Duties Of Women Research Articles

Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel

During the 19th century, as British citizens left England for the New Worlds, hearth and home were moved from the heart of the Empire to its very outskirts. This volume explores how this affected the ways in which Victorians both promoted and undermined the ideal of the domestic woman. Drawing upon works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler and Charles Dickens, it shows how the ideals of womanhood and home promoted by domestic ideology in many ways conflict with the arguement in favour of emigration to imperial destinations. A pattern emerges in almost every Victorian novel that encounters the New Worlds: if an English hero to be happy, he either marries an English angel-wife and brings her with him to the New World, or, abandons thoughts of settling abroad and returns to England to marry. This pattern seems to support the supposedly complementary ideologies of domesticity and imperialism. The literary texts, however, reveal much ambivalence toward this domestic ideal. Female emigrants were desperately needed in the colonies; thus, a woman's imperial duty was to leave England. Yet her womanly duty told her to remain an untainted idol beside an English hearthside.

Visions of the Volk : German Women and the Far Right from Kaiserreich to Third Reich

Visions of the Volk:German Women and the Far Right from Kaiserreich to Third Reich Elizabeth Harvey (bio) An examination of German women's relationship to far-Right politics in early twentieth-century Germany quickly uncovers paradoxes. Conservative, (usually) Protestant women built powerful associations which gave a public voice to women, but they also mounted platforms to proclaim that women's highest duty to the nation lay ultimately through their labors within the home. Claiming to eschew any agenda of women's rights, conservative women fought their way into the most fiercely antifeminist of political milieus, arguing for their inclusion on the basis of their selfless feminine devotion to the higher cause of the nation. Meanwhile, deeply reactionary and instinctively antifeminist men came to accept women as allies in defending their vision of the nation against its foes. Such seeming contradictions invite a closer investigation of what drew women to radical political ideologies and movements that were chauvinistically nationalist, anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and typically antifeminist; what visions of gender and politics emerged from women's involvement with the far Right; and what impact women had within the far Right in a period of mass politics, war, revolution, and counter-revolutionary backlash. The history of German women and the far Right has tended to be dominated by questions about the place of women within National Socialist ideology, and about the extent and nature of women's support for National Socialism before and after 1933. Pioneering studies of women and Nazism appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, exploring the aims and impact of Nazi policy and asking whether women had been peculiarly resistant, or peculiarly susceptible, to Nazism.1 Debates arose, among other things, about bourgeois feminists in face of Nazism and the reasons why German feminists did not resist more effectively the onslaught of Nazism upon democracy and women's rights.2 Other debates on the impact of Nazi policies after 1933 raised the question whether women should be seen more as the victims of a viciously sexist regime, or as collaborators in the creation and stabilization of the Nazi state, actively involved or at least complicit in the regime's crimes.3 While these debates have moved on and become less polarized, important tasks still remain for historians in assessing women's compromises and complicity with the Nazi regime, and in exploring the experiences and responses of women who were discriminated against and [End Page 152] persecuted on the basis of their political views, "race," ethnicity, sexuality or "hereditary quality."4 Meanwhile, more recent studies have raised new questions about the broader spectrum of the radical Right before Nazism and women's place within it, seeking to illuminate women's involvement in these far Right groupings and to analyze the gendered discourses of far Right culture. This brief overview will highlight some of the findings from that research on the decades from the turn of the twentieth century to the installation of Nazi rule in 1933. Tracing those changes means recounting a story that leads towards the rise of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party, NSDAP) and Hitler's takeover of power, but the aim here is also to bring into view some of the individuals, networks, and groupings that competed, ultimately unsuccessfully, with the Nazi movement in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The light this research sheds on women in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People's Party, DNVP) and on other women belonging to a broader far Right milieu provides an important point of comparison with Nazi ideas and practices concerning the vision of a "national community"—and women's role within it. The far Right in early twentieth-century Germany is hard to demarcate precisely: it was made up of parties and groupings that emerged and refashioned themselves in the course of the upheavals of World War I, revolution, the introduction of democracy, and its demise fourteen years later in 1933. Not so much a cohesive movement as a political and to some extent also a social milieu, the far Right in Wilhelmine Germany could be identified as comprising the Deutsch-Konservative Partei (German Conservative Party), which hovered between loyalty to...

