Good Wife Research Articles

Imagined Hillarys: Feminism, Fantasy, and Fictional Clintons inThe Good WifeandThe Good Fight

In the 2010s, Hillary Clinton emerged as a central character not only in American political life but also in its imagined political scenarios. This article considers the centrality of Clinton as a model for women's legal and political empowerment in CBS dramaThe Good Wife(2009–16), arguing that the show's generic blend of the television procedural with melodrama and soap is key to both its normative portrayal of women in the corporate workplace and its positioning of Clinton as an aspirational figure for white liberal feminists. A similar tension is also central to Clinton's bid for the presidency in 2016, and this article dissects the ways in which Clinton's anticipated victory has provided a powerful but ultimately misleading “feminist” fantasy for many television shows of the last decade. A final section concludes this article with a brief analysis ofThe Good Wife's 2017 spin-offThe Good Fight, to argue that this show pivots from a fantasy of women's empowerment to a much more interesting dystopic picture, tapping into the surrealism of the present moment to convey the difficulty of women's aspiration under a Trump administration in ways that more directly, if still imperfectly, tackle the failings of liberal feminism to account for racial and economic difference.

Cortesanía y humanismo en el debate sobre la mujer: Alfonso de Cartagena y su Duodenarium

Alfonso de Cartagena (1385-1456) escribió su Duodenarium (1442) a instancias de Fernán Pérez de Guzmán. Se trata de la respuesta a una serie de cuestiones; la última se refiere al debate de la mujer: ¿qué excelencia es mejor, la femenina o la masculina? Sostiene la superioridad de una mujer, la Virgen, sobre cualquier otro ser humano y analiza las virtudes propias de hombres (fortaleza, justicia) y mujeres (modestia, recato). Vindica la excelencia femenina mediante tres diálogos —revelador de una elaboración literaria, pero se le impuso a don Alonso el modelo del diálogo-disputa de tradición medieval— de tres parejas excelsas, correspondientes a los tres estadios de evolución moral: ley natural (Lucrecia y Catón), ley vieja (Susana y José) y ley nueva (reina Berenguela y Fernando III de Castilla). Sus ideas sobre la mujer y el matrimonio son conservadoras, rigoristas: marginación de la sexualidad y defensa firme del consentimiento parental. Completa éstas el comentario del elogio bíblico de la buena esposa (Proverbios 31), anticipo de La perfecta casada de Fray Luis de León.

El género en las experiencias de violencia de mujeres de San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas

  Several studies indicate that violence against women in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, represents a social problem of great dimensions, in which the landscape a whole is taken into account but the specificities of the experiences of women included in it are ignored in the general data. Asides from quantifying, it is important to study violence against women from the perspective of themselves, analyze how they live, their feelings and thoughts, therefore, this article aims to answer the following research question: How do women experience violence when they have suffered it at some point in their life? specifically the young and adult women of the municipality aforementioned. The study is a qualitative research in the frame of gender anthropology, the central concept that is used is the lived experience as a gender experience. A non-probabilistic sample of intentional type was defined, consequently, semi-structured interviews were carried out with 14 women of different socio-demographic profiles located in the municipality; the topics established in the script formed trees of categories whose content was codified and analyzed with the help of the qualitative analysis software Nvivo. The results indicate that the experiences of violence of women are crossed by the vital situation and the condition of gender, the interviewees experienced in key moments of their life, in violent ways, what it means to be a woman, in each one of those stages, they learned and apprehended by cooperating or by violent means what is expected of them and how it must be a girl, a decent young girl, a good mother and a good wife and how they should not exercise their sexuality.

일제에 의해 강압된 유교 문화 연구 - ‘교육칙어’, ‘호주제도’, ‘현모양처’를 중심으로

일본은 메이지 유신 이후 통제와 간섭을 강화하기 위해 호적법을 제정하여 천황제 국가를 지탱하는 하부체제로서 ‘가(家)[이에]’ 제도를 재창출했다. 이후 충효사상을 근본으로 한 ‘교육칙어’가 발포되면서 천황의 자식으로서의 신민(臣民)을 만들어냈고, 한국 병합 후 우리나라에도 이러한 제도를 강제했다. 특히, 일본은 조선시대 제사상속의 관습을 차용한 호주 중심의 가족제도를 강제해 우리가 상속의 진화로 볼 때 원시사회에 있음을 강조하고 이를 통치에 이용하고자 했다. 또한 일본을 통해 유입된 ‘현모양처’론으로 여성교육이 강조되었지만 ‘강압된 유교’와 ‘호주제도’에 의해 조선시대 여성 교훈서에 나오는 단어 그대로의 ‘현모양처’로 재탄생되었다. 이렇게 ‘만들어진 전통’으로 인해 한국 사회는 대부분의 인구가 성리학적 종법을 따지며 제사를 지내고, 여성은 이로 인한 노동을 강요받는 시집살이를 살게 되었다.

