Space For Women Research Articles

Space, Agency, and Withdrawal: Birth Control Choices of Women in Turkey

Withdrawal (WD) is not a reliable method for preventing unwanted pregnancies, yet it is still a very popular form of birth control in many societies, including Turkey. We look at the relationship between women's agency and physical space in relation to birth control choices of women in Turkey. Agency in our context refers to a woman's ability to resist domination and subordination to the patriarchal beliefs valuing her reproductivity over her pleasure. Our analysis of the Turkish Demographic Health Survey (TDHS) suggests that (a) the available space in the household for possible private encounters between husband and wife, and (b) the women's capacity to insert her agency into her life choices are closely correlated with WD choices. Women with better social and physical resources prefer WD less.

Book Review: Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space by Alice Fahs

Out on Assignment: Newspaper and the Making of Modern Public Space. Alice Fahs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 376 pp. $37.50 hbk.A rare photograph in Alice Fahs's book Out on Assignment shows five in late Victorian attire seated together in front of desk cluttered with papers and photographs and other newsroom miscellanea. Congenial and confident, the form tableau, with two leaning an elbow on the desk as they meet the camera's gaze, while another clutches the arm of the woman next to her in sisterly fashion and yet another holds kitten.Writers for the York World, the were all well-known in their day. What is remarkable about the photograph now, however, is that it calls into question historiographical assumptions about female journalists of the past who, if remembered at all, are presumed to have been brash and brassy tokens in field that was not simply male dominated but macho. The photograph illustrates Fahs's main point-that there was community of independent women writing for large urban newspapers and that together they created a new engagement between and public life, one centered around active participation and observation. Yet because of low regard for the sensational press, controversy as historical organizing principle, and sexism itself, all but few have been forgotten.Fahs, historian at the University of California, Irvine whose research examines the intersections of print culture, race, gender, and public space, provides an engaging and thorough look at many of these women, based on close reading of their work and other archival sources. Focusing on journalists working between roughly the mid-1880s through the 1910s, she shows how newspaper work was integral to increasing participation in the workplace generally, their expanded travel experiences, and their sense of adventure. As she writes, If the tropes of 'innocence' and an 'averted gaze' had structured Victorian selfhood, now 'experience' and an alert, forthright, all-seeing gaze reorganized ideas of what constituted appropriate knowledge for newspaper women.The book's organization underscores the interrelatedness between newspaper work and lives. The first chapter notes that between 1870 and 1900, the recorded number of working as reporters and editors increased from total of 35 to 2,193, and that did not include paid for specials on rates (freelancers). Many came to York from the South and West, driven by sense of adventure and the need for paid employment. The latter was particularly true during the economic downturn of the early 1890s, when such as Elizabeth Jordan found themselves supporting their families. Some were New Women-privileged, educated, and mostly white-while others were Bachelor Girls whose narratives focused on frugally feminine independent existence. Meanwhile, journalists such as Rose Pastor Stokes were working class, and African American such as Victoria Earle Matthews, Fannie Barrier Williams, Gertrude Bustill Mosell, and, of course, Ida B. Wells made name working for race papers. As group, newspaper were so visible that Margherita Arlina Hamm wrote regular column titled Among the Newspaper Women for the York Journalist beginning in 1891.Of course, many were relegated to the women's pages, the focus of Fahs's second chapter. Not surprisingly, many resented the segregation and limitation of women's topics (household hints, fashion, and recipes) and the ridicule of being called the hen coop. It is humiliating to do no work worth being taken seriously, wrote Anne O'Hagan, beauty editor of the York World. Moreover, some writers made healthy professional salary advising other to be domestic-a point that is troubling from feminist perspective. However, others used the space to explore progressive womanhood, using women's page space to create an ongoing public discussion that helped readers see new possibilities. …

(Mis)Understanding Abortion Regret

The debate about abortion regret rests on competing assumptions about women's attachment to pregnancy. Antiabortion claimants argue women always attach to pregnancy (inevitably regretting abortion), while abortion rights supporters counter that women do not attach to pregnancies they choose to terminate (feeling relief instead). Neither assumption explains women's experience; research shows that attachment is discursively produced. Using interview data from 21 women, this study moves past these political claims to empirically identify three sources of women's emotional difficulty around abortion: social disapproval, romantic relationship loss, and head versus heart conflict. Findings point to the importance of attention to women's lived experience and space for complex feelings around abortion.

