Good Wife Research Articles

Gender and the Public Sphere in Modernizing East Asia

Gender and the Public Sphere in Modernizing East Asia Ellen Widmer Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press by Joan Judge. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 348. $70.00 cloth, $70.00 e-book. Women Pre-scripted: Forging Modern Roles through Korean Print by Ji-Eun Lee. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 182. $49.00. Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan by Kerry Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. xv + 234. $85.00 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book. As one learns from both monographs and general histories, the encounter between East Asia and the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prompted numerous conversations about self-strengthening in China, Japan, and Korea. One area of concern was the position of women. The Confucian idea that men took responsibility for affairs outside the home, whereas women focused on internal matters could be justified in traditional culture,1 but it did not work as well in an industrializing and modernizing world. When it meant that [End Page 447] women were quite ignorant of their surroundings, it aroused concerns that the enforced ignorance of past generations might have weakened East Asia on the world stage. Moving into a leadership position, Japan was the first among the three countries to articulate a need for change. Entrenched ideas on gender did not vanish altogether in the face of rhetorical pressure, and few Japanese leaders proposed making women into full-fledged citizens. Nevertheless, the exigencies of the era set men wondering how to bring women into the public sphere. The formula “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo 良妻賢母; also rendered as “good mothers, wise wives,” ryōbo kensai 良母賢妻) was promulgated in the Meiji Civil Code of 1898.2 The advantage of this formulation was that it allowed women some basic education while preserving the idea that their true place was in the home. Significant differences among the three countries meant that their trajectories were not identical, yet there is plenty of evidence of a common core. A series of books and articles from the past fifteen years or so has laid down the parameters as far as Japan’s role in the project is concerned. From the work of scholars like Barbara Sato, Barbara Molony, Kathleen Uno, and Sarah Frederick a fairly clear picture has emerged.3 Political crises like the first Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I mark stages of a distinct progression. During these emergencies, women were needed to help weather national crises, and they took part in public activities.4 More and more took advantage of public education, but women’s magazines were also thought to complement schools in informing women about the world. These magazines were of various types. Some emphasized virtues [End Page 448] like self-cultivation, alongside their informational and commercial outreach. Magazine-based instruction could be promoted as an enhancement to women’s schooling, in that it did not require women to leave home. Thus it allowed the good wife–wise mother to remain in her residence even while she interacted as reader with the world outside. Intellectual women (known in Japan and elsewhere as bluestockings) might decry these magazines as conservative, for they did nothing to challenge old ideas about male superiority, but for women of more modest backgrounds they could still be deemed progressive in two important ways. The first was the feeling of choice that they promoted. Whereas the good wife–wise mother concept had been handed down from on high, magazines gave the reader pride and a sense of agency over how she ran the home. In this way, she might come to see her home as part of a wider public sphere. The second great advantage was the feeling of community to which these magazines gave rise. Especially due to readers’ columns and other interactive features, women could look upon their fellow readers as a kind of focus group and on the magazines themselves as friends and hence as antidotes to the isolation of earlier days. Another important development was the emergence of...

‘My baby and this mom body’: examining post-partum bodywork through stroller fitness

This article, based on ethnographic research, discusses the ways in which women exercise their class privilege in order to facilitate their membership in a postpartum stroller fitness class so as to be fit for their new maternal role. Privilege is linked to capital, a powerful social construct and an important resource which governs lifestyle practices and endows individuals with distinction in particular cultural fields. Feminist theory has explored the concept of capital and its relationship to women’s cultural practices and experiences. Utilising these theoretical frames, this analysis situates fitness and body image at the intersection of social class and gender, and suggests that stroller fitness classes allow postpartum women to acquire, demonstrate, convert, and reproduce particular forms of gendered capital. Specifically, this article details the nuanced mechanisms through which participants develop and deploy social and physical capitals in order to construct their new ‘mom body’ which operates as a visible illustration of social class privilege and the aptitude and ability to be a good wife and mother.

