Gender History Research Articles

Studying and Teaching Gender-Caste Histories in India: Problems, Possibilities, and Pleasures

Amid a larger context of political and social changes in India, this article reflects on a personal-academic trajectory and the problems, possibilities, and pleasures of teaching and researching histories of gender and caste in modern India at the University of Delhi for more than three decades. As a feminist historian, the author first points to some of the limitations in her early years of teaching courses on gender, where she occluded caste as a category of analysis. However, an examination of the conjunctions between anti-caste thought and gender through a Dalit feminist pedagogical lens led to shifts in her curriculum and academic scholarship. The article goes on to discuss how preparing and teaching courses on gender-caste histories pose many challenges in terms of queries from the university administration, curriculum design, pedagogic practices, and student responses. Classroom spaces are highly politicized in India, with pronounced gender, caste, class, and linguistic identities that often overlap with each other, which has implications for teaching and research. Finally, the article deliberates on the creative possibilities of such courses and pedagogical strategies, as students critique the crafting of mainstream history writing, feel drawn to new theoretical tools and methodologies that rely on different archival registers, and question the erasure of caste as an analytic, in the process also making the classroom a more democratic space.

Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850–1940

Gendered Capitalism is a unique combination of interdisciplinary research—including business history, economic cultural history, management studies, international business, women's history, gender studies, and the history of technology—from a comparative and global perspective. Paula de la Cruz-Fernández offers a study of international business as much as of the home insofar as it explains gendered marketing structures and gender-specific advertising strategies by using the case of the sewing machine (p. 3). This book differs from traditional works on multinational firms that look at the evolution of a parent company and assume that its branches abroad mirrored it. Instead, the book shows how a global firm adopted local business practices in order to succeed in different countries and markets. Moreover, Cruz-Fernández examines cultural definitions of domesticity and associations between sewing and embroidery, in addition to how women's labor and role in society shaped international management. In doing so, this book presents a comprehensive history of women in business.Gendered Capitalism covers a 90-year period that is relevant both to the history of international business in general and to the history of the sewing machine in particular. During this time, the transportation revolution and technological innovations transformed productive processes and communications, leading to the emergence of multinational corporations and globalization. The Singer sewing machine is a good example of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The patented invention was successfully turned into a new tool and technology that was globally adopted as a household appliance. The Singer sewing machine became a global brand that revolutionized clothes making and embroidery while facilitating women's integration in the market. Indeed, Singer became a cultural institution.Although the sewing machine and its relevance to business and women's history are not new historical findings, Gendered Capitalism looks at two country cases, Spain and Mexico, in a novel manner. These cases are interesting for two main reasons: they were part of the developing world that was behind the more economically advanced economies, and they were the first Spanish-speaking countries where Singer established shops and depots (and remained for over a century). This book illuminates brilliantly how the firm had to adapt to each country's business culture in order to gain market share and maintain it for almost the entire time that sewing machines were an asset that allowed women to earn a livelihood. This required local expertise and the adoption of commercial and financial practices that enabled consumers to acquire their sewing machine. Likewise, it required the US headquarters to be flexible about different forms of practical business operations. The company's strategy proved successful: Singer continued to operate in each country despite political and economic turbulence arising from the Spanish-American War (1898), the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), and the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).Cruz-Fernández definitively explains how in both Spain and Mexico the sewing machine was viewed positively across the political and social spectrum. Singer sewing schools along with flexible forms of credit for acquiring their machines were crucial to this goal. For more progressive groups and female heads of households, credit plans and property rights as defined in each country allowed women to become sole owners of their sewing machines, which gave them a way to earn a living, start a business, or both while staying at home. Similarly, the sewing and embroidery advertised by Singer allowed for the promotion of the conservative values and duties of domesticity. Women, in any event, were involved in Singer as consumers and marketing experts throughout the period covered in the book.Gendered Capitalism thus successfully “puts forward a gender framework to examine the history of the multinational enterprise that places sewing and embroidery practices, which were pillars in the construction of ideas of domesticity, at the center of understanding how international business operations developed for Singer” (p. 179). Written in clear prose, the book has a solid grounding in primary sources. The author demonstrates a mastery of the methodologies and historiographies of international business history and gender history to develop interpretations that will contribute to each of these historiographies. Furthermore, Cruz-Fernández insightfully presents Singer's operations in Spain and Mexico in their respective national contexts and in global context. This book is essential reading for historians of women and gender interested in business history and the history of capitalism as well as for business and economic historians interested in learning more about gender history in Latin America and the world.

