Virtuous Wife Research Articles

Loose Women, Virtuous Wives, and Timid Virgins: Gender and the Control of Resources in Rwanda

RésuméIl a été suggéré qu'il était important de comprendre l'accès aux ressources essentiel pour établir le fondement de l'analyse du statut social des femmes, en termes de classe. Cet article déclare que le contrôle et l'utilisation des surplus sont d'égale importance et que toute analyse de classe et de sexe doit englober tous les aspects des relations sociales de production dans un contexte historique et culturel spécifique. Au Ruanda, la capacité des femmes en ce qui concerne le contrôle des ressources et des surplus est extrèmement limitée, à la fois socialement et légalement. Les femmes, quelles que soient leur richesse ou leur pouvoir, sont limitées alors que les hommes riches et puissants ne le sont pas. Cet article examine les transformations dans l'état pré-colonial, la période coloniale, et le développement du capitalisme qui ont créé cette situation; trois études de cas illustrent les contraintes et les possibilités auxquelles les femmes Rouandais sont confrontées. Au niveau local, le langage de la morale publique et du stéréotype est une arme dans la lutte pour accéder aux surplus des femmes. Les stéréotypes—femmes légères, épouses vertueuses, ou vierges timides—sont utilisés par les hommes et les femmes pour interpréter, manipuler, valider, ou refuser tout contrôle sur le travail, les ressources, ou les surplus.

The Significance of Lucrezia in Machiavelli'sLa Mandragola

The “fall” of Lucrezia in Machiavelli's playLa Mandragolais a puzzlement. She is presented as an intelligent and virtuous wife who by play's end not only agrees to commit adultery but murder as well. Any attempt to interpret the play must address the significance of Lucrezia and her fall. It is argued here, however, that the real deception is that Lucrezia does not undergo a conversion—she is of questionable character from the start. Upon examination, her similarity with the Goddess Fortuna reveals a deeper tale being told within the play. Machiavelh uses her to mock the Church, and St. Augustine in particular, and to deliver a frightening message that the free will is no match for the goddess.

Virtuous wives and kind mothers: Concepts of women in urban China

China's leaders since 1949 have generally held that women's emancipation is an automatic result of socialist economic development and that a separate focus on gender issues is therefore unnecessary. This has left certain structural and conceptual problems of gender inequality unaddressed. Old and new concepts defining and giving value to women and women's activities result in limiting the development of a feminist consciousness among urban women, and limit opportunities and choices for these women in education, jobs, and leadership. Comparison of the perspectives of women in official positions with urban working class and college-educated women shows that class differences affect their responses to the current concepts of and opportunities for women. These differences are also reflected in their assessment of the degree to which women have achieved emancipation in China, and their interest in further work toward creating gender equality.

Deviation of Women's Liberation in China and a Tentative Plan for Instituting a New System of Female Employment

In Dong yue luncong (East Mountain Tribune) 4 (1986), Li Mingchuan wrote an article on women's liberation in China. In the article the author asserts that emancipation of women from household burdens calls for material and technical conditions. To have women enter the realm of society by skipping over the necessary stage of historical development will be a disaster for both society and the women themselves. First, this will lead women's liberation to absurdity. If all women are engaged in public work, household chores, rather than losing their hold on women completely, will also get men embroiled. Some women of the virtuous wife and affectionate mother type are actually doing two full-time jobs, and their heavy work load is more than one can bear. Second, it will destroy the natural division of labor, resulting in a tremendous waste of human resources in society. For a fairly long time to come, there is still a rational reason for women in China to engage in housework. Under the circumstances whereby ...