Imagining women's conventual spaces in France, 1600–1800. The cloister disclosed. By Barbara R. Woshinksy. (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.) Pp. xvii+344 incl. 4 frontispieces and 22 figs. Farnham–Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2010. £65. 978 0 7546 6754 4

Imagining women's conventual spaces in France, 1600–1800. The cloister disclosed. By Barbara R. Woshinksy. (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.) Pp. xvii+344 incl. 4 frontispieces and 22 figs. Farnham–Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2010. £65. 978 0 7546 6754 4 - Volume 63 Issue 2

Women's Spaces Needed to Connect, Recharge on Campus

Women's Spaces Needed to Connect, Recharge on Campus

Filming France's colonial past: Women ‘wearing the pants’ in Outremer and Indochine

ABSTRACTReleased when France had to deal with the aftermath of immigration (mainly from its former colonies) and its long overdue coming-to-terms with its colonial past, as well as gender parity in the workforce and politics, Outremer/Overseas (Roüan, 1990) and Indochine (Wargnier, 1992) provide views on the status of women during the colonial era. Each film portrays a strong female colonizer torn between her contrasting roles as wife/lover/mother and domain manager. Placed in a position of relative power between the colonized and the male colonizer, these women venture out of the private sphere (women's traditional space) to enter a public sphere that was expanded when colonisation stretched the boundaries of nation and pitted the notion of national identity against that of race and culture. By examining and comparing the representations of these two female characters who assume men's roles, the article aims to show how their characterizations can participate in the discourse on gender roles that informed the time of their release.

Mapping the Spaces of Women's Civil War History

Mapping the Spaces of Women's Civil War History

Identifying time‐space constraints: a neglected element of the development discourse

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to provide conceptual provocation in the context of collective expertise on the identification of time‐space constraints – a conceptual provocation that pushes understandings of routines and practices and the tensions that exist around schedulability and social efficiency when the collective dimension of all social action is ignored by social policy, be it in the developing or developed context.Design/methodology/approachThe article examines time‐space constraints in three distinctive environments – low‐income children in urban Ghana, women's space in the North West Frontier province of Pakistan and low‐income elderly sick within the National Health system of the UK. A case study approach is taken.FindingsThe analysis draws attention to the impact of mobility constraints on dignity and social functioning in policy environments that maximise rather than address and redress such constraints.Research implicationsA time‐space constraint approach leads towards more fundamental practices of process investigation rather than a parading of apparent patterns of outcomes, and this in turn leads towards a practice of process correction. There are significant policy implications from this research.Originality/valueIdentifying time‐space constraints represents a woefully neglected element of the development discourse, and it is time for the correction of this neglect with detailed analysis of time‐space constraints across the range of social action. This paper addresses this.

From Living to Eat to Writing to Live: Metaphors of Consumption and Production in Sapphire’s Push

