Treatment Of Widows Research Articles

Widows’ Men: The Admiralty Board, Precedent, and Pensions for the Widows of the Lost Franklin Expedition

ABSTRACTWhen the British Admiralty announced in January, 1854 that it intended to strike the names of the officers of Sir John Franklin's missing polar expedition off the active Navy List, it had years of legal precedent to support its right to do so. The Board used such precedent to its advantage in ending a search its members had considered fruitless since 1849, the year the expedition's food would have run out. However, in their treatment of the widows made from that decision, Board members consistently pushed against established practice in order to do what they felt was right: to give the widows as generous a pension as the Treasury would approve, and to do so in defiance of the strict rules of eligibility. In 1844, only months before Franklin and 128 men set forth to discover the Northwest Passage, new eligibility guidelines were set that both limited women's access to pensions, and hampered the Board's ability to grant them. Archival evidence that forms the core of this article shows, however, that compassionate treatment of the expedition's widows was central to all discussions of how the Admiralty might move forward on the Franklin disaster, between promoting officers in absentia in order to augment pensions, to waiving the need for proving the date of death in order for families to collect the explorers’ back pay. As this article argues, the 1854 Admiralty Board had powerfully split loyalties: on the one hand, as the press acknowledged, the Board had a duty to perform on behalf of the public, to avoid wasting the nation's money on frivolous or useless searches for men assumed to be long dead; on the other hand, it felt equally strongly the obligation to support those widows who were the product of such imperial adventuring, even in defiance of its own rules. Through an analysis of legal precedent, Naval Instructions, and private Admiralty Board documents, in the case of the Franklin expedition's widows one can perceive a few naval administrators who tried to keep some of the nation's most vulnerable citizens in view even as they managed the bottom line.

The Impact of Cultural Evolution on the Ego Ideal, Depression, Psychosis, and Suicide: A South India Community Study of the Widow

Cultural factors have a significant impact on the manifestation of psychiatric illness and the development of the ego ideal. The evolution of the widow's cultural role in a South India village provides insight on the ego ideal through several generations. As treatment of widows changed so that their appearance became indistinguishable from other women, they no longer became objects of revulsion. A case study approach documents the interrelationship of changes in the cultural ego ideal on psychiatric illness among widows in a South India village over a period of more than four decades.

Bending bodies, borders and desires in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and Deepa Mehta's Earth

Deepa Mehta's Fire gained much attention, both in India and internationally, as the first film to document a queer relationship between two South Asian women. What has been underexplored in Mehta's feminist trilogy – Fire, Earth, and Water – is how each film is set upon representing one particular form of violence against women within South Asia. Fire deals with the suppression of female desire, Earth with the violence against women during the Partition and Water with the treatment of widows in Hinduism. Mehta is so firm in documenting these oppressions individually that she is ultimately unable to capture the complexities of what she seeks to represent. This is best illustrated when comparing her second film Earth to its original narrative form: Baspsi Sidhwa's semi-autobiographical account of her childhood in Lahore during the Partition, Cracking India. Given that Mehta's trilogy documents different forms of women's subjugation, it is no surprise that Sidhwa's novel and the Partition would be an ideal fit for her feminist explorations. However, Mehta does not fully represent women and men's bodies in their different forms of agency the way that Sidhwa's novel does. In this essay I explore how Mehta's film represents the multiple violences against women and men as they are figured in the novel, but ignores the queer identifications and desires that saturate Cracking India. While Mehta's Earth stresses the violent reality of women's bodies as national metonyms, Sidhwa's Cracking India is able to represent both the violent repercussions on women's bodies during the Partition and simultaneously the queer bonds and bodies that emerged during India and Pakistan's creation. Sidhwa's Cracking India asks us recognize formations other than the national, through creating a queer liminal space. I argue that Mehta's traditional feminist perspective of representing women's subjugation obscures her ability to represent Sidhwa's novel beyond the heterosexual matrix of nationalist violence. As a result Mehta misses the radical sites of queer and feminist resistance that Sidhwa's narrative offers.

Widows, AIDs, Health and Human Rights in Africa: Case Study from Tanzania

Widows, AIDs, Health and Human Rights in Africa: Case Study from Tanzania

Manchu Widows and Ethnicity in Qing China

Like women in many parts of the world whose husbands predeceased them, widows in China were free electrons, unbound elements in the social chemistry. Economically vulnerable, ritually superfluous, and at the same time socially destabilizing and sexually threatening, they were archetypal liminal figures—marginalized, caricatured, and feared. This has made the widow a good subject for literary critics, anthropologists, and historians interested in the way that societies treat women and in the way that treatment of widows in particular is intended to ward off or contain potential disturbance to the status quo. For China, as pioneering work by Mark Elvin and Susan Mann has shown, examining changing attitudes toward widows can illuminate larger social, political, and economic shifts in the late imperial period, roughly the thirteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Mark Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” Past and Present 104, 111–52; and Susan Mann, “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 46:1 (February 1987), 37–56. Among newer work, see the excellent discussion in Bettine Birge, “Levirate Marriage and the Revival of Widow Chastity in Yuan China,” Asia Major, 8:2 (Fall 1995), 107–46. By focusing on Manchu widows, the present essay attempts to improve our understanding of widowhood in late imperial China and at the same time shed light on the role of widows, and women generally, in the construction of ethnicity in the Qing period (1644–1911), when the alien Manchu dynasty ruled the country.

Cross-Cultural Codes on Husband-Wife Relationships

This article presents a set of codes and ratings dealing with several dimensions of husband-wife relationships as they are patterned across societies. This set of scales is the second in a series of codes that have been developed as the basis for a long-term study on variations in male-female relationships in cross-cultural perspective. The first set of scales concerned the purely sexual aspects of malefemale interaction (Broude and Greene 1976). The codes provided here, by contrast, focus on nonsexual measures of husband-wife relationships. In particu? lar, these scales are concerned with five related features of the marital bond. These include mechanisms for arranging marriages, customs identified with newlyweds, intimacy and aloofness between husbands and wives, divorce, and treatment of widows. The codes thus highlight various stages of the marital relationship from the initial choice of a partner to the termination of a marriage through divorce or the death of a husband. While the construction of these scales has been dictated in large part by our own research interests, we also see these codes as contributing to other studies of husband-wife interaction. Variations in marital relationships have been examined by a limited number of cross-cultural anthropologists; however, no extensive set of scales measuring customs and behaviors surrounding marriage is currently available. Thus, while Whiting and Whiting (1975) and Slater and Slater (1965) have explored the causes and consequences of variations in husband-wife intimacy and aloofness using measures of the marital relationship that are similar to a number of the codes presented here, they have relied upon a set of unpublished codes constructed at Palfrey House, Harvard University, so that their raw data are unavailable to other researchers. Other investigators?for example, Stephens (1962, 1967)?do include measures of marital interaction in their published work. However, these indices, which include polygyny, motherchild sleeping arrangements, and the long post-partum sex taboo, are somewhat indirect and selective. Researchers familiar with the cross-cultural literature on cross-sex identity and hypermasculinity will recognize these variables as also figuring prominently as measures of father-absence (see, for example, Ayres 1974; Burton and Whiting 1963; Kithara 1975; Slater and Slater 1965; Stephens 1962; Whiting, Kluckhohn and Anthony 1958). Again, as indices of father's role in relationship to mother and child, these measures are not ideal.