Stories ?That Only a Mother? Could Write: Midcentury Peace Activism, Maternalist Politics, and Judith Merril's Early Fiction

tury peace organizations posited that it was women's civic duty to protect their families by protesting against the militaristic social and moral orders attending the dawn of the atomic era. As science fiction became increasingly central to the American imagination in the 1950s, women writers turned to the genre as an ideal vehicle through which to express their dissent from the Cold War status quo. Premier among them was Judith Merril, whose passionate antiwar sensibilities led her to write science fiction that invoked the maternalist logic of midcentury peace activism by demonstrating how militaristic practices threaten to destroy the very families they are designed to protect. Additionally, Merril's stories extend the logic of her activist counterparts by imagining how women might connect with other caring workers-especially doctors and scientists-and create new communities that will protect future generations from the devastating legacy of the nuclear age.

SERVANTS, SLAVES, AND THE DOMESTIC ORDER IN THE OTTOMAN MIDDLE EAST

AbstractTo an appreciable degree, female domestic work in the Ottoman Middle East was shaped by organizational and valuative premises that were also common to women outside the Ottoman and Islamic worlds. Ambiguity such as between women's duties and socially recognized "work", or between kin and servant—was a keynote of women's condition regardless of cultural setting. However, in the Middle East, the persistence of slavery into the late nineteenth century as a predominantly female and domestic-labor institution added a distinctive element to the nature of domestic labor and women's role within it.

WOMEN AND HEALTH: POWER, TECHNOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND CONFLICT IN A GENDERED WORLD

WOMEN AND HEALTH: POWER, TECHNOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND CONFLICT IN A GENDERED WORLD

WHERE IS THE WOMAN IN THIS TEXT? FRANCES POWER COBBE'S VOICES IN BROKEN LIGHTS

IN 1864 FRANCES POWER COBBE jumped into the still-churning waters of Essays and Reviews (1860) and Colenso's Pentateuch (1862) with a book that put the case against an infallible Revelation even more frankly than these men had liked or dared. Broken Lights, her main contribution to the mid-Victorian Bible wars, went through at least eight editions and, next to her Duties of Women (1881), was the “most successful” of her books (Life 2: 370). Identifying “Frances Power Cobbe” on the title page as the “Author of an ‘Essay on Intuitive Morals,’ ‘The Pursuits of Women,’ etc.,“ the material object in a stranger's hands left no doubt that here was a work by a woman who had written on likely female subjects. Yet the table of contents, which lays out a schema of Churchmen's positions on the Bible questions of the hour, yields no clue that a feminist advocate wrote this book. Even in perusing its discussions of high theological matters, most readers would not have suspected, as I will argue, that the analyses of these men's positions are colored by Cobbe's distinctive “woman's perspective” (Caine 147), and that public and personal gender issues are being negotiated through its modes of discourse and argument.

The Birth of the New Order State in Indonesia: Sexual Politics and Nationalism

Scholars have suggested that Indonesia's former president Suharto's New Order state legitimated itself by destroying the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia, PKI). In this article, the author points to the sexual politics underlying this process of legitimation that have been largely ignored in earlier analyses. She focuses on the military's orchestrated campaign of slander and sexual innuendo against the PKI's women's organization Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women's Movement). This campaign was pursued for more than 30 years since the 1 October 1965 putsch in Indonesia that eventually brought Suharto to power. It embodied a powerful, supportive logic by which Suharto's rule was sustained until mid-1998, creating a particular form of national, militarized identity. Another consequence of the sexual accusations Gerwani endured was the destruction of what was at the time one of the most powerful women's movements in the world. Not only was Gerwani banned and destroyed, but the remaining women's organizations were also brought under strict government control. The state even set up its own mass women's organizations, under the umbrella of Dharma Wanita (Women's Duty), which were intended to re-subordinate rather than emancipate women.

‘A crisis in woman's history’: Frances power cobbe's duties of women and the practice of everyday feminism

The article explores the ways in which Cobbe's Duties of Women grapples with new challenges facing the late nineteenth-century feminist movement, with an emphasis on the particular force of Cobbe's text that results from her unique role as a mainstream journalist of mid-Victorian feminism to non-feminist-identified audiences. It argues that Duties of Women participates in the ongoing negotiation of the representation of suffrage, both within feminist communities and in the ways that feminism is represented and understood by a non-feminist public. Specifically, the author argues that Cobbe's lecture series and book are generically linked to the conduct book. They offer advice for the appropriate daily practice of emancipated womanhood at a time when significant changes in feminist practice, such as the increasing emphasis on suffrage, threatened, in Cobbe's view, the larger public perception of that movement.