Evaluation of the Incidence of Pharyngocutaneous Fistula after Total Laryngectomy.

Laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma is one of the most critical head and neck cancers. Total laryngectomy is one of the main options for treating laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma responsible for forming pharyngocutaneous fistula (PCF), which increases morbidity and mortality. This study aimed to determine PCF incidence and identify the factors associated with this complication. In a retrospective cohort study, 85 patients who underwent total laryngectomy at Imam Khomeini Hospital (Tehran, Iran) from 2011 to 2019 were selected as the study population. The presence/absence of PCF, weight, anemia status (Hb <12.5 g/dl), renal dysfunction status (GFR <90 mL/min/1.73m2), malnutrition status (Albumin <3.5 g/dl), and marginal involvement status was extracted from postoperative medical records. The data were analyzed using SPSS ver. 26.0. The overall incidence of PCF was 11.8%. The mean ±SD of the duration of hospitalization in patients with PCF was 32.40 ±14.75 days, and in patients without PCF was 16.89 ±7.05 days (P = 0.009). The mean ±SD of time to develop a fistula was 7.4 ±3.74 days. The statuses of anemia, malnutrition, renal dysfunction, surgical margin, history of radiotherapy, pharynx closure, gender, and age were unrelated to the incidence of PCF. Further studies with a larger sample size are recommended.

Prevalence of Bacterial Urinary Tract Infection, Associated Risk Factors, and Antimicrobial Resistance Pattern in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) brought a significant and serious health-related problem that may lead to the subsequent development of serious indications with the challenge of the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Therefore, the choice of antibiotics depends on the accuracy of the diagnostic tool of UTIs to minimize false results that may subject patients to wrong treatments. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of bacteriuria, associated factors, and AMR pattern of UTI-suspected patients. A cross-sectional study was conducted from March to May 2022, at Arsho Advanced Medical Laboratory (AAML), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Species identification and isolation from bacterial colonies were characterized by gram stain and biochemical properties followed by antibiotic susceptibility testing using the Kirby-Bauer method on Muller-Hinton agar. Logistic regression analysis was carried out to determine the association between the independent variables and significant bacterial growth to identify factors that affect the prevalence of UTI. A test is considered statistically significant that has a P value less than 0.05. Out of 141 (31.6%) which yielded significant bacteriuria, 16 different species of bacterial uropathogens were identified. A total of 105/446 (91 Gram-negative and 14 Gram-positive) of bacterial growth in the female gender and 36/446 (33 Gram-negative and 3 Gram positive) in male were observed with a P value of 0.03. The most predominant bacteria were E. coli followed by Klebsiella pneumoniae. Amoxicillin had shown the highest resistance rate (100%) followed by Ampicillin (98.9%). Females and participants with previous infections were shown to be associated with significant bacterial growth. Based on our study finding, the ordinarily used antibiotics seem to face emerging resistant strains, which needs considerable and due attention to the impact of UTI in developing countries including Ethiopia. History of previous UTIs and female gender were shown to be possible risk factors associated with UTIs.