Wipe that look off your face or I'll knock it off. Dry up, he'd scream, eat.--Toi Derricotte, When My Father Was Beating Me (1997) In When My Father Was Beating Me, Toi Derricotte recounts the two forms of parental abuse she endured--her father's physical abuse and her mother's silence and acquiescence. She writes, hear my mother the kitchen preparing dinner. I'd hear the spoons hitting the mixing bowl, the clatter of silver falling into the drawer. I'd hear the pot lids clink and rattle. She continues, though her sounds could come to my ears, my screams and cries and whimpers, his demands and humiliations, the sounds of his hands hitting my body, couldn't pierce back the other way (13). In this instance, the image of a mother providing beautiful yet withholding emotional sustenance illustrates a view contrary to that found many black women's writing on food, cooking, and kitchens. Though many African Americans find community bonding and self-expression women's space near the stove, sink, and kitchen table, the kitchen space (and by extension, food) can also subjugate and oppress. Such is the case Sapphire's Push (1996), a novel which the protagonist, Claireece Precious Jones, has a destructive relationship with food and, like Derricotte, suffers from violence within the home. (1) Throughout her short life, Precious is raped and sexually abused; her body is exploited, misused, and beaten, and, the end, with HIM. To escape into numbness and achieve some sense of emotional safety, however illusory and precarious, Precious eats and overeats. Her unwholesome consumption of everything (everything her body ingests, digests, or absorbs, including but not limited to food, both involuntary and otherwise) is a result of a childhood and adolescence during which her sexuality is exploited and her human rights are suppressed. It is not until she stops consuming compulsively, radically alters her relationship with food, and begins (producing written words and literally producing and raising a child) that she acquires the tools needed to comes to terms with her mistreated and diseased body, and is able to achieve personal freedom. Push brutally exposes multilayered issues affecting the black community and black women particular: racism, poverty, sexual abuse, illiteracy, colorism, self-hatred, obesity, inadequate social institutions, and AIDS. Precious Jones is a victim of all of these problems. Her relationship with her body and her multiple diseases--social, emotional, and physic--all result from the brutality of patriarchal and matriarchal control over her body her home, community, and society. Precious's father, Carl Kenwood Jones, enacts sexual violence, forcing Precious to eat him, while her mother, an agent of patriarchy, forces Precious to binge: Mama give orders, Daddy porno talk me (62). Outside of the home, Precious's body continues to suffer under patriarchal rules. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes, society treats women's bodies a sexually brutal and commercially rapacious way (210). Precious fears the pain, humiliation, and dangers of sex and being sexualized, but having internalized societal standards of beauty, she still desires sexual acceptance. She describes a fantasy version of as light skinned, thereby treated right and loved by boyz, an indication of the extent to which her self-worth is dependent on male desire and beauty issues such as colorism (113). Significant to Precious's development is when she stops taking things in and them out. The exception, of course, is when she takes knowledge. Yet what her body and mind ultimately produce are the most important terms of changing the downward spiral that her life has become. In short, as Precious learns language, writes poetry, and gives birth to a son she can love and protect (unlike her first child, whom she doesn't raise), she pushes out the vileness her past and pushes out words that reject the dangerous consumption of food and sexual perversion that have entrapped her self-hatred and self-destruction. …

Women's spaces, gender mainstreaming, and development priorities: Popular participation as gendered work in rural Bolivia

Synopsis This paper examines Bolivian popular participation as a gendered process. By comparing and contrasting ethnographic examples of development work in a rural community, this article examines participation in its cultural context and engages indigenous conceptions of participation, gender, and development. Contrary to research and popular assumptions, this study demonstrates that women are extremely visible in development contexts. But poor rural women appeal to more holistic understandings of development that are predicated upon the understanding of women's roles as wives and partners in relationships with poor, indigenous men — another vulnerable, but untargeted, group. In order to foster inclusion, collaboration, and engagement in popular participation, women attempt to both maintain conventional gender norms at the same time that they struggle to transform them. This case study shows that development work is identity work, or the negotiation of varied perceptions of appropriate gendered identities to successfully target groups for development attention or funding. Because of its inattention to the intersectionality of class, ethnicity, and gender and how these positionalities are negotiated in development work, gender mainstreaming has had little effect on rural women's lives except to overburden them.

A Search for Women's Space in Indian Micro Finance Spectrum

A Search for Women's Space in Indian Micro Finance Spectrum

Infraction and change in the Nigerian feminist novel: Zaynab Alkali and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo

Over the years, Nigerian feminist discourse seems to have shifted its focus from the plight of the servile housewife or the peasant woman to the engagements, whether restricted or not, of the professional woman in her (urban) society. This shift in paradigm is the main thrust of my article. Using the novels of Zaynab Alkali and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo I attempt to demonstrate that the Nigerian feminist novel, especially in the twenty-first century, has mainly concerned itself with a woman's negotiated space and how she utilises it to not only privilege and advance the condition of the woman but also to fully participate in and indeed lead socio-political struggles in her society. My contention is that the (new) professional woman of the Nigerian feminist novel, such as Alkali's Seytu in The descendants (2005), and Adimora-Ezeigbo's Nenne in Children of the eagle (2002) use their very professional achievements to pursue nationalist, not just womanist, objectives.

Okyeondong- A liberating Space for Women in SukyeongNangjaJeon

Okyeondong- A liberating Space for Women in SukyeongNangjaJeon

Finding Safe and Affirming Spaces in Women’s Field Hockey

Finding Safe and Affirming Spaces in Women’s Field Hockey

Gender and Burial in Imperial China: An Investigation of Women's Space in Fujian Tombs of the Song Era (960-1279)

AbstractThis paper examines how Song dynasty (960-1279) contemporaries viewed women's place in the afterlife. It analyzes archaeological reports on women's and men's tombs in Song Fujian as well as relevant writings by Song era Neo-Confucian scholars. Despite Neo-Confucians' strong emphasis on gender segregation among the living, both textual and material evidence show that the increasingly hardened gender hierarchy did not carry over into the afterlife. Prescription of gender distinctions in burial practices is virtually absent from neo-Confucians' writings. The structure of tombs implies that communication between women and men after death was expected, not suppressed. Similarities overwhelm differences among women's and men's grave goods, which resemble each other in both object categories and decorative motifs. Women's place in the afterlife was not a reflection of the hierarchies on earth but a new construction.