Engendered/endangered: women, tuberculosis, and the project of citizenship

The anti-tuberculosis campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an unprecedented display of medical authority and public health purview. With accumulating evidence that the disease disproportionately struck the poor, tuberculosis by the early decades of the century was perceived epidemiologically as embedded in individual practices including hygiene and domestic order. Tuberculosis was in a sense a trope for national degeneration, and as such it became the vehicle for a self-conscious thrust towards national renewal and moral regeneration. This paper uses a feminist Foucauldian framework in its analysis of the anti-tuberculosis campaign. In the case of San Francisco, efforts to combat tuberculosis centred in part on women in their roles as wives and mothers. Women were the gatekeepers of health because they were responsible for keeping the home clean and bacillus free. Not only did this focus become a medical legitimization of women's domestic duties, but it also became a discourse of citizenship. Whether explicitly or implicitly, physicians concentrated their attention on white middle class women in their messages of health maintenance. Within sanatoria, a primary agenda of tuberculosis treatment was the inculcation of middle class behaviour into the working class patients. The anti-tuberculosis campaign was thus a part of the early-twentieth-century project of nationhood where citizenship was largely calculated through the lens of class and race.

Women in labor: mothers, medicine, and occupational health in the United States, 1890-1980

Women in Labor: Mothers, Medicine and OccupationalHealth in the UnitedStates 1890-1980 provides an incisive history of gender issues in the workplace. Hepler's interdisciplinary approach to motherhood, medicine, and industrial labour offers a fully realized exploration of the many issues that have affected women in the workplace. While the book focuses on motherhood, the workplace, and health, Hepler's emphasis on gender allows for a wider understanding of occupational health that includes, for example, how and when laws intended to aidprotect women also benefited their male coworkers. As suggested by its subtitle, Hepler's book spans ninety years of occupational health and provides an interesting overview ofthe many problems women have faced in industry. The author's focus, however, eventually shifts to the conflict between feminists who believe in protective labour legislation for women in the workplace and feminists who work for women's equality by minimizing differences between men and women. Divided into seven chapters, Women in Labor explores the construction of the idea of occupational health. Hepler notes that early reformers' concerns about women's health in the workplace was founded on the principle that women's primary duty was that of mother. Long hours and unsanitary conditions could hinder women's ability to produce and raise future citizens. The author notes that reform efforts eventually led to protective legislation that limited the number of hours women could work in selected jobs. While protective legislation often was beneficial to women, it also prohibited their employment in jobs that posed less of an overall threat to their health. In the 1920s, the debate over protective legislation was shaped by two groups: the Women's Bureau and supporters ofthe Equal Rights Amendment. Hepler traces this debate through World War I1 when women's entry into the workforce in unprecedented numbers instigated a variety of reforms beneficial to both women and men. These reforms convinced protectionist advocates such as Alice Hamilton to support a philosophy that minimized difference. This philosophy, expressed by supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment, limited activism for protective legislation based solely on gender. Hepler continues her investigation of protectionism in her study of fetal protection policies by citing the American Cyanamid's surgical sterilization of five employees as part of its fetal protection policy. She also discusses the

The gender division of labour: the case of Tuscan smallholders

What explains the gender division of labour in preindustrial economies? Although men and women frequently do different types of labour in any given society, men's and women's tasks vary considerably across different societies. In some societies, women engaged in trade and agriculture (in parts of Africa, for example); though these were men's duties in others (in parts of Europe, for example). At the same time, European historians discovered that women often engaged in tasks, such as agricultural labour and commerce, that were often assumed to be the domain of men, again suggesting a wide variation in the gender division of labour. Understanding the division of labour in preindustrial economies is important, because these historical cases often serve as implicit or explicit referents for understanding how much – or how little – has changed in contemporary societies.A number of excellent works, such as those by Barbara Hanawalt and Martha Howell, have explored women's roles in the economy. However, often missing from treatments that focus on women's history is an analysis of the gender division of labour, that is, an explicit comparison of men's and women's activities. Undoubtedly, such a comparison is hampered by the difficulties of finding documentary sources that provide the appropriate type of evidence.This article takes up this task in a particular way, by examining single-person households, composed of either males or females in fifteenth-century rural Tuscany. This empirical evidence is useful for several reasons. First, from an analytical perspective, it makes it possible to compare explicitly the activities of men and women who are in an identical position, that is, living alone. Second, as I discuss below, the documentary record from this period makes it possible to provide the evidence for this comparison. Third, this evidence provides historical information on a relatively under-researched group, rural widows and widowers. For example, there is generally more information available for Florentine women than for female rural inhabitants. Furthermore, little research explicitly compares men's and women's tasks to examine the gender division of labour. Although Piccinni and Mazzi and Raveggi provide much information about women's duties and activities in rural Tuscany, their work does not directly address the gender division of labour. While the archival evidence presented below cannot explain the division of labour at all points in individuals' life courses, it does provide explicitly comparative information about men and women.