Embodied Histories of Gender and Generation in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

‘Embodied Histories of Gender and Generation in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland’ by Dr Shonagh Hill examines a practice-as-research project that offered participants the opportunity to explore their experiences of gender and generation through a somatic movement workshop. Hill developed the workshop with Nicola Curry, the artistic director of Maiden Voyage Dance NI. Restrictive gender norms and violent conflict in Northern Ireland have cultivated a climate of repression that has impeded corporeal movement and expression in myriad ways. The practice-as-research was underpinned by the fundamental assertion of the value of embodied knowledge as a refusal of the silence and shame imposed on feminized bodies and as a means of engaging with the complexity of identity and lived experience. The workshop had two objectives: firstly, to examine the embodied experiences of different generations of ‘those who travel under the sign women’ (Ahmed 2017: 14), and, secondly, to address their relationship to feminism. The workshop’s attention to generational experience is set against a backdrop of sustained media focus on generational tensions articulated through a conflictual binary. Moreover, within the context of Northern Ireland, conflictual binaries serve to divert and stall progressive forces for change, and perpetuate ongoing crisis and collapse. The workshop findings highlight the need for intergenerational and intersectional models that might generate more complex ways of telling feminist histories of Northern Ireland, as well as a broader understanding of the invasive forces that shape embodied histories and of their legacy.

‘The Falange Changed Our Way of Being Completely’: Women and Gender Identity in Spanish Fascism

Women's and gender history has broadened our knowledge of the Franco dictatorship by incorporating new perspectives and categories of analysis. The Women's Section of the Falange, a topic that has attracted progressively greater attention since the 1990s, has been analyzed mainly as a mechanism of female subordination and as a differentiated sphere for women's agency. This dual approach follows to a great extent the ground rules established in ongoing debates on other European experiences of fascism. This article intends to offer ways of surmounting some dichotomies (e.g., subordinated/emancipated, victims/perpetrators) that have underpinned the analysis of women during the dictatorship. Accordingly, an attempt will be made to explore how the Falangists constructed a collective subjectivity from their own notions of their political culture – Spanish fascism – and a specific war experience that had shaped them as subjects. And, from this perspective, the article offers an understanding of their agency in a context in which the ‘victory’ of the military uprising had led to a process of reconstructing political and social power.

Women and the Labour Party: Gender and the Writing of British Political History

AbstractThis article takes stock of the state of women's political history in the twentieth century and suggests new lines of enquiry, drawing on the authors’ own work on the Labour Party. It identifies a number of key themes which have enriched histories of women and gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and considers how these might be developed. Firstly, it examines the significance of the local, and more particularly, the neighbourhood, in women's political lives. Secondly, it asserts the value of focussing on the membership, including the economic, social and cultural shifts that shaped their lives, the intersection of gender with factors such as age or ethnicity, and their own political identities. Finally, it stresses the importance of interrogating masculine cultures to understand how gendered dynamics played out. It concludes with a reminder that inserting women into established political narratives is insufficient: the point is to transform those narratives.

Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the American West by Sheila McManus

