Prominent Women Research Articles

Sustainability in the Ministry of Alma Halse

Scholarly research on the ministry of early Pentecostal women in Norway, are scarce. However, historical sources from the first half of the 20th century, bear witness to several prominent women ministers who spread the gospel all over Norway. Alma Halse (1907-1969) was one of those evangelists, who also pioneered a large social work in the north of Norway. What makes a woman rise, take on leadership, huge financial and physical risks during war and grate turbulence? Through her resilient leadership Alma Halse answered the needs and the challenges of her day. What qualities from Alma Halse’s ministry might shed light on today’s urge for sustainable leadership? Will the accounts of her life, help us respond to the arising challenge of equipping leaders with adequate skills for attaining wise and sustainable leadership? The aim of this paper is to explore literary and audible accounts of Alma Halse’s ministry, and more currant leadership literature to deliberate the questions raised above. This paper will argue that the virtues she exposed, nurtured by her faith and devotion to God, manifest the gist of what might be identify as wise and sustainable leadership. The paper will confer with autobiographies, books, newspaper articles and a tv-interview with Alma Halse, as well as leadership literature that explores the entities of such leadership. Pentecostal spirituality and issues of gender equality also ads insight to the context of Alma Halse and will therefore be considered.

An Invitation into the Mehfil: Muslim Women's Interregional Intellectual Networks

AbstractScholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how American and European suffragists participated in and published reports about one another's activities. Less well-known are the exciting circuits of exchange that took place between women in Asia and Africa in spaces emerging out of colonial modernity. In this article, I explore how such circuits evoke cultural institutions embedded within shared histories of courtly patronage of the performing arts and rhetoric. To this end, I posit the mehfil as an alternative paradigm to capture how women's ideational networks operated within the Perso-Arabic sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. The mehfil, in addition to delineating neglected circuits of women's intellectual exchanges, also demonstrates how such exchanges, if attended to, pose certain tensions with known feminist histories. By broadening the definition of who we think of as early women activists or as pioneers of women's intellectual networks, it interrogates and intervenes within our understanding of first-wave feminisms. By foregrounding the interaction of claims for gender justice with anti-imperialist discourse, the mehfil provides an early model of women's collectivity that hinges not on demands for suffrage or other legislative reform, but on critique of colonial patriarchy.

WOMEN’S MEMOIRS OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT IN RUSSIA: PROBLEMS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE

The article considers the memoirs of prominent women of the Enlightenment era in Russia as historical sources relevant to the study of this era, its features and the position of women in a particular historical period. Historiography is also covered, its degree of study and completeness of historical knowledge is given.

Some observations on the methodological approach to biography of the first female members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

After almost three decades since the publication of the 17 volumes of the edition dedicated to Serbian male scientists, SANU has launched an edition of the collection of works on the female members of its institution. The aim of this article is to present the methodology and results of the first volume dedicated to female academics. Using the qualitative research method, the contents of the textual and visual material are analyzed, and using the comparative method, the similarities and differences with other similar efforts to shed light on the life and work of the first women in the highest scientific and artistic institution are examined. It is shown that the attention was primarily focused on the chronological presentation of the work of women academicians, and that there was mostly no consideration of the connections and relationships between the specificity of female gender identity and social norms. Although a gender-sensitive biographical model for prominent women in Serbian society was established in 1913 in the album Srpkinja, this model remained ignored in this collection. Recommendations for further research concern a more complete determination of the impact of gender differences and specificities from a historical and contemporary perspective, a critical examination of socio-political factors of gender discrimination, determination of professional and social ties of female academics. It is estimated that this article can improve the historiographical study of gender differences and specificities, and can be useful for the improvement of state policies of education and memory, work, employment and social policies.