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

Book Review of: Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters) (2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose

The gender ideology of 'Wise Mother and Good Wife' and Korean immigrant women's adjustment in the United States.

The notion of 'wise mother and good wife (WMGW)' (Hyonmo Yangcho) is the traditional idealized image of Korean womanhood as one who serves her country and others through her roles as a mother and wife. This ideology may continue to have some significance in the lives of many first-generation Korean immigrant women, but its potential role in the adjustment challenges these women may face while acculturating to the immigrant context in the United States has received little attention. In this paper, we briefly review the historical background of the WMGW ideology and discussed the significance of focusing research attention on the role of this notion in contemporary first-generation Korean immigrant women in the United States. We focus on the intersecting influences of gender, ethnicity, and immigrants' generation status, which may further marginalize some first-generation Korean immigrant mothers. We then outline possible unique challenges faced by some of these mothers due to the WMGW gender ideology, highlighting potential immigration-related difficulties including changes in their social support networks, parenting burden, mental health, and language issues. Finally, we provide suggestions for researchers and practitioners working with U.S. Korean immigrant women.

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

SHŌJO. GIRLS, CULTURE AND COMICS

This article analyzes shōjo culture and shōjo girls as a participants and creators of this culture. The first part of the article presents the history of girls' schools from the beginning of the 20th century and the ideal of a good wife and wise mother (ryōsai kenbo). The second part focuses on the issue of the "privileged body" of shōjo (girl), which is on the edge between the body of a child and a woman, a boy and a girl. Shōjo manga, as comics addressed to girls, have evolved since the 70s, when women began to create them. At the end I examine aesthetic traits and „the aesthetics of sameness” as tools to create emotional involvement of readers. Shōjo culture is the Japanese version of girl power.

Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages by Glenn D. Burger

Reviewed by: Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages by Glenn D. Burger Mary-Rose McLaren Burger, Glenn D., Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; hardback; pp. 272; 4 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$65.00, £54.00; ISBN 9780812249606. This book is a challenging and important contribution to the understanding of ‘thinking’ in the later Middle Ages. Analysing the purpose of texts that focus on the behaviour of women and men is fraught with difficulty in the context of twenty-first-century feminism. Frequently, I found myself rising to challenge Glenn D. Burger’s paradigms, only to have him add another, richer layer of interpretation. The book is logically constructed. Burger lays the foundations of the study by identifying the significance of texts that move the ‘good wife front and center’ (p. 2) to become a model; the negotiation of new social responsibilities that this opens up; and the fusion of new and old ideologies that can be observed in the texts. One implication of such texts is the transformation of morality to ethics. Burger sets the scene for the analysis and examination of specific texts with a discussion of embodied reading, where the action of reading itself helps to bring about the sought-after behaviour. He argues several ideas that build on each other: that an affective contract lies at the core of medieval developments in thinking about marriage as a sacrament; that conduct literature for women ‘mainstreamed’ thinking about married relations and households and transmitted this across Europe and across social classes during the fourteenth century; that literature aimed at the good wife provides the context for ‘a new model of heterosexuality’ (p. 24); that love of the marrying kind constituted an affective, rather than an erotic or feudal, contract, and that this kind of love ‘empowered new forms of social activity’ (p. 24). Burger further argues that conduct texts had the capacity to reconfigure female identity, which, in turn, created a space for a new authority for men as husbands and fathers, creating new patterns of social recognition and engagement. Consequently, this literature provides ‘a powerful medium for such a rethinking of gender and sexual relations’ (p. 25). He presents this conduct literature as a hinge, or turning point, between marriage as it had been known and developed during the medieval period, and the beginning of a new understanding of heterosexuality that can be seen emerging during the early modern period. Central to this notion is the transformative power of the ‘revisioning of female embodiment’ (p. 26) and the tension which this generates within the social context. Burger then analyses specific texts, each of which adds a further layer to his interpretation of the role of conduct literature as determining functions and [End Page 184] behaviours within both the family and wider society. Such texts as the Journées chrétiennes provide a recognized role for women beyond that of an enclosed religious life (Chapter 1). Les Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle, the Speculum dominarum, and Le Miroir des bonne femmes present a new belief in the capacity of women’s nature for improvement, just as men are capable of improvement. They reflect changing marital relations and authorize the aristocratic household as ‘a new model for the social’ (p. 31; Chapter 2). Burger then uses Le Menagier de Paris, a household book, to examine what happens when the newly understood social function of marriage, as constructed via conduct literature, is played out in an urban merchant’s household. The bedchamber becomes the rehearsal space for the more public playing out of the couple’s marriage, which centres on the good conduct of the wife under the authority of her husband (Chapter 3). The final layer added by Burger is a discussion of the earliest iterations of the Griselda story. Boccaccio and Petrarch’s versions are examined, as well as Philippe de Mézière’s French translation, and the inclusion of this into Le Livre de la vertu du sacrament de mariage and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. In these texts, shaping narratives of...