Reviewed by: Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the American West by Sheila McManus David C. Beyreis Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the American West. By Sheila McManus. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. 204. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Borderlands are complicated. Rather than places where a country's power to regulate commerce and dictate national loyalties are ascendant, these territories are often sites of political contestation, economic integration, and grass-roots identity formation. Sheila McManus calls on historians to develop a more nuanced comparative framework for borderlands studies. Part of this task involves rectifying an imbalance in historiography prioritizing the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Another element of the author's call to action is to search for patterns and dissimilarities in the processes of borderlands formation—what is true for the southern border is not necessarily true for the northern border and vice versa. In laying out a clear set of themes for investigation, pointing out analytical shortcomings, and providing commentary on underdeveloped topics, the author has produced an extraordinarily useful primer for students of borderlands history. To bring clarity to this complex topic, McManus identifies five themes that unite borderlands literature. First, she addresses borderlands as Indigenous spaces, particularly as sites of Native political dominance, trade, and diplomacy. McManus stresses the role of women as laborers and kinfolk and calls for increased attention to their roles as diplomats and peacemakers. Second, borderlands are places where nation-states attempt to create static identities for their citizens. Although governments often view borders as places where national identities are clear and unchanging, the reality is far more complex. The author points out that borderlanders themselves often make choices about loyalty and identity at a grassroots level, in decisions that challenge national, exclusivist binaries. Third, borderlands are often violent places where national law enforcement agencies and military forces attempt to "secure" the region by restricting and regulating the movement of people and goods. Fourth, the author contends that borderlands are capitalist landscapes whose function is often at odds with the nation-states' attempts to make borders hard dividing lines. [End Page 584] Mining, ranching, manufacturing, and farming have traditionally relied on the easy cross-border movement of capital and labor. In this sense, capitalism works at cross purposes with the forces seeking to stabilize borderland regions. Finally, borderlands are places where people engage in grassroots processes of identify formation, like blending, choosing, and becoming, that often challenge state directives and aspirations. McManus also points out notable gaps and disparities in borderlands literature. The author laments a historiographical imbalance between the massive list of works on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the much smaller body of literature on the U.S.–Canada borderlands. The robust literature of the Texas–Mexico borderlands contributes to this disparity. That said, works on Texas by historians like Juliana Barr, George T. Díaz, Monica Perales, Raúl A. Ramos, and Andrés Reséndez provide model studies of the region. Another gap McManus identifies is a relative paucity of gender history. Women are often overlooked and under analyzed. Curiously, the author largely overlooks environmental history as another avenue of comparative analysis. Sheila McManus has done a marvelous job pulling together, analyzing, and comparing a vast range of secondary borderlands material. Her clarity in identifying historiographical themes brings order from chaos. Her call to action, for more work on gender and the U.S.–Canada borderlands, could stimulate work in these fields and bring more regional parity. Both Sides Now should be required reading in graduate seminars and will undoubtedly become a standard reference work in North American borderlands studies. This book is a superb introduction to an endlessly fascinating, complex, and important topic. David C. Beyreis Saint Mary's School (Raleigh, North Carolina) Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Sirens, Narrative Ethics, and Christina Rosenvinge's ‘Mi vida bajo el agua’

This article examines the historical representation of the Siren myth and how it is employed by Spanish musician Christina Rosenvinge in her song ‘Mi vida bajo el agua’ (2011) (‘My life under water’) and its music video. Rosenvinge criticizes various moral beliefs attached to the myth, and this article's focus is specifically on these beliefs, which are analysed using a narrative ethics approach. This field aims to understand how narratives take shape and are repeated in different forms, thus enabling us to transform our understanding of the previous comprehension of the narrative. The methodological frame of narrative ethics is connected to feminist theories and the field of gender history in this article, which provides an opportunity to examine the changing meanings and beliefs around the Siren myth over time in an ethically significant way. This case study intends to illustrate the value of applying narrative ethics to research in cultural history since it helps us to understand how the narrative can articulate power relations and at the same time shape our understanding of the possible.

Resisting Models, Building Bridges: The Present and Future of Gender History in Spain

Resisting Models, Building Bridges: The Present and Future of Gender History in Spain

Zhenshchiny i religioznaya aktivnost' na Severnom Kavkaze (v kontekste istorii razvitiya problemy radikalizma)

The analysis of the issue of women's religious activity in Russia, through the study of gender history, individual practices, documents, normative legal acts, allowed us to identify its important directions and forms. The article presents a retrospective analysis of women's participation in religion, shows the features and ways of optimizing women's participation in religious and public life.

