Lessons For Women Research Articles

Suffering Illness as an Ascetic: Lessons for Women in Pain

Abstract Women’s pain remains underappreciated, undertheorized, and undertreated in both medicine and theology. The ascetic practices of women in pain, however, can help Christians understand and navigate their own pain and suffering, particularly because they are experienced in the context of chronic illness and disability. In what follows, I argue that Christians would do better to view the pain that accompanies disability and chronic illness as a potential resource for spiritual practice rather than an example of sin or evil. I begin with a brief overview of the most common theological explanations for the relationship between disability and sin within contemporary Christian writings on disability. What is often neglected in these conversations is the acknowledgment of pain in the disability experience. Likewise, discussions of evil often attempt to explain the existence of pain and suffering, but rarely address the practical realities of pain. As a way to begin to remedy the lack of attention to the experience of chronic pain for those living with illness and disability, I consider what it would mean to live faithfully with pain by examining the lives of three holy women who provide examples of what it means to interpret, manage, and share their pain within the body of Christ.

An Important Book on Women's Education in the Last Period of the Ottoman Empire: Practical Agro-industry Lessons for Women

Osmanlı’dan günümüze, kadınlara yönelik dersler ev ekonomisi disiplini altında verilmektedir. Osmanlı Devleti’nin aslında bir yazı ve kayıt medeniyeti olduğunu bilmekle birlikte, gerek bilgi kaynaklarının kaybolması ve gerekse Osmanlı Türkçesi (Osmanlıca) okuyanların az olması sebebiyle geçmişe dair bilgilerimiz yetersiz kalmaktadır. Günümüzde Osmanlıca kurslarının yaygınlaşması, ortaöğretimde bile seçmeli ders olarak okutulması, bu tarz bilgilerin farkındalığını artırmakta, erişimi kolaylaştırmaktadır. Tarım ve Orman Bakanlığı Kütüphanesi’nde yer alan ve 1915’li yıllarda basılmış olan “Kadınlara Amelî Sanayi-i Ziraiye Dersleri” isimli kitap, ev idaresi ve ziraat sanatlarına ait bazı konuları içermesi açısından önem arzetmekle birlikte asıl onu önemli kılan, bu kitabın kadınlara yönelik olduğunun özellikle vurgulanmış olmasıdır. Kitabın tanıtımı, içindeki bazı bilgilerin detaylı ve günümüz diliyle yazılmasıyla birlikte, özellikle un ve ekmek üzerine çalışan, geleneksel üretimle ilgilenen araştırıcıların da dikkatine sunulmakta ve bazı bilgilerin bugünle kıyaslanması amaçlanmaktadır.

Musical Virtue, Professional Fortune, and Private Trauma in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Feminist Biography of Elisabetta de Gambarini (1730–65)

ABSTRACT The composer Elisabetta de Gambarini (1730–65) led a life of public and private contradictions. Publicly, she was renowned as both a professional performer and one of the first female composers to publish in Britain. Recently discovered documents at the British National Archives show, however, that her final year of life was marked by violence and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, Stephen Chazell. A feminist biography of Gambarini should not ignore or downplay her survivorhood, but should stress how she harnessed her virtue as a means of promoting herself as a female performer and composer whose entrepreneurial and publishing activities emulated those of male musicians. The documents themselves help us to understand how, despite her stature as a virtuous woman and a prominent public figure, she was erased from the narrative of her own abuse. In the age of #MeToo, Elisabetta’s biography provides an opportunity to reflect on how surviving trauma does not define a woman’s core identity; at the same time, it shows that ignoring assault and trauma in historical biography suppresses important lessons about believing women—lessons that are now more important than ever.

Lessons for Women: Woodblock Prints of the Tenpō Reforms Era

Lessons for Women: Woodblock Prints of the Tenpō Reforms Era

Challenge in the development of physiotherapy for women's health in Japan

Background: In Japan, physiotherapy forwomen’s health care has not been popular yet. In addition, because, in Japan, almost rehabilitation for women’s health are not covered by public health insurance and direct access is not allowed. That is, it is not still easy that women receive physiotherapy management for prenatal and postpartum or any other women’s health issues. Meanwhile, professional training for women’s health has been required because it is not included in undergraduate program of physiotherapy education in Japan. Furthermore, there are many issues about so-called work-life balance for female workers in Japan and physiotherapists are also no exception. We established a community-based and privately-owned corporation to resolve the issues stated above since 2013. Purpose: The aim of this study was to review our activity and explore future prospects. Methods: For people community-dwelled, two group lessons for women’s issues and two lecture meetings were held. The group lesson for women middle-aged and older dealt with fall prevention, low back pain and lifestyle-related disease in terms of women’s health. The lesson for prenatal and postpartum issues consisted of lecture and exercise for restoring and maintaining health condition. Health checkup and educational activity about women’s health were performed in a community event. As professional training, three workshops were also held for physiotherapist. The workshops were composed of maternity exercise, lymphedema, temporomandibular disorders, health issue about adolescent female athletes and so on.We also hadworkshop about career design and work-life balance for female therapist. All our events had a nursery in order that therapists were able to participate in the workshop with children. And our events were supported by the students majoring physiotherapy as internships in professional training.We reviewed our activity based on questionnaire results from each event. Results: Regarding community-based lesson, almost all participants answered that they could understand and were satisfied with the contents. Participants would like to have exercise-based program regularly, which were one-hour or one-and-a-half-hours lesson once a week or a month on weekday. They also would like to know their physical condition and continue exercises. According to answers from physiotherapists, theywere interested in prenatal, postpartum and adolescent issues. They were also interested in cooperative action or founding of a private practice, to engage women’s health care. For attending the professional workshop, they would like to have a seminar on weekend with nursery because most participants were women. Conclusion(s): Providing women’s health support program by physiotherapist are needed in Japanese community. Identically, professional training is important. It may be critical that therapists who have children continue to study and involve in women’s health physiotherapy. Implications: Our activity just marked the beginning and is unique. Developing our activity would be one of the model for women’s health support by physiotherapists. We also think that involvement of men in all aspects regarding our activity will be important in future.