FROM CHARWOMAN TO EMPRESS DOWAGER: SERVING-WOMEN IN THE MING PALACE

There were three categories for palace women in Chinese dynasties: royal princesses, imperial consorts, and women in service activities. Imperial women (princesses and consorts) have been the subject of considerable reflection by Chinese and Western historians. Western studies of imperial women in different dynasties have made significant contributions: Priscilla Ching-Chung has researched the Northern Song, Felicia Soulliere the Ming, and Evelyn Rawski the Qing. In addition to a principal focus on imperial women, these three studies examine serving-women to varying degrees. Rawski has dealt with methods of recruitment and family backgrounds of Qing serving-women. Ching-Chung and Soulliere have discussed thoroughly Song and Ming serving agencies, including the institutional organizations and women's ranks and duties. Serving women, ranked below imperial women in status, served as their personal attendants, yet composed the numerical majority of palace women. Their work was essential to the running of the inner palace, yet their lives have not gained sufficient attention. Further studies of the lifestyles of serving-women in different dynastic eras are crucial to understanding palace women as individuals and as an element in dynastic history.

A Half Life: Women Caregivers of Older Disabled Relatives

ABSTRACT This paper explores the impact of caring on caregivers' life style and health. Interviews were carried out with women caregivers over 50 years old. Transcripts from the interview are analyzed through a detailed discourse analysis within an ethnomethodological framework showing how the caring tasks are constructed in the interaction as a women's duty, inscribed in a gendered moral order. A difference is noticeable between family caregivers who describe the caring tasks as the cause of intense stress, physical and psychological problems and voluntary or paid caregivers who see caring as a source of satisfaction and well being.

The Little Mermaid : Three Political Fables

Women are associated with birth and the maintenance of life, men with the rational capacity to make moral decisions. Since the inception of modern contract theory in the seventeenth century, the usual view of women's duty as citizens has comprised a conceptual paradox: the female activity of provid- ing life-giving, life-enhancing care is at once natural and obligatory. The female body is construed as entailing primary responsibility for the undeniably necessary work of sustaining affective social life. Yet women's relegation to the devalued space and time of contingent social relations compromises their desire to share the privileged male status of moral autonomy. And so the mermaid must sacrifice for the welfare of the prince, who oafishly overlooks it (Solomon 145). She does so, however, to further her own self-conceived ends. The Little Mermaid's ambivalently rendered plot and provisional resolution mark it as a fable of modern culture's feminine dilemma, that of the false choice between fulfilling feminine

Education and the "woman question."

CPA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology as a Profession (1996) / Prix pour contribution remarquable a la psychologie en tant que profession (1996)AbstractThe question refers to the nineteenth century debate about whether the rights and freedoms available to men should be extended to women. The intent of this paper is to explore the expression of this debate within the context of the post-secondary education system. Selected examples of the historical arguments in support of the exclusion of women are outlined (i.e., women are lower on the evolutionary scale; reproductive harm; loss of femininity) followed by a more contemporary analysis of gender differences in graduate education with a particular focus on access, graduation rates (i.e., attrition) and time to completion of graduate degrees. The construct is presented as a possible explanation for the alleged gender differential on these latter two variables. According to this model, the structures and operation of academic institutions embody significant elements of systemic discrimination and micro-inequities which disadvantage women. A series of six studies are described in which various aspects of the chilly climate (i.e., mentoring and supervision, sexual harassment) are explored especially in terms of the effects on attrition and time to completion. Paradoxically, although the research reveals a failure of educational institutions to fully resolve the woman question, women continue to operate effectively under conditions of inequity. Despite general dissatisfaction with the quality of their educational experience, and the concomitant experience of significant life stress, women did not withdraw in larger numbers nor take longer to complete their degrees than did men. The paper concludes with a few modest speculations about the future constructions and deconstructions of this debate.IntroductionIn the discussion to follow women's experiences in academe are explored in terms of the historical rationales for keeping women out of the academy, gender differences in access, attrition and the time to complete graduate degree requirements, and the explanation for these differences. A series of research studies in which gender differences in graduation rate (i.e., attrition) and the time taken to complete all graduate degree requirements are examined in the context of the chilly climate hypothesis.Historical rationalesThe question refers to the nineteenth century debate about whether the rights and freedoms available to men should be extended to women, a debate triggered in part by the entry of women into the labour market (Fee, 1976). Among the myriad rights and freedoms at issue was whether women should be allowed to participate in educational institutions on the same footing as men. Historically women were denied access, a decision justified by the view that women were intellectually inferior.This alleged deficit in intellectual capacity underscored the obvious foolishness of exposing women to the form of education offered to men but some forms of training or learning were regarded as appropriate. Rousseau, for example, argued persuasively in 1762 that: Women's entire education should be planned in relation to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to win their love and respect, to raise them as children, care for them as adults, counsel and console them, make their lives sweet and pleasant: these are women's duties in all ages and these are what they should be taught. (cited in Griffiths, 1976).In early nineteenth century Canada, Rousseau's advice was reflected in the curriculum offered in Mrs. Cockburn's (private) Girls' School. The pupils were taught plain and fancy needle work, drawing and painting on velvet along with dancing, music, flower and cardwork (Griffiths, 1976).The assertion that a small brain equals a small mind held sway well into the nineteenth century, elephants notwithstanding. …