Whither the good wife? 2016 presidential candidate spouses in the gendered spaces of contemporary politics

ABSTRACTThe rhetorical maneuvers of Heidi Cruz, Jane Sanders, Columba Bush, Melania Trump, and Bill Clinton in the preprimary phase of the 2016 race serve as entry points for a critical inquiry into the current cultural state of “the good wife” and the rhetorical implications of this role. The presences and absences of these four female spouses in the initial phases of their husbands’ campaigns reveal the power of the cultural scripts that functionally silence aberrant wives, while the case of Bill Clinton exposes the masculinist ideology that defines the proper role for this prospective “first gentleman” and the corresponding rhetorical traps that constrain Hillary Clinton. This essay demonstrates how the hegemonic values, ideals, and myths that define “the good wife” intersect with rhetorics of nativism, classism, and sexuality to constitute powerful boundaries governing speech and silence.

“I May Need You, Peter, but You Sure as Hell Need Me Too”

Observing that contemporary marriages now represent transactional efforts that benefit wives as much as their spouses, this article considers The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick alongside a list of real-life women, most notably Hillary Clinton, whose examples have helped to trouble and complicate the image of the betrayed wife. While marriage continues to register as a necessary complement to any political run, this fact is increasingly regarded with skepticism and a self-conscious admission that the performance of a happy union is often merely a tactical move, a reality that is well-evidenced in The Good Wife and the ABC drama Scandal. A meditation on Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, a real-life political couple who seem to be baldly borrowing from (or perhaps inspiring) these televised marriages, closes the piece and is used to suggest that political marriages may serve as professional boons.

The Fashion of Florrick and FLOTUS

In this article, I explore The Good Wife’s particular uses of costuming and wardrobe and the consequent linkages to politics, feminism, and the discourse of “quality” television the show mediates. I argue that CBS borrows language from feminism to rehabilitate network broadcasting’s reputation as a dying medium in the wake of premium cable, time shifting, and cord-cutting. In the service of this strategy, I investigate how CBS dusts off an old tactic from The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, using fashion to target a “quality” professional female audience and self-referentiality to resignify broadcast television as an activity for progressive, educated, and diverse women. Ultimately, I argue that The Good Wife uses costuming with female characters to self-legitimate and brand itself as “quality” television.

Broadcasting Quality

This special issue is devoted to The Good Wife ( TGW) and unpacking the discursive divide between “quality” niche programming and mass entertainment broadcast programming. These essays question the conversations about quality swirling around a show that carries all the markers of prestige, but that also features the female protagonist, broadcast home, procedural roots, and soapiness often denigrated or overlooked by critics and academics alike. In response to the inherently gendered notions of quality, these essays re-center feminine subjects and interrogate masculinizing discourses through an array of approaches to a single series, analyzing TGW via the lenses of habitual mobile technologies, fashion, fantasy, and the labor of wifedom and motherhood. Analyzing this particular series through discourses of quality is not only a way to acknowledge a broadcast series within pre-existing standards of excellence but also a way to begin to reclaim television studies’ feminist roots from often hyper-masculine discussions of twenty-first-century quality TV.

To Trust in Strange Habits and Last Calls

This article examines the impact of mobile smartphone culture on TV narrative through an examination of the network series The Good Wife ( TGW; CBS, 2009–2016). Ubiquitous smartphone use proffers a managerial relationship between subject and device, such that smartphone culture becomes necessary for navigating between different spheres of life. Furthermore, as smartphones occupy a greater role in public life, they have also begun to shape the creation of story in media narratives. I argue that smartphones have become a tool of narrative management for network drama not unlike the ways in which they govern everyday life. TGW’s narrative form and genre—a unique negotiation between episodic procedural and serial melodrama—successfully mirror the management of routine informational and emotional flows, structuring narrative and spectatorial habits while also accommodating for technology’s glitches.