Enemy under My Skin: Eileen Chang'sLust, Cautionand the Politics of Transcendence

Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy, particularly his notions of transcendence and the “face of the other,” illuminates Eileen Chang's short storyLust, Caution(Se, jie) and, to a lesser extent, Ang Lee's film adaptation.Lust, Cautiontells of an assassination plot against a collaborator with the Japanese during the second Sino–Japanese War in which the heroine's fatal decision to let go of her enemy results in the deaths of herself and her comrades. The story problematizes the status of the personal and ethical in times of war, occupation, and resistance through the heroine's path from the collective anonymity of national salvation to the theatrical solitude of underground activism and the intersubjective encounter with the face of the other. Also relevant is Hannah Arendt's theory of the (bourgeois) social, which in conjunction with its feminist revision prompts reflections on women's space of action in “dark times.”

The Psychosocial Dimensions of Hysterectomy: Private Places and the Inner Spaces of Women at Midlife

Although the literature on hysterectomy is well represented by the medical and nursing professions, there is a paucity of social work research on the psychosocial dimensions of hysterectomy and surgical menopause. With over one-half million women undergoing the surgical removal of their reproductive organs each year, clinical social workers need to be aware of the potential effects of hysterectomy on the physical, affective, social, spiritual, and sexual domains of women's lives. The sequelae of a hysterectomy portend consequences for the quality of a woman's life. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods, a Web-based questionnaire was used to examine women's lived experiences of hysterectomy in each of these domains. The findings of this exploratory study (n = 74) suggest that younger women may be at greater risk for depression than older women following hysterectomy and that physician gender may influence pre-surgery decision making.

Lilith's Midwives: Jewish Newborn Child Murder in Nineteenth-Century Vilna

This article examines a court case of newborn child murder in nineteenth-century Vilna. In 1890, the state indicted a group of Jewish women for running a lucrative baby-farming business in which they hired out unwed mothers as wet nurses and extorted their salaries in exchange for the care of their illegitimate offspring—most of whom died from neglect or abuse. I argue that this illegal network on the outskirts of town threatened the legitimate, respectable Jewish world at the center but was indispensable to it. It provided families with wet nurses, domestic servants, and even infants for childless wives to adopt. It also allowed a legitimate way for unwed mothers to abandon their unwanted offspring. Scrutiny of this lower-class women's space sheds light not only on the lives of unwed mothers but also on the complicity of Jewish society in the fate of their illegitimate children.

Dramatizing Home and Memory: Lady Mary Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth

ABSTRACTThe article discusses two plays by noblewomen: Lady Mary Sidney Herbert's translation The Tragedy of Antony (1998[1591]) and Lady Mary Wroth's pastoral tragicomedy Love's Victory (1614–16), to explore how drama, as a genre, provides unique opportunities for remaking home as a woman's space. Irigaray's vision of woman's self-dispossession within the home and Elizabeth Grosz's injunction to recover a female-centered chora, provide a framework to read the texts. Drawing on the classical idea of a memory-theater, the article analyzes how the scripts creatively manipulate relationships between domestic venues and settings in order to reshape memories and promote alternative constructions of woman's place.

Tránsitos: circulación de brasileñas en el ámbito de la transnacionalización de los mercados sexual y matrimonial

En este artículo tomo como referencia la migración de brasileñas a Europa en el contexto de la trasnacionalización y la imbricación de los mercados del sexo y matrimonial. Basándome en investigaciones realizadas desde una perspectiva antropológica en Italia y España con el objetivo de comprender los aspectos políticos, económicos y culturales vinculados a ese tipo de migraciones, considero la noción de transnacionalismo presente en el debate sobre prostitución y en los estudios sobre migraciones. Prestando atención a las redes de relaciones accionadas durante el proceso migratorio y los grados de participación de esas personas en la vida social en los países de origen y de destino argumento que para comprender como las prácticas transnacionales operan en este tipo de desplazamientos es necesaria una perspectiva amplia que tome en cuenta los espacios de agencia de esas migrantes.