Lessons for Women from the Top of the World

Lessons for Women from the Top of the World

Lessons for Women’s Health From the Massachusetts Reform: Affordability, Transitions, and Choice

Three years into Massachusetts’ health insurance reform, we are beginning to see what that experience portends for women nationally in the wake of legislation similar to the Massachusetts model. Although the Massachusetts reform has been successful in terms of reducing the number of uninsured men and women, interviews with Massachusetts women reveal significant problems that remain to be addressed. In this paper, we offer snapshots of three women whom we interviewed on the cusp of the Massachusetts reform. None of the women had insurance at the time; thus, health care reform represents a significant improvement in their access to care. However, as these snapshots indicate, major challenges remain in terms of affordability, continuity of coverage, and systemic complexities in choosing plans.

Confucian Morals and the Making of a 'Good Wife and Wise Mother': From 'Between Husband and Wife there is Distinction' to 'As Husbands and Wives be Harmonious'

The most important text in the ‘Lessons for Women’ genre of the Tokugawa era (1600–1867) was the ‘Greater Learning for Women’. But this text remained too vague to be reliable. In the absence of clear norms to which ‘womanly cultivation’ could be referred, a need to replace it was strongly felt during the Tokugawa era’s latter part. This project, however, came to fruition only in the wake of the Meiji Renovation. Fukuzawa Yukichi and Empress Haruko played pivotal roles in this regard. The Imperial Rescript on Education, issued in 1890, centered on an enumeration of virtues closely resembling the ‘five ethical relations’ of classical Confucianism. Here, however, the classical phrase ‘Between husband and wife there is distinction’ was no longer used; the stipulation

Inventing Familial Agency from Powerlessness: Ban Zhao's Lessons for Women

For centuries Chinese women have been trained to Sanchung Side or “Three Obediences and Four Virtues,” as set forth in Nüjie, (Lessons for Women), written in 106 CE by Ban Zhao, ,1 during the East Han Dynasty.2 This essay reinterprets the oldest extant and most important female conduct manual in Chinese in order to question the traditional view that Ban silences Chinese women. It argues that Western feminists' approach to the idea of agency is not appropriate to understanding Chinese women's agency. It delineates a different concept of agency, based on Lessons for Women, forged out of the powerlessness of individual women, which is familial, communal, indirect, and conferred by others. In addition to expanding rhetorical scholarship on agency, I demonstrate that Ban's embedded concepts of familial agency are well illustrated by the 20th-century Taiwanese First Lady Chiang Fang-liang, a Russian Communist who married Chiang Ching-kuo, eldest son and heir of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who followed Ban's precepts to transform her perilous situation into an honored and respected life role.

Gender in the Meiji Renovation: Confucian 'Lessons for Women' and the Making of Modern Japan

From the early Tokugawa period onward, the expression, ‘The hen does not announce the morning. The crowing of a hen in the morning indicates the subversion of the family’ from the Shujing (Book of Documents) was frequently called upon as a warning. At the height of the Tokugawa period, Ogyū Sorai deployed the authority of the Confucian Classics to subject the daimyo houses' ‘inner quarters’ (oku) to a scorching critique. But in conjunction with the Sannō Gaiki (Secret History of the Three Rulers), attributed to his student Dazai Shundai, Sorai's Seidan (Discourse on Government) could also be perceived as targeting the house of the shogun. While the anonymous author of the Sannō Gaiki meant to expose the sorry state of the shogun's rule, Sorai's Seidan offered a vision of what government ought to be like. Calls to remove ‘the hens’ from the inner sphere of power now rapidly grew in volume. Against this background, the ‘Meiji Renovation’ (Meiji ishin) must also be understood as an attempt to eliminate, in the diction of the times, ‘the power of the women’ (joken) from the deep recesses of the government's power structure, and to reaffirm the power (of men) which alone was considered legitimate. Thus, after their seizure of power, the imperial restorationists hurried to crush what they called ‘the power of women already lasting for centuries’ and moved an empress who ‘does not poke her beak into matters of government’ to the front instead. Ultimately, a program to educate ‘good mothers and good wives’, drawing on examples from Japan, China and the West alike, was embarked upon with the empress at its head.