Who Tells Your Story? Analyzing a Century of Utah History

Who Tells Your Story? Analyzing a Century of Utah History

Woman and Yemen in Three Novels by Nadia al-Kawkabani (Yemen)

Among scholars of literature, there is a discussion about whether modern Arab women write fiction differently from their male counterparts. Some argue that women writers have special concerns which result from their specific experiences in Muslim society and determine not only the thematic spectrum of their works, but also a specific, sometimes vague manner of their literary expression. This discussion is based mostly on the works of prominent women writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, sometimes Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf States. Yemen has not received much attention in this discussion, as well as in literary studies in general. This article examines to what extent the suggested female, or “feminist”, manner of writing is manifested in the works of Yemeni novelist and short story writer Nadia al-Kawkabani, who is one of the most prolific women writers in her country. In her three novels, Not More Than Love (2006), Submissive Wives (2009), and My Sanaa (2013), “feminist” topics are touched upon repeatedly, but practically none of them is represented by a detailed story with a sufficient degree of sentiment and psychologism. On the contrary, a great deal of attention in these novels is given to the culture and modern history of Yemen, and the narrative, like in many male writers’ works, is dominated by sociopolitical issues. One may argue that Yemen in Nadia al-Kawkabani’s novels prevails over the “feminist” issue.

Review: Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil, by Adele Nelson

Review: <i>Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil</i>, by Adele Nelson

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF SHEEN FARRUKH AND HAMRA KHALIQ

SheenFarrukh and Hamra Khaliq are among the prominent women writers of the 21st century. Sheen Farrukh's autobiography "Jeene Ka Juram" and Hamra Khaliq's autobiography "Kahan Kahan Se guzar gay" came to the fore. New thinking and concern can be estimated from the situations and events that happened in the lives of two contemporary women autobiography writers because both of them have the same commitment and also spent their educational period in college together. The important thing in these autobiographies is that both women highlight the ups and downs of life as well as the joys and sorrows of the stanzas. If we examine the two personalities, they saw a lot in their lives. In the autobiography, they presented scenes like partition, migration, and war. Although there is a contradiction in the personality of both, the study of their lives shows that a woman should be liberal (Sheen Farrukh) or domestic (Hamrah Khaliq), she gets a high position and status only after going through difficulties.

REICHE FRAUENGRÄBER DES 1. JAHRTAUSENDS V. CHR. IN SÜDWESTDEUTSCHLAND

Rich female graves in southwestern Germany are only recognisable archaeologically from about 600 B.C. onwards. During the Urnfield Culture and the Hallstatt C phase, male burials predominate among the rich graves. The earliest known female graves from the Western Hallstatt Culture to contain gold artefacts come from burial mounds 4 and 2 of the Bettelbühl cemetery near the Heuneburg. Furthermore, the discovery of tumulus 4, which contained a "princess grave" and the burial of a small girl, indicates that social rank and status at the Heuneburg were hereditary by at least the early 6th century BC.&#x0D; The female graves of the Bettelbühl necropolis represent the start of an early Celtic tradition which last for more than 250 years. One of the last examples of this tradition being the grave from Waldalgesheim, which dates to the decades around 300 BC. From the middle of the 2nd century BC onwards rich female graves are only sporadically attested in southwestern Germany.&#x0D; The rich female graves of Southwest Germany may be interpreted as representing members of an emerging aristocratic ruling class. The social importance and power of some women, which is attested archaeologically, was probably based on a matrilineal kinship or inheritance system. The archaeological sources indicate that these prominent women also held political and religious offices, and exercised power in their own right.

New women in a new state

This paper intends to explain not only the origins of the modern woman in a changing political and social environment in a newly established state after First World War, but also the development of ideas formulated by women in their intellectual endeavors, through their influence and criticism, and their hopes and expectations of the new state. It focuses on Croat and South Slavic spaces in the process of unification of the State of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918 (called the Kingdom of SHS, Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1929). This period saw the unprecedented involvement of women in political and public life with the aim of achieving political and legal equality. Examining the complex structural changes that took place amidst great economic, social, and political commotion, the paper encompasses the personalities and ideas that challenged the established understanding of the status of women and analyses the ways and forms of some of their social and public actions. The most important among them was Zovka Kveder Demetrović, a journalist and editor of a prominent women’s magazine Ženski svijet/Jugoslavenska žena [Women’s World/The Yugoslav Woman] whose advocacy of women’s issues is the focus of this paper. It informs the reader on new possibilities of understanding the intellectual and political contribution of women, and identifies the most important, if generally unknown, women authors from the region whose work contributed to the general advancement of women’s issues in the aftermath of First World War.