Beyond “Good Wives and Wise Mothers”: Feminism as Anticolonialism in Manchukuo Schools

Beyond “Good Wives and Wise Mothers”: Feminism as Anticolonialism in Manchukuo Schools

Household Knowledges in Late-Medieval England and France ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten

Reviewed by: Household Knowledges in Late-Medieval England and France ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten George Shuffelton Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten, eds. Household Knowledges in Late-Medieval England and France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii, 271. $120.00. As its title suggests, this essay collection sits at the intersection of several topics of recent interest. Since David Starkey's influential suggestion in 1981 that the later Middle Ages were the "age of the household," historians and literary critics have paid increasing attention to real, fictional, and figurative households of all kinds. More specifically, this volume's focus on the household as a site for "both the consumption and production of knowledge" seems traceable to recent decades' attention to the didactic and practical texts included in various miscellany manuscripts often classified as "household" books (3). Three of the ten essays [End Page 389] focus on particular miscellanies, and four others address practical texts (including conduct literature). But the contributors' interest in manuscript context remains subordinated to the overarching concept of the household as a space for working out social relations, and in that sense the volume has a coherent organizing principle. The contributors' methodologies and predilections vary slightly, but as one might expect, gender and marriage are recurring subjects. The introduction by Burger and Critten provides a useful overview of recent historical research on medieval households and nods to some of the more daring applications of this work by literary scholars such as D. Vance Smith, in Arts of Possession (2003). The first essay, by Burger, examines the different modes of knowledge in Le menagier de Paris, a text treated more extensively in his 2018 monograph Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages. Burger's essay here emphasizes the diversity of genres in Le menagier and the interplay between textual and experiential authority. Inevitably, the distinction breaks down, as when practical advice on removing stains is presented as experiential wisdom from the household servant "Dame Agnes," when in fact it derives from a text. Burger concludes that Le menagier de Paris "argues that the movement of knowledge within the bourgeois household can never be simply top-down" (36). Textual authority acquired from outside the household must be reinterpreted to conform to local conditions and informed by experiential knowledge from within. Burger suggests an analogy to the relations of husband and wife. The next essay, by Elliot Kendall, continues the consideration of gender and marriage with a reading of Caxton's Book of the Knight of the Tower. Kendall examines the internal tensions of the text's patriarchal agenda. For example, the text presents domestic violence as both entirely justified and simultaneously displaced, "separated from patriarchal will" (56). The completion of a woman's education is her recognition of her own incompetence, and the essay concludes by considering Margaret Paston's awareness of the "socially construed limits of her competence" (66). Two essays focus on particular kinds of technical or practical knowledge. The first of these, Nadine Kuipers's study of various Latin, Anglo-French, and Middle English treatises on agriculture, makes the point that texts purporting to be practical may not be practical at all, given the varieties of climate and some of their more fanciful recommendations. Some of The Craft of Graftyng's descriptions should come with the disclaimer "Don't try this at home," such as injecting trees with ferrous [End Page 390] oxide to turn fruit blue, or grafting together multiple species. Instead, such texts likely served other purposes, as entertainment, a source of nostalgia, and (in the case of bourgeois households) a form of social aspiration. Kuipers concludes with the argument that sixteenth-century readers actually did seek practical instruction from agricultural treatises, unlike their medieval predecessors. This claim seems plausible, but needs more evidence and exposition to be fully convincing. Michael Leahy's essay looks at medical texts, including John Arderne's De fistula in ano, John of Bourdeaux's Governayle of Health, and Henry Daniel's Treatise on Rosemary, and the way they "imagine the household as an environment typified by bodily integrity and perfect living" (180). Here...

Introduction

Introduction

The Stories in Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete and the İdea of Contemplation

Continuing its publication life between 1895-1908 and the longest running women's periodicals in the history of the Turkish press, Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete appears as a tool in which women's voices are announced through the experiences of authorship in the changing social life of the Ottoman society. Adopting the mission of spreading the ideal of “good mother”, “good wife”, “good Muslim” woman, Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete is an important resource for the educated women writers of the period to announce their works and thoughts to other women living in the Ottoman society in particular. It is seen that the periodical reached a wide range of readers with its articles and news published on various subjects ranging from education to family, home administration, raising children, from hygiene to health, from beauty to sewing to embroidery, from entertainment to fashion, from literature to culture and art. The literary activity in the magazine, along with other fields, continued intensively from the first issues. Women writers such as Fatma Aliye, Emine Semiye, Poet Nigar, Makbule Leman, whose names are often heard today, published their first works in this periodical. In this rich literary activity, it was found that the most published genre in the journal were stories. In this article, Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete will be examined in the context of the stories published. After the general characteristics of the stories are given, reading will be made in the journal close to the works of the authors who have at least two stories. Finally, the selected stories will be evaluated in the context of the idea of gaze.