The Cruel Optimism ofThe Good Wife

This article juxtaposes The Good Wife’s ( TGW) representation of Alicia Florrick’s experience as a professional woman and a mother, against interview accounts of middle-class women who left successful careers after having children. I show that TGW furnishes a compelling fantasy based on (1) the valorization of combining motherhood with competitive, long-hours high-powered waged work as the basis for a woman’s value and liberation, and (2) an emphasis on women’s professional performance and satisfaction as depending largely on their individual self-confidence and ability to “lean in,” while marginalizing the impact of structural issues on women’s success and workplace equality. This fantasy fails to correspond to women’s lived experience, but shapes their sense of self in painful ways. The TGW fantasy thus involves a relation of “cruel optimism”: it attracts women to desire it while impeding them from tackling the structural issues that are obstructing realization of their desire.

"Coniugalia praecepta" Plutarcha o życiu żon

The good wife, as Plutrach taught, ought to have no feeling of her own, but she should join with her husband in seriousness and sportiveness, in soberness and laughter. The husband has to be pure and clean from all connexion with others when he approach his wife and her virtue, her exclusive devotion to her husband, her constancy, and her affection, ought to be most in evidence. The man ought to exercise control over the woman, not as the owner has control over a piece of property, but, as the soul colonists the body, by entering into her feelings and being knit to her through goodwill. He is teacher of philosophy, she is his disciple: for his wife husband must collect from every source what is useful and carrying it within his own self impart it to her, and then discusses it with her, and makes the best of these doctrines her favourite and familiar themes.

Sex, ‘Race,’ and Betrayal: Kalinda Sharma and Bisexual Feminist Politics

ABSTRACTThe bisexual woman is a key site of contestation in theorizing a feminist sexual politics. Paradoxically, she can be situated as either a source of liberation or a source of oppression. Acknowledging this ambiguity, the author examines to what extent female bisexuality can theorize a liberatory feminist sexual politics from three angles: pleasure and desire, queer alliance building, and ‘race.’ Challenging bisexual stereotypes, the author shows how bisexual women are framed within a phallocentric lesbian feminist consciousness and considers how the racialization of bisexuality complicates its radical potential. The author considers the threatening nature of bisexual women through Hemmings’ theory of the bisexual ‘double agent’ and the character of Kalinda Sharma from the CBS television series The Good Wife. The author uses these productive limitations of bisexuality to imagine a liberatory feminist sexual politics, exploring to what extent the unbiased nature of bisexual desire defies misogyny and heteronormative logic.

Felipa de Lancáster, la dama inglesa que fue modelo de <em>reginalidad</em> en Portugal (1387-1415)

Until a few decades ago, the historians’ interest in the evaluation of the power exercised by the queens, as wives or mothers of the kings who were in charge of the governance of the kingdom, was almost non-existent. However, there are enough data to prove that in Portugal, in the Middle Ages, some queens exerted political and diplomatic functions, participated with their husbands in the administration of the assets of the crown, in addition to fulfilling the obvious obligations of being good wives and mothers. Philippa of Lancaster’s –wife of John I of Portugal– queenship is well documented.

“This Should be My Responsibility”: Gender, Guilt, Privilege and Paid Domestic Work

Although women’s presence in the labor force has shown a marked increase, much of the existing research on housework suggests that for heterosexual families men’s and women’s housework contributions remain unequal. Scholars of domestic labor suggest that this influx of privileged women into the labor force, coupled with growing income inequality has caused an increase in the demand for paid domestic labor. This re-delegation of domestic labor may in some ways represent a threat to privileged women’s self image as caring for family has been inextricably part of the ideological construction of what constitutes a good wife and mother. Research demonstrates that even as families hire someone for domestic/cleaning labor women feel “obligated” to retain control of its’ supervision. This is not necessarily challenging the existing gendered division of labor but rather displacing housework along raced and classed lines. Utilizing data from 30 qualitative interviews with white class privileged women who hire domestic workers; this paper explores the motivations for hiring domestic workers, the ways in which participants conceptualized this labor as gendered, and finally how they navigated the guilt that often times accompanied hiring domestic workers.