‘Almost None’: Women Sociologists and the Study of Women’s Crime in Early 20th-Century China and the U.S.

AbstractThe question of how and why women committed crimes was a topic of hot debate in 1930s Republican China. Although men sociologists during this period largely framed the origins of both men’s and women’s crime as a social issue, they nonetheless still seriously considered biological and physiological factors in women’s motivation for crime. At the same time, women sociologists who authored the two most comprehensive 1930s studies on women’s crime – Zhou Shuzhao and research team Liu Qingyu and Xu Huifang – pushed back on the connections between biology and physiology in relation to crime for both women and men. Instead, they argued unconditionally for the social causes of all crime and particular social challenges for Chinese women. Their methodologies and frameworks were especially influenced by work from the Chicago school of sociology, a department which itself produced a number of prominent women social scientists. This article traces the transnational conversation on women’s crime in Republican China through the work of U.S. sociologists who were cited by Zhou, Liu, and Xu; research by Chinese men sociologists, especially prominent sociologist Yan Jingyue; and finally, Zhou, Liu, and Xu’s own rebuttals, conclusions, and contributions in developing a theory of Chinese women’s crime. By also comparing the work of Chinese and U.S. women social scientists, this article argues that both groups pushed back, with varying strategies, on their men colleagues’ inordinate focus on criminalized women’s biology and physiology. In this way, both Chinese and U.S. women social scientists spoke into a largely male-dominated conversation and provided novel theories of women’s crime as women themselves.

A mothering dramaturgy: the creative co-practices of mothering and directing in contemporary rehearsal rooms

ABSTRACT This essay considers the conceptual diversity in the current discourse on dramaturgy within contemporary theater making and adds an embodied maternal dramaturgy. Featuring interviews with six prominent women directors who are mothers, the essay presents key mothering moments and their presence in rehearsal practice. The essay highlights the corporeal knowledge of the postpartum director, and the kinds of adjustments to practices and work models that emerge from the needs of the director as mother. We present a mothering dramaturgy as a political act: a process that disrupts and unsettles divisions of labor, social constructs, and commonly accepted notions of body.

Mormonism's Inside-Outsider

Jan Shipps is Mormonism's “inside-outsider” who transformed the field of Mormon studies and paved the way for many who followed in her footsteps. Her book Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition remains one of the most widely read and assigned books about the Mormon Restoration, offering a concise introduction to the faith from someone on the outside of it. Her status as an outsider who earned the respect and trust of insiders lent credibility to both her writing and a field that was insular and dominated by believing historians. Drawing on previously published autobiographical writing, oral history interviews by the Church History Department, and lengthy personal interviews, Gordon and Gary Shepherd's biographical sketch of Shipps's life welcomes readers into the life of one of Mormon studies’ pioneering voices.In Jan Shipps: A Social and Intellectual Portrait: How a Methodist Girl from Hueytown, Alabama, Became an Acclaimed Mormon Studies Scholar, the scholar becomes the subject, and readers of Mormon history are given the opportunity to learn about one of the field's leading voices. The biography is written in two parts. The first tells the story of Jan's life, her upbringing, marriage, college career, and arduous journey through the academic job market. Most importantly, her biographers highlight the extent to which Jan immersed herself not only in Mormonism but in the academic study of Mormonism. Jan was among the first to bridge the academic study of the Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ. She was the first non-Mormon to serve as president of the Mormon History Association, advocated for the Mormon Studies Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and published one of the most widely read books on Mormonism in the twentieth century.The second half of the book takes a different approach from the first, which is purely biographical overview. In chapters 5–8, the authors analyze the major events in Jan's life that led to her rise to fame in Mormon studies and place her life alongside other prominent women in the field. The authors chose to compare Jan's life and work to Juanita Brooks and Fawn Brodie because, as they argue, their books are “indisputably the most important or impactful that have ever been written about Mormons and their history” (143). While some may dispute this claim, these three authors represented women's scholarship in a field comprised mostly of men. Along these lines, the Shepherds conclude their overview of Jan's life with a focus on Jan's view of feminism. Although Jan does not identify as a feminist, the authors situate Jan in a long line of “proto-feminists” who impacted both Mormon history and the lives of Mormon women.Readers will be impressed by Jan's determination and intellectual journey. Graduate students and those interested in academic work will find this book particularly compelling. Jan spent years on the academic job market and struggled to find full-time employment, with varied jobs including a brief position at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. While her life represents that of an exemplary and groundbreaking scholar, the biographers did not paint an easy ascent in academia. It is honest and represents a reality that many entering the field will find useful, even consoling.It would be dishonest not to admit that this book was not only intellectually but personally meaningful to me. As a fellow non-Mormon woman in Mormon studies, Jan Shipps became something of a role model to me and someone whose scholarship I have admired since graduate school. In their conclusion, Gordon and Gary Shepherd write, “Jan Shipps's salient scholarly contributions to the understanding go Mormon history, and her influential role in legitimating Mormon Studies as a significant discipline area of inquiry, merit deep appreciation of all contemporary scholars of the religious culture and history of the Latter-day Saints” (208). I, for one, am grateful.