Writing to Undo

Abstract This study investigates protestations as a unique lens into the workings of coercion and resistance in the early modern period. Protestation was a wide-ranging genre of document, written to counter the consequences of coercive forces in myriad forms: familial, economic, religious, and political; on the levels of micro and macro; and across social and geographical space. This remarkable scope has paradoxically proven an obstacle to realizing the historiographical potential of the phenomenon, which remains largely uncharted and familiar only to a few specialists separated by sub-disciplinary divides. This article thus offers a unifying conceptual, analytic, and methodological framework. It interrogates protestations as material objects as well as verbal texts; follows them throughout their lifecycle; and explores their spectra of producers, protagonists, and functions. A variety of case studies from the ancien régime illustrate the significance of the phenomenon on both the micro and macro levels, whether in the struggles of young people against the abuses of patriarchal and familial authority or in the subversive use of protestations in the constitutional crises of absolute monarchy. Protestation is thus shown to be of wide interest to a broad swath of scholars, including historians of gender, family, working-people, elites, high politics, law, and writing.

Martha S. Jones. Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

Martha Jones’s Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All is an extremely important work. This political history of Black women from the late eighteenth century to the present is sweepingly ambitious and makes arguments both bold and subtle. It is based on a wealth of published and unpublished sources and reveals Jones’s deep knowledge of the nineteenth-century archival terrain and years spent thinking about the history of Black women’s public culture. Vanguard should immediately make gender historians rethink and revise their syllabi. Published to coincide with the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, Jones’ book goes well beyond familiar insights into the racism of mostly white organizations for women’s suffrage. The book offers invaluable details on the limitations of the Nineteenth Amendment and on what Black women did in response to its passage. Vanguard also reframes the subject to treat the fight to vote as only one of Black women’s political campaigns—and by extension, exercising the franchise as only one avenue to exercising power. Jones explores women’s politics within the Black church and the “colored” convention movement as much as she does the more familiar sites such as the abolitionist movement and the early women’s movement. She writes about the Black women’s club movement of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries as incubators of political ideas and strategies at times when first all, and then (after 1920) most Black women could not vote.

Barrymore's Gun: Gender and Genre Potential in The Blood Red Knight (1810)

This article closely examines William Barrymore's equestrian melodrama The Blood Red Knight; or, The Fatal Bridge (1810). While the play uses a vague medievalist setting, such associative conventions to the medieval romance are upended when the play's heroine shoots and kills the villain during the knight's mounted battle. While contemporary reviewers and theatre historians today have been largely fascinated by the use of live horses on stage, the gunshot makes The Blood Red Knight an outlier worthy of further study. I argue that the firing of Barrymore's gun creates a moment of disruptive potentiality where melodrama's complex and ambivalent politics are negotiated before the audience witnessing the play's concluding spectacle. In this largely overlooked moment, histories of gender and violence as well as romantic convention are disrupted, demonstrating the radical potential available to melodrama during its early stages of development.

HUBUNGAN INDEKS MASSA TUBUH DAN JENIS KELAMIN DENGAN DERAJAT KEPARAHAN CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME DI RSUD KOTA MATARAM

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) is a common disorder with symptoms involving the median nerve. The risk factors for the occurrence of CTS are grouped into individual and physical factors related to work. Individual factors consisted of a history of diabetes mellitus, hypothyroidism, obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, age and gender. In addition, there are work-related physical factors, namely work with repetitive hand movements, gripping or clamping work with force, abnormal postures on the wrist for a long time. Purpose to determine the relationship between BMI and gender with the degree of severity of CTS in Mataram City Hospital. Observational analytic quantitative research with a cross-sectional study design. The sampling technique used a random sampling technique of 34 samples. The research was conducted at the Mataram City Hospital, from November to December 2022. The data obtained was analyzed using the spermaman rank test. Results of the 34 study samples, there were 8 people (23.5%) with BMI &lt; 24.9 kg/m2 and, 26 people (76.5%) with BMI ≥ 25 kg/m2. A total of 13 men (38.2%) and 21 women (61.8%) suffered from CTS. The value of p = 0.001 (p &lt;0.05) with a correlation value of 0.528 for the relationship between BMI and the severity of CTS, and p = 0.001 (p &lt;0.05) with a correlation value of 0.531 for the relationship between gender and the severity of CTS . There is a significant relationship between BMI and gender with the degree of severity of CTS in Mataram City Hospital.

Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines by Gregory A. Daddis

<i>Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines</i> by Gregory A. Daddis

Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe by Ruth Balint

<i>Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe</i> by Ruth Balint

The Politics of the Everyday in Occupied Europe

The Politics of the Everyday in Occupied Europe Mary Louise Roberts (bio) Maren Röger. Wartime Relations: Intimacy, Violence, and Prostitution in Occupied Poland, 1939–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. ISBN 9780198817222 (cl.); 9780191858758 (ebook). Raffael Scheck. Love between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 398 pp. ISBN 9781108841757 (cl.); 9781108894821 (ebook). Paula Schwartz. Today Sardines Are Not for Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN 9780190681548 (cl.). For historians of gender, traditional military history is arguably the last frontier. Battle narratives peopled with generals and soldiers by definition exclude women. Grand strategy has little to do with the cultural construction of gender. More recently, however, help has arrived in the form of a “new” military history, often called the study of “war and society.” This approach looks beyond the battlefield to understand war within the societies it impacts and generates.1 Central to the successful execution of the “war and society” method is a rethinking of power and politics. Gender historians, well-versed in Foucault, have long assumed a notion of power as inhering in personal relations, particularly sexual relations. While more traditional historians privilege power exercised in military, juridical, or political institutions, women’s historians have attended to the politics of the workplace, the marketplace, the altar, and the bedroom. The “history of the everyday” or Alltagsgeschichte has provided still another analytic framework for the study of gender and war. In her recent history of German and Austrian societies under Nazi dictatorship, Elissa Mailänder characterized Alltagsgeschichte as “giving great importance to quotidian forces and proximate relations of power which all too often lay in obscurity.”2 This terrain of the “everyday” is where the historians Maren Röger, Raffael Scheck, and Paula Schwartz stake their claim. They focus on sexual relations and small acts of resistance under the Third Reich. Their books reveal both the startling possibilities and the enormous challenges these “everyday” histories present. German historians Röger and Scheck focus on transgressive heterosexual relations prohibited by the Nazi state. In Wartime Relations: Intimacy, Violence, and Prostitution in Occupied Poland, 1939–1945, Röger explores a range of intimacies between German soldiers and Polish women, from rape and prostitution to consensual relations. In 1939, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler signed a decree forbidding any kind of sexual intercourse [End Page 150] between Wehrmacht soldiers and Polish civilians. Underwriting this prohibition was the Nazi belief that Poles and other “eastern” people were untermensch, that is, racially inferior to Aryan Germans. The ban, however, contradicted another Nazi belief: that “a virile, soldierly masculinity” depended on regular sexual satisfaction (23). These conflicting aims provided a path for Röger to find the light between policy and practice. Scheck follows a similar agenda in Love Between Enemies: Western Prisoners of War and German Women in World War II. “Frenemies” is what we might call his subject matter: French, Belgian, and British prisoners of war who pursued romantic or sexual relations with German women.3 Again, such contact was prohibited not only by the German military but, in the case of the prisoners of war (POWs), by the Allied armies. According to Scheck, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 POWs were court-martialed for pursuing relations with local women during their captivity. Most of these women were working-class laborers or farmers. If arrested and convicted, they were publicly shamed and sent to prison. French prisoners lived up to their reputation as the Don Juans of Europe, making up eighty percent of these court martial cases. Both Röger and Scheck show enormous invention in ferreting out new kinds of sources for these histories. “More than once, when presenting this project, I was confronted by the question of feasibility,” admits Röger. She refers (without names or citations) to the “many historians” who believed there would be no archival material due to the fact that German soldiers rarely disobeyed the rules (16). Because Polish women who were raped or who served as prostitutes did not want their stories known, Röger could not rely on memoirs or...

Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration by Bronagh Ann McShane (review)

Reviewed by: Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration by Bronagh Ann McShane James E. Kelly Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration. By Bronagh Ann McShane. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2022. Pp. xv, 324. $115.00. ISBN: 9781783277308.) Long considered nearly impossible due to the disparate nature of the sources, Bronagh Ann McShane has produced the first overarching study of Irish women associated with religious orders in the early modern period. Gathering evidence from mentions scattered throughout a range of materials, McShane successfully traces various forms of Irish female religious commitment from the dissolution of religious houses in the 1530s and 1540s to the end of the seventeenth century, including both those at home and in mainland Europe. Her opening two chapters consider the suppression and survival of female religious life during the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries. McShane judges the reformation in Ireland to have been far less systematic than that in England, though, unlike their male equivalents, it did manage to crush institutional expressions of female religious life. Having to rely on some conjecture to draw conclusions about what happened to the women after their convents were dissolved, McShane uncovers evidence of different types of religious life being adopted, including as tertiaries affiliated to male mendicant orders, and the short-lived but pioneering Catholic Reformation experiment that was the Mná Bochta (Poor Women), who worked alongside the small Jesuit mission in an active apostolate. Fairly heavy on detailed financial records and Irish family history, these two chapters are followed by a shift in focus to look at migration, and those women who went abroad to pursue their vocations. Really hitting her stride, McShane tracks several Irish women who made the journey to mainland Europe. Some entered local convents, though a number headed to English houses established in exile, especially the Poor Clares at Gravelines. Nevertheless, a Dominican convent was [End Page 405] founded for the Irish nation at Lisbon. Intriguingly, it seems to have been markedly different from the exile English convents; both enjoyed local support, though the Irish Dominican convent appears to have been wealthier than the majority of English ones, and was a popular destination for Portuguese nun recruits as much as it was for Irish women. The final section examines the return of professed female religious life to Ireland. The slightly more tolerant 1630s witnessed a cautious return, which flourished under the Catholic confederacy of the 1640s before being crushed during the Cromwellian wars. Following the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, McShane outlines attempts at again fostering female religious life in the country that reached greater heights under the Catholic toleration that followed the accession of James II. However, the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite wars halted official advancement, McShane judging, though, that it was nowhere near as traumatic as the Cromwellian period, and female religious life continued in Ireland into the eighteenth century. Tracing down these stories across a variety of sources is an impressive achievement that should not be underestimated. At times, the book's shifting focus affects its wider definitive positioning, whether to go all out for Irish national history, the history of the Catholic Reformation, or gender history. There is also a question at the book's heart: as McShane acknowledges, the formation of Irish women religious in exile English convents was "pivotal" (p. 249); yet the question of why there was not an equivalent exile movement for Irish women religious is not answered. With far greater numbers of Catholic women in Ireland, why was it that the English conventual movement was so much bigger? That this book raises such a question is testament to McShane's convincing achievement. Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700, fills an obvious gap in the scholarship and, proving that it can be done, should encourage others to work on early modern Irish women religious. James E. Kelly Durham University James E. Kelly Durham University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press

Remains to Be Seen

AbstractThis article unspools the history of nylon as a commodity between two Black feminist cultural expressions, Senga Nengudi's R.S.V.P. series and Audre Lorde's Zami. The first popular petroleum-derived synthetic fiber, nylon was a crucial material in building what Dwight D. Eisenhower was to dub the “military-industrial complex.” Through readings of R.S.V.P. and Zami, the article traces the racial and gendered history of nylon as both a fashion commodity and a military resource. These readings demonstrate Black feminism's central relevance to US military imperialism, particularly in Asia and the Pacific, as well as imperialism's impacts on Black femininity during the Cold War. This article argues that Black feminist aesthetics, such as those Nengudi and Lorde employ, restores the context of commodities like nylons, revealing the centrality of Black women's productive and reproductive labor to US empire. Most important, as R.S.V.P. and Zami restore context, they also generate a system of value in opposition to racial capitalism that does not depend on violence against Black women.