Mrs. Pat's Two Bodies: Ghosting and the Landmark Performance

In 1893, Mrs. Patrick (Stella) Campbell appeared as the title character in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray at the St James's Theatre in London. The play told of a respectable widower, Aubrey Tanqueray, and his doomed second marriage to Paula, a younger woman with a past. Good wives did not have “pasts,” and Paula's is particularly scandalous for she has, since adolescence, “kept house” with a series of men. Aware that their marriage is unlikely to be accepted by their peers, Paula and Aubrey retreat to the country, where they are joined by Aubrey's adult daughter, Ellean. Ellean subsequently becomes engaged to a young soldier, Hugh Ardale. The crisis of the play occurs when Paula and Ardale come face to face and the audience learns that the pair had once lived together in London. With this revelation, Paula becomes convinced that she cannot outrun her past, and the play closes with her suicide. Despite the conventionality of its ending, the play was considered modern and daring and is remembered as one of the first attempts to represent the “fallen woman” sympathetically and to question the sexual double standard that operated in Victorian society. Campbell's clarity of expression and relatively unmannered delivery enhanced Pinero's uncommonly sympathetic portrait of a former courtesan. However, it was the actress's physical presence that particularly captured the audience's imagination. Campbell was tall, pale, and thin to the point of angularity—a representative example of the fashionable “neurasthenic” woman of the 1890s. Pinero's characterization joined with Campbell's playing style and (most important) her physicality to create the entity I dub “Paula Tanqueray circa 1893.” This entity haunted Campbell's entire career, acting as a ghostly double to her living body both onstage and off. Campbell continued to play the role of Paula Tanqueray into the 1920s, yet as the actress's body matured and changed, that of the ghost retained its svelte 1893 proportions and youthful charm, creating a corporeal dissonance that disrupted audience reception.

Trabajo-familia: ¿de la autonomía a la culpa?

Resumen: Partiendo del hecho de la incorporaciónmasiva de la mujer al mercado laboral en las últimasdécadas en Colombia, la autora se pregunta por el costoen la vida de las mujeres de la doble jornada y de supapel simultáneamente público y privado. Desde ladoble necesidad de reconocer la función social de untrabajo digno y de disfrutar de la mínima socializaciónde la vida cotidiana, se reconoce el problema para lasmujeres de cómo conciliar exigencias profesionales ynecesidades de participación social, política y cultural,de autonomía, con la tradicional imagen de buenaesposa-madre nutricia. Esto ocurre en una sociedad queha cambiado pero no lo suficiente, pues no se les exige alos hombres un cambio correspondiente al de las mujeres.En vez de culpa, muchas mujeres viven en el malestar oel desencanto, aún cuando a veces no son conscientesde ello. Esto conduce a muchas a aplazar todo proyectoafectivo, o la maternidad, y es fuente de muchas rupturasde matrimonios y uniones. Se concluye con un llamado alas mujeres de las nuevas generaciones a asumir la luchade las mujeres, volviéndose vigilantes y veedoras de susderechos y exigentes hacia nuevos por conquistar.Palabras clave: mujeres, mercado laboral, cambiosociocultural, derechos de las mujeresAbstract: Recognizing the fact of women’s massiveincorporation to the labor market in Colombia in recentdecades, the author wonders about the cost for women’slives of the double shift and of their public and privateroles. She acknowledges the dual need of recognizingthe social function of work and of enjoying thesocialization of aspects of their everyday lives, but theproblem remains of how to reconcile professional, social,cultural and political participation with traditionalimages of good wives and nourishing mothers, in theframework of a society that has changed but not enough,since women are changing but men are not. Rather thanguilt, many women live in discontent and disappointment,often unconsciously. This leads many to postponeaffective projects or maternity, and causes brokenmarriages and unions. The essay concludes calling onyounger generations to take on women’s struggle,defending their rights vigilantly and demanding newconquests.Key words: women, labor market, social and culturalchange, women’s rights