Avant la lettre: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

<i>Avant la lettre</i>: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

Balancing the Books: Valuing Household Work in Weimar Germany

AbstractThis article explores the way that bourgeois women academics and social reformers adopted the quantified language of economics to advance their own position in the Weimar Republic. As statistics and indices proliferated as measures of national recovery, women attempted to record and describe their own economic realities within the household. They promoted bookkeeping as an indispensable tool of household rationalisation. This article argues that these bookkeeping practices enabled prominent women, including Henriette Fürth, Alice Salomon and Erna Meyer, to delineate the household – in its role as both economic unit and unit of reproductive and care work – as a site of economic importance and a field of intervention in the nascent social welfare state. Furthermore, the article shows how in the 1920s and 1930s, the market intruded into domestic life to shape notions of value and worth.

The Whore and the Madonna: The Ambivalent Positionings of Women in British Imperial Histories on Southeast Asia

This article examines how British imperial historians of the early twentieth century, the zenith of the colonial era, approached the writing of British colonial women into their histories. In the early nineteenth century, hundreds of British women went out to the British colonies in Southeast Asia, yet to date, their stories and experiences have largely been neglected by historians. In general, the nature of the imperial project, with its emphasis on masculinist values of conquest, territorial expansionism and despotic administration, left little scope for the inclusion of women’s experiences and contributions in its histories. This article focuses closely on how British historians of the period of high imperialism approached writing about two prominent women, the wives of an imperialist hero, Stamford Raffles. It shows how conventional assumptions about women were entangled with prevailing gendered ideologies, such as the madonna/whore stereotypes, which in turn were enmeshed with notions concerning Orientalism, class and race. The result was a deeply ambivalent portrayal of these colonial women, which awkwardly brought together divergent elements of sexual scandal, wifely devotion, literary achievement, delicate health, career promotion, emotional care taking and judgments about beauty. These positionings tell us more about contemporary cultural discourses than they do about the women themselves.

How do women's GONGOs influence policymaking processes in Turkey?

ABSTRACT The article examines the most prominent women’s Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization (GONGO) in Turkey, named KADEM, as a case to illustrate the mechanisms that GONGOs use to influence gendered labour policies. Existing studies underline the ideological and discursive role that GONGOs play in the late-AKP era, while the specific mechanisms that they use to influence policymaking processes require investigation. To address this gap, the analysis reveals each step that contributes to KADEM’s occupation of power in policymaking processes and explores the mechanisms that they use to interact in these processes with their essentialist gender justice agenda. These mechanisms are the direct engagement of the organization in domestic policy programs, their representation in international organizations, their expertise and advocacy to public institutions, and their strong institutional and personal links with the government. The findings are based on 48 interviews conducted with key actors and reveal that KADEM acts in line with the conservative and authoritarian labour policy agenda of the ruling party to erase gender equality in public discourse, policy formulation, and policymaking while emphasizing essentialist gender justice. The article contributes to the literature on the politics of gender under authoritarian regimes by presenting the mechanisms that GONGOs use to translate their agendas into policymaking procedures.