Turning the hourglass: Gender relations at the deathbed in early modern Canterbury

The paper examines the gender relations and tensions that surrounded and informed deathbed practices in early modern Canterbury. Based on a detailed analysis of church court materials it argues that gender was a significant factor in the organization and management of dying. The care and attendance of the sick and dying were commonly associated with women's work and duty. As wives, neighbours, friends and servants women contributed in important ways to the preparations for death. Women were, however, largely marginalized during willmaking—the ritualized production of a text which was to guide the distribution of the deceased's wealth and a set of practices which were mainly conducted by high-status, professional men. The representation of women as figures which were required to be present at the deathbed and to watch over and tend the dying, combined with the representation of men in terms of their production of the will document, gave rise to gender divisions and differences. The process of dying often i...

Human reproduction, emerging technologies, and conflicting rights

This book examines the controversial and increasingly complex policy issues surrounding reproduction today. Blank and Merrick argue that medical advances, changing social values, and novel legal cases are challenging conventional notions of reproductive rights, and creating difficult public policy dilemmas. This exciting volume focuses on the conflicts surrounding reproduction and reproductive rights. Restricted access to abortion, rights of surrogate and biological mothers, the right to control fertility, fetal and embryo research, and a pregnant woman's duty to avoid risk are among the timely issues explored in this book. Conflicts in the maternal-fetal relationship, such as court-ordered intervention, maternal substance abuse, and workplace hazards are also covered.

Raising boys to maintain armies

Jewish Israeli boys are made aware of their future role as warriors from early childhood. Their entire development is oriented towards it. Older men promise and threat simultaneously, “Wait and see, when you get to the army.…” After scraping their knees little boys are told, “It'll pass before the army,” while girls are told, “It'll pass before the wedding.” Such messages and the ritual aspect of military service are reinforced by the secrecy surrounding military matters. This establishes a privileged inner circle, to be joined only via army service. As women's military duty is fundamentally different from that of men in Israel, they are among those excluded from the privileged core. Men's service defines masculinity as lethal strength. The boy soldier is given a gun, literally the power to kill. One man interviewed for a film that I worked on was bemused to sense a joy of the hunt during service. Another, whose son …

EXHUMING WOMEN'S PREMARKET DUTIES IN THE CARE OF THE DEAD

This research provides a history of women's domestic duties in the care of the dead prior to its transformation into a male-dominated market activity. The author presents data on the position of importance women held in the premarket care of the dead as well as on the knowledge necessary to prepare the body for burial. Both the positions and the knowledge women held were later appropriated into the more “advanced” practices by the newly developing funeral industry in the mid-19th century; moreover, the position women held as “shrouding women” was largely unacknowledged by the emerging funeral industry.

Women's Alcoholic Intoxication: The Origins of the Double Standard in Canada

This article hypothesizes that the gender division in the drinking practices of men and women finds its origin in the nineteenth century. Very few historians have studied Canadian drinking patterns prior to the Temperance movement, which commenced in Canada at the end of the the 1820s. Evidence of a possible double standard concerning female intoxication is virtually nonexistent. When temperance mobilized the masses and became a popular crusade, women of both Upper and Lower Canada joined the movement. In this period, as in the pre-temperance era, evidence was found of a double standard concerning female intoxication but the findings are not extremely clear. Women entered the forefront of the Temperance movement through the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. This membership believed that it was women's moral duty to protect the home against society's ills, and women were ultimately made responsible for male drunkenness. Furthermore, ideas about female purity precluded any sustained discussion of women's ...