Re-imagining the Noir Femme Fatale on the Renaissance Stage

[Introduction]: Traditionally, the femme fatale has been closely associated with a series of noir films (such as Double Indemnity [1944], The Maltese Falcon [1941], and The Big Heat [1953]) in the 1940s and 50s that necessarily betray male anxieties about independent women in the years during and following World War II. However, the anxieties and historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. In this context, to re-imagine is to imagine or conceive of something in a new way. It involves taking a concept or an idea and re-imagining it into something simultaneously similar and new. This article will argue, first, that the noir femme fatale’s emergence coincided with a period of history characterised by suspicion, intolerance and perceived vulnerability and that a similar set of historical factors—namely the presence of a female monarch and changes to marriage laws—precipitated the emergence a femme fatale type figure in the Renaissance period. Second, noir films typically contain a series of narrative tropes that can be similarly identified in a selection of Renaissance plays, which enables the production of a new, re-imagined reading of these plays as tragedies of the feminine desire for autonomy. The femme fatale, according to Rebecca Stott, is not unique to the twentieth century. The femme fatale label can be applied retrospectively to seductive, if noticeably evil women, whose seduction and destruction of men render them amenable to our twenty-first century understanding of the femme fatale (Allen). Mario Praz similarly contends that the femme fatale has always existed; she simply becomes more prolific in times of social and cultural upheaval. The definition of the femme fatale, however, has only recently been added to the dictionary and the burden of all definitions is the same: the femme fatale is a woman who lures men into danger, destruction and even death by means of her overpowering seductive charms. There is a woman on the Renaissance stage who combines adultery, murder, and insubordination and this figure embodies the same characteristics as the twentieth-century femme fatale because she is similarly drawn from an archetypal pattern of male anxieties regarding sexually appetitive/desirous women. The fear that this selection of women elicit arises invariably from their initial defiance of their fathers and/or brothers in marrying without their consent and/or the possibility that these women may marry or seek a union with a man out of sexual lust. The femme fatale of 1940s and 50s noir films is embodied by such women as Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Maltese Falcon), Phyllis Dietrichson (Double Indemnity), and Ann Grayle (Murder, My Sweet), while the figure of the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, including The Changeling (1622), Arden of Faversham (1592), and The Maid’s Tragedy (1619). Like the noir femme fatale, there is a female protagonist in each of these plays who uses both cunning and sexual attractiveness to gain her desired independence. By focusing on one noir film and one Renaissance play, this article will explore both the historical factors that precipitate the emergence of these fatal women and the structural tropes that are common to both Double Indemnity and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. The obvious parallels between the two figures at the centre of these narratives—Phyllis and Beatrice-Joanna respectively—namely an aversion to the institution of marriage and the instigation of murder to attain one’s desires, enable a re-imagined reading of Beatrice-Joanna as a femme fatale.

Female Professionals and (Neo-)Victorianism: The Case of The Good Wife

The article examines The Good Wife (CBS 2009–), as well as other recent television series with female professionals as protagonists, alongside nineteenth-century novels such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Law and the Lady, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, or Bram Stoker's Dracula, which, like The Good Wife, place ‘the law’ and ‘the lady’ in direct confrontation. This comparative analysis reveals that current television series, even those that showcase women's professional success, articulate a discourse that valorises domestic stability and motherhood above professional achievements and, therefore, resonate with Victorian ideologies about the conflicted relation between women and the public sphere. Contemporary television series are not so different from Victorian texts that grant their heroines freedom to move outside home-boundaries, while treating women's public ascendancy as a transgression of normative femininity and using a number of strategies devised to guarantee women's return home and/or an appreciation of what they have to sacrifice in order to advance in their careers.

