and taking new, better things).

Maidin Cornwall

AbstractWhile the research literature on regional dialect levelling is substantial (e.g.Williams and Kerswill 1999;Britain 2002;Watt 2002;Jansen 2019), this process is under-explored and under-theorised when it comes to patterns of lexical usage. Usingmaidas a case-study, in this article I provide a detailed account of processes of lexical levelling in Cornwall. I consider the usage ofmaidfrom two perspectives, that of onomasiology and semasiology. From an onomasiological perspective,maid, as a variant of the conceptwoman, exhibits socio-stylistic reallocation, with attested usages ofmaidin this study being limited to older speakers in careful speech styles. From a semasiological perspective, two senses ofmaid, ‘woman’ and ‘female servant or attendant’, have undergone structural reallocation in apparent-time withmaid‘woman’ being the prototypical sense for older speakers but a more peripheral sense for their younger counterparts.

금관가야 여자 머리 장신구의 유형과 착용모습 일러스트 제안

This study aimed to present illustration images of Geumgwan Gaya"s queen, noble women, or ordinary women who wear hair accessories. This study categorized women"s hair accessories in Geumgwan Gaya, focusing on literature and excavated artifacts related to Geumgwan Gaya, and proposes illustrations of queens, nobles, and commoners wearing hair accessories. Eleven women"s hair accessories were excavated from the Geumgwan Gaya ruins, including two combs, five comb-shaped accessories, and four binyeo pieces. The combs and binyeo pieces of the Geumgwan Gaya ruins are significant. They are relics that prove that comb and binyeo were widely used in the northwestern region of the Korean Peninsula and the central and southern regions. Since the overall appearance is similar to that of a bird, it is presumed that the view of the bird of the ancients was reflected in the comb-shaped decorations. The queen"s headdress was exemplified by referring to the comb and a piece of binyeo excavated from the 25th tomb of Jeopo-dong, Hapcheon, currently stored in the Leeum Museum. The comb and the binyeo were represented, respectively, made of bone and gold in the imaging process. Both accessories were put into the middle of the hairs, which were done in a chignon to be seen from the front. Hair accessories for noble women or their female servants were illustrated hereafter comb-shaped accessories made of bone uncovered from Daeseong-dong Ancient Tomb No. 88. The accessories are imaged differently depending on those women"s social status. More specifically, the study illustratively depicted hair accessories for noble women so that they appeared made of lacquered bone and decorated with gilded silk threads and gilded beads. In contrast, those for female servants were expressed here to be seen made of bone and beautified with lacquered silk threads and little beads. Meanwhile, this study had some limitations because it illustrated decorative hair accessories worn by the queen, noble women, and ordinary women only based on one image for each social status.

Women in Nepal and India (Fourth to Eighth Century): Fragments of Information Gleaned from Inscriptions

During the period of fourth–eighth century ad, women begin to appear as not only as queens but also as donors, burnt widows (satī) and female servants in inscriptions of both India and Nepal. In a patriarchal set-up, men dominated over women. Yet there were exceptions. Although widows were now encouraged to immolate themselves in the funeral pyres of their husbands, Prabhāvatī (from India) and Rājyavatī (from Nepal) as widows continued to control kingdoms that their husbands had left behind. The poorer economy of Nepal perhaps allowed women to exercise greater freedom than in India in some matters. An inscription from Nepal shows that a married woman had the freedom to remarry. No such instance has been found in inscriptions from India.

Book Review

Book Review

PEREMPUAN SEBAGAI KOMODITAS WARUNG KOPI CETOL DI DESA GONDANGLEGI

The coffee shop is a second home for modern citizens amid the rise of coffee culture in male society. One way to attract customers with the existence by using women as waiters and even accompanying customers as in a small coffee shop. This study aims to find out: (1) how is the relationship between female waiters and customers in coffee shops, (2) the reasons why women are willing to work as waiters in cetol coffee shops, and (3) the views of the surrounding community on the existence of cetol coffee shops. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative. The results obtained from this study indicate that the interaction pattern between the waiter and the cetol coffee shop customer uses symbols in providing services to customers, such as wearing tight clothes, sounding spoiled, and others. They work as servants because of economic factors, lack of job opportunities, and also want to fulfill their own needs independently, so these female servants do not care about the negative public response to their work.

Unmasking the Loyal Maidservant in Germinie Lacerteux

This article argues that by unmasking the secret life of the fictional maidservant, Germinie Lacerteux, the Goncourt brothers develop and describe a nineteenth-century social imaginary of the rebellious female servant. The rebellious maidservant emerges in the nineteenth-century social imagination through an interconnected web of discourses emanating from the period’s literature, faits divers, household manuals and criminology reports. By analysing Germinie Lacerteux in conjunction with nineteenth-century household manuals, this article explores how the Goncourts contributed to this interconnected web of discourses that created the nineteenth-century cultural stereotype of the rebellious female servant. In revealing the ‘true’ nature of the maidservant in their novel, the Goncourts imply that the bourgeoisie must learn to see the image of the devoted servant as nothing more than a construct in the social imagination. The guardian angel whom the bourgeoisie sought to hire is a myth born out of their increasing fears surrounding the potentially dangerous stranger in their home.

The Body Language of Some Female Servants in the Ancient Egyptian Private Tomb Scenes

The Body Language of Some Female Servants in the Ancient Egyptian Private Tomb Scenes