The Women of High Noon : A Revisionist View

THE WOMEN OF HIGH NOON: A REVISIONIST VIEW by Don Graham* "My family didn't want me to marry Will in the first place. . . I seem to make them unhappy no matter what I do. Back home they think I'm very strange. I'm a feminist. You know, women's rights—things like that. . ." Amy Fowler Kane in the screenplay High Noon1 Traditionally Western movies have not granted women characters much strength, respect, or importance except as they serve to support the stronger male roles. Indeed, one critic, Philip French, has reduced the role of women in Westerns to a pair of stereotypes: "In the model, traditional Western there is the unsullied pioneer heroine: virtuous wife, rancher's virginal daughter, schoolteacher, etc.; on the other hand there is the saloon girl with her entourage of dancers."2 Until recently, Western movies that departed from these ironclad stereotypes were more notable for their eccentricities than for their artistry.3 The Oxbow Incident (1943), a quite inferior film, is, from the viewpoint of women's roles, a misogynie work of the.first order. The saloon girl, Rose Mapen, is a disloyal and dangerous flirt, which does not surprise us, but what does is that there is no counterbalancing image of woman in the film. Jenny Grier, known as Ma, is a travesty of a transvestite, eager to ride with men, hungry to lynch the innocent. Two more intelligent works, Forty Guns (1957) and Johnny Guitar (1953), are special cases, films directed by idiosyncratic auteurs, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray. Though their women characters are indeed interesting, being manlike and powerful to the fullest degree, yet in the end each heroine must yield her whip or gun to the brave manliness of the film's male *DON GRAHAM, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, is the author of The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context (University of Missouri Press, 1978); co-editor, with William T. Pilkington, of Western Movies (University of New Mexico Press, 1979); and editor of Critical Essays on Frank Norris (G. K. Hall, 1980). 1.Carl Foreman, High Noon in Three Major Screenplays, eds. Marvin WaId and Michael Werner (New York: Globe Book Company, 1972), p. 242. Hereafter all quotations from High Noon are from this text; pagination will be cited parenthetically in the essay. 2.Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 62. 3.In post-Sixties Westerns there have been glimmerings of attempts to redefine the function of women in this male-dominated genre. Comes a Horseman (1978), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Going South (1979), and somewhat earlier, The Hired Hand (1971), should be cited among such efforts. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW243 Don Graham protagonist. None of these films attains either the artistry or the conviction of another Western made during the same era, High Noon (1952). Much celebrated at the time of its release—and much condemned by later critics—High Noon represents a notable advance in the portrayal of women in Westerns.4 Working firmly within generic patterns, High Noon offers some vital and original innovations upon the familiar archetypes. The result is a work that brings new strength and integrity to the hackneyed presentation of women in Western. A glance at the immediate literary source for High Noon shows how the movie changes the masculine emphasis of John M. Cunningham 's pulp formula story, "The Tin Star."5 In Cunningham's story, there is only one woman character, Cecilia Doane, wife of the main character, Sheriff Doane. But, because the wife is dead, her only "appearance" in the story occurs in a scene at her graveside where the aging, arthritic sheriff goes to pay his respects. The rest of Cunningham's story also differs greatly from the version given us by scriptwriter Carl Foreman and director Fred Zimmerman. Cunningham's story is about professionalism, with the main emphasis falling on the old sheriff and his young deputy Toby. Here the sheriff is not deserted; indeed, Toby comes to accept the same idealistic definition of a lawman's vo'cation as the sheriff: a man does a difficult, dangerous job for himself and not for...

Aspects of Traditional Chinese Biography

Any historian approaching the subject of traditional Chinese biography may be confident of at least one fact: he will be overwhelmed. The sheer volume of this material available in the Chinese sources is exceedingly large.In discussing Chinese historical writing, it is customary to point first to the chengshih, the so-called “standard histories,” dealing with all of Chinese history down to 1644. There are twenty-five histories, all bulky, in this “official” group. All contain large collections of biographies, elaborately sorted out: loyal officials, villainous officials, imperial concubines, writers, hermits, virtuous wives, and filial sons. In the History of the Ming Dynasty, that portion which is biographical in nature runs to 197 out of a total of 332 chapters–in actual pages about sixty percent of the whole. We encounter the same phenomenon outside of the “standard histories”–in local histories, for example, of which there may be several for one small district. All of this material I shall call “historical biography.”

The Ironic Structure in "Alcestis"

THERE are two distinguishable structures in Alcestis, the combination of which makes the drama. The primary structure is the melodramatic plot: Admetus is saved from misfortune because he entertains Heracles who in turn rescues Alcestis-the plot predicted by Apollo in the prologue (64-72). It is melodramatic because of the kind of events involved and because of the tone in which it is related. Death is the villain of the piece, and Heracles is the hero who rescues the noble husband's virtuous wife at the last possible moment. The other is an ironic structure, parallel to the first, composed of themes, imagery, and even a kind of plot-the testing of Admetus. The melodramatic plot offers an exposition and interpretation of the Alcestis myth. Concurrently the ironic plot offers an analysis and criticism of the attitudes and beliefs implied by the melodramatic plot and by the myth itself. This is not to say that the poet offers two plays in Alcestis, one for the ordinary spectator and another for the discerning, but rather that both treatments of the story, which imply different readings of the same facts, are necessarily available to all of the audience, and that fully to appreciate the play requires responding to both. Critics have recognized a compounding of styles in the play. It has been treated as a comedy which also offers a serious, perhaps tragic character study in Admetus, and the label tragi-comedy is frequently applied.' But as in many of Euripides' experiments in mixing tones and styles within a single play, the combination is unique, and therefore difficult to classify usefully. I shall use the terms melodramatic, tragic, and comic to describe particular effects used by Euripides, without defining a class to which the play belongs. This study of Alcestis attempts to demonstrate that the treatment of Admetus' character and the variety of effects employed are elements in a single design intended as a critical analysis of the myth's implications. In the prologue Euripides emphasizes melodramatic elements already