Going with the flow and yet controlling the Flow: the Early Life, Education, and Scholarship of Takatsukasa Seigyoku, Current Abbess of Zenkōji’s Daihongan Convent

Takatsukasa Seigyoku (b. 1929) is the current abbess of Daihongan convent, which is one of the two administrative heads of the popular Japanese pilgrimage temple Zenkōji. In this paper, I analyze Takatsukasa’s autobiographical materials about her early life, her monastic education, and her scholarly works. Her early life, here defined as the time from her birth until 1979, demonstrates the ways in which she asserted or relaxed control over her life at various times, following her motto “going with the flow and yet controlling the flow.” Her education at the Pure Land Nuns’ Sectarian School brings to light the ways that women come to embody being a nun. Her scholarship demonstrates the ways that biographical narratives can function to create ideals within the monastic community, while at the same time, they place Takatsukasa’s convent and the tradition she is a part of within the larger (mostly male) historic record. I also analyze media accounts about her ordination in 1955. From these accounts we can determine that Japanese society’s views about nuns (and laywomen, as well) in mid-century combined elements of medieval understandings of taking the tonsure as a sad event with twentieth-century discourses that defined women’s roles to be “good wives and wise mothers.” Additionally, we can see how Takatsukasa has reclaimed the narrative of her life through writing autobiographical materials, effectively challenging the interpretations of her life produced in newspapers and magazines.

ALEX’S PERCEPTIONS OF HER ROLES IN IKA NATASSA’S DIVORTIARE TRILOGY

Ika Natassa’s Divortiare trilogy is Metropop genre novels which tell about Alex’s life as a single woman and housewife. Thus, I want to focus on Alex’s way of prioritizing her career as single woman or divorcee and Alex strategies for being a good wife in Ika Natassa’s Divortiare trilogy. I am going to analyze Alex’s life with women’s roles theory related to patriarchal ideology in Indonesia. The first part of analysis discusses Alex’s way to prioritize her career and her reason. The second part explains her strategies for being a good wife in her second marriage. Also, I find that Alex does her work so hard in order to prove that she can survive on her own. I also find that she embraces the traditional feminine roles in order to get a happy marriage. Therefore, she enjoys her life as a married woman rather than a successful single woman.

The Woman of Substance and Human Flourishing: Proverbs 31:10–31 and Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach

In this article, Claassens employs Martha Nussbaum’s understanding of human flourishing as a hermeneutical framework for interpreting the portrayal of the “Woman of Substance” in Proverbs 31, the ʾ ēset ḥayil that alternatively has been translated as the “good wife,” “virtuous woman,” “capable wife,” “noble woman,” or most literally, “woman of strength.” The author proposes that Nussbaum’s understanding of human flourishing as evident in her capabilities approach may reveal some interesting perspectives regarding the way women are portrayed in the biblical text in the creative space opened up when text and contemporary context are brought together. Moreover, by reading the text in terms of Nussbaum’s thoughts of human flourishing, we will also be reading life, contemplating the significance of the intersection of gender and human flourishing for women in communities everywhere who are struggling to survive.

“A Good Wife Brings Her Husband Bath Water”: Gender Roles and Water Practices in Nampula, Mozambique

ABSTRACTIn the Global South, gender roles and relations are closely connected to water collection and use. The aim of this article is to move beyond the simple development associations linking improved water access with women’s empowerment by showing how gender roles, marital relations, and the division of labor are connected to everyday water practices. Ethnographic research took place in five communities in Nampula, Mozambique, during a year when residents endured seasonal dry months and later received a water supply project. This research explores how gender roles and relations are impacted by changes in community water resources, and how these impacts are understood from local perspectives. In rural Mozambique, water collection and use are not only gendered activities, but also practices that shape marital relations and cultural notions of a good wife and mother.