Review: At Home in the World: California Women and the Postwar Environmental Movement, by Kathleen A. Cairns

Kathleen Cairns’s At Home in the World: California Women and the Postwar Environmental Movement is a good book that adds new names to the long list of engaged citizens trying to right environmental wrongs in the mid-twentieth century United States. The book’s intention is to highlight the political activism of a handful of white, middle-class and elite women working to preserve California’s unique ecosystems.The book begins with the 1950s activism of several prominent women who sought to clean Southern California’s air. The book then turns northward to San Francisco and Sylvia McLaughlin’s campaign to save the San Francisco Bay. The next two chapters similarly focus on activists who anchor the history of efforts to save two other ecosystems, the Nipomo Dunes and the Santa Monica Mountains, respectively. In each chapter, Cairns deftly illustrates the ways in which these women “knew how to play the game” of formal politics and how they mobilized their socioeconomic connections to powerful men to achieve their aims. There are interesting details about the strategies the women utilized (from knocking on doors to letter-writing campaigns to attending county planning meetings). The “feminine warriors” that Cairns describes were not overly radical or creative in their efforts, but they were mostly effective at achieving changes that would have long-term benefits on California’s ecosystems (both marine and land).Cairns doesn’t do much to connect the mid-twentieth century activism (strategies and even causes) to that of the Progressive Era female reformers, and that’s curious as these California warriors borrowed much from their foremothers in the songbird conservation and the National Park advocacy campaigns of a half century before. The book is highly accessible in terms of style and vocabulary and thus could be widely assigned to learners from high school through undergraduate college level in classes about environmentalism and even second-wave feminism. While Cairns admits her subjects are all well-connected women with plenty of access to time and resources, her analysis falls a bit short in places. She seems not to want to discuss the ways in which these women’s classed positions contributed mightily to the pollution and shrinking open space they abhorred. Despite some of the weaknesses of the book, however, the research is sound and the activists that Cairns’s work highlights deserve to be in the historical record and now they are.

Progress in neurology as seen by female neurologists

Over the past 20 years, the field of neurology has evolved and expanded tremendously, and so too has the prominence of women in the specialty. Udani Samarasekera interviewed The Lancet Neurology's newest female editorial board members to hear their views not only on research developments in the field, but also on shifts in the divisions of and interactions between specialties, diversity in clinical practice and research, and their hopes for the future.

Women Labour Models and Socialist Transformation in early 1950s China

AbstractThis article investigates Chinese women labour models (or labour heroines) of the early 1950s as actors and symbols of socialist transformation. It centres on the example of Shen Jilan (1929–2020), who was one of the most prominent women labour models of the time. Shen rose to fame through her struggle for equal pay for equal work in her native village, became a delegate to China's National People's Congress, and even participated in the Third World Congress of Women in Copenhagen in 1953. The article critically engages with the concept of “state feminism” and proposes a shift in focus from state–society relations to work as a means to understanding the transformation of women's lives under socialism. Socialist society was a society of producers and work shaped people's daily lives; it was central to identity formation and constituted the regulating mechanism of social relations. Indeed, women labour models, together with related categories of working women, came to typify the new Chinese woman, who was integral to and symbolic of socialist modernity. They epitomized communist theory about women's participation in production being the mechanism of their liberation. The article has three main parts, each of which addresses a different level (local, national, international), different constellations of actors and agency, and different aspects of the relationship between working women and socialist transformation. By tracing Shen Jilan's activities in various contexts, the article reveals the complexity, contradictions, multilayered nature, and also incompleteness of socialist transformation.