Women's Freedom Research Articles

Putting the World to Rights: An Interview with Yakin Ertürk, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its Causes and Consequences

Tuesday 8th November 2005, London Your mandate at the UN naturally endorses human rights as the mechanism for promoting women's freedom from violence. The human rights framework advocates equality,...

I'm no angel: the blonde in fiction and film

Have you ever wondered why there are so many dumb jokes - always about women? Or how Ivanhoe's childhood love, the flaxen Saxon Rowena, morphed into Marilyn Monroe? Between that season in 1847 when readers encountered Becky Sharp playing the vengeful Clytemnestra - about to plunge a dagger into Agamemnon - and the sunny moment in 1932 when moviegoers watched Clark Gable plunge Jean Harlow's platinum-tressed head into a rain barrel, the playing field for women and men had leveled considerably. But how did the fairy-tale blonde, that placid, pliant girl, become the tomato upstair, as Monroe styled herself in The Seven Year Itch? In I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction and Film, Ellen Tremper shows how, at its roots, the image of the blonde was remodeled by women writers in the nineteenth century and actors in the twentieth to keep pace with the changes in real women's lives. As she demonstrates, through these novels and performances, fair hair and its traditional attributes - patience, pliancy, endurance, and innocence - suffered a deliberate alienation, which both reflected and enhanced women's personal and social freedoms essential to the evolution of modernity. From fiction to film, the active, desiring, and sometimes difficult women who disobeyed, manipulated, and thwarted their fellow characters mimicked and furthered women's growing power in the world. The author concludes with an overview of the various roles of the blonde in film from the 1960s to the present and speculates about the possible end of blond dominance. An engaging and lively read, I'm No Angel will appeal to a general audience interested in literary and cinematic representations of the blonde, as well as to scholars in Victorian, women's, and film studies.

The death of feminism: what's next in the struggle for women's freedom

The death of feminism: what's next in the struggle for women's freedom

Nancy J. Hirschmann on the Social Construction of Women's Freedom

Nancy J. Hirschmann presents a feminist, social constructionist account of women's freedom. Friedman's discussion of Hirschmanns account deals with (1) some conceptual problems facing a thoroughgoing social constructionism; (2) three ways to modify social constructionism to avoid those problems; and (3) an assessment of Hirschmann's version of social constructionism in light of the previous discussion.

Not My Feminism: The Global Fight for Women's Freedom

Not My Feminism: The Global Fight for Women's Freedom

Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (review)

Reviewed by: Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Paul S. Ropp (bio) Dorothy Ko . Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005. xix, 332 pp. Hardcover $29.95, ISBN 0-520-21884-1. Dorothy Ko's new history of footbinding is a wonderfully imaginative, wide-ranging, and provocative study of a subject long in need of revisionism. She argues persuasively that there is not one footbinding but many, and that therefore any history of footbinding has to recognize first and foremost the multifaceted complexity of the phenomenon. She handily meets this challenge. She also suggests at numerous points in her study that the study of footbinding has been dominated by antifootbinding views and by the discourse of men, so much so that we have seldom been privy to the views of the women themselves who had their feet bound and who in turn bound the feet of their daughters and granddaughters. Cinderella's Sisters is likely as close as we are to come to a study of footbinding from the perspective of the Chinese women themselves who carried out, managed, and experienced firsthand this widespread custom, with all the pains and benefits it brought them. In her Introduction Ko briefly notes earlier explanations of footbinding such as Freud's theory of fetishism, Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption, and Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates's development of a Marxist-feminist view of the mystification of female labor. She also notes the widespread perception (as illustrated in Ida Pruitt's well-known biography of Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai) that women bound their feet mainly for the sake of upward mobility in seeking a good marriage.1 All these views illuminate the custom, Ko suggests, but they suffer from the assumption that footbinding was a single uniform custom with a single uniform cause. Ko has the advantage, over all these studies, in developing a multifaceted book-length treatment that ranges from antifootbinding discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to scholarly works tracing the origins of the custom, to discussions of the aura of footbinding among male scholars during the custom's heyday in the Ming-Qing period, to an incisive discussion of women's shoes as items of fashion, concealment, and women's "self-fashioning." Just as footbinding was complicated, so was its termination. In part I, "The Body Exposed" (chapters 1-3), Ko provides "an alternative history" of the final abolition of footbinding, from the 1880s to the early 1940s. She notes these developments in terms of "three kinds of time: on the level of cosmology or episteme, [End Page 305] the cultural prestige or justification of footbinding; on the level of customs and conventions, footbinding as a social practice; and on the level of personal experience, footbinding as individual embodiment" (p. 11). As changes occurred on each of these levels in different ways at different times and places, there was a great deal of cultural turmoil and confusion in the ways the custom gradually died out. Both foreign missionaries and Chinese nationalists developed the antifoot-binding strategy of photographing and exposing the misshapen foot whose appeal had long depended on the allure of its concealment in the inner quarters and its covering with the elegant embroidered cloth shoe. One of Ko's most striking conclusions is that, with the exception of a few women (such as the radical Qiu Jin, beheaded by the Qing police in 1908), the Chinese abolitionists were primarily male, and their main arguments concerned not the pain of women but rather the weakness of the Chinese nation and the humiliation and embarrassment caused the nation by such a backward custom. She criticizes the antifootbinding movement as misogynist toward women with bound feet, indifferent to the pain caused by unbinding, and less successful than many have claimed. "One woman's pride and freedom was predicated on another woman's shame and bondage" (p. 68). Although not mentioned in her bibliography, an excellent complement to Ko's analysis that in my view corroborates many of her insights on the complexities and ironies of the turn-of-the-century antifootbinding movement is...

Reliability and validity of the sexual pressure scale

The purpose of this study was to develop the Sexual Pressure Scale (SPS) as a valid and reliable measure of gender stereotypical expectations to engage in sexual behavior. Data were collected using audio computer-assisted self-interview in 306 urban women, aged 18 to 29. Exploratory principal components analysis with varimax rotation yielded 19 items consisting of five factors: Condom Fear, Sexual Coercion, Women's Sex Role, Men Expect Sex, and Show Trust, accounting for 62% of the variance. Divergent and convergent validity were supported, respectively, by negative relationships of SPS factors with dyadic trust and positive relationships with sexual victimization and sexual risk behavior. Alpha reliability was .81; factor reliabilities ranged from .63 to .82. A valid assessment of sexual pressure can suggest the extent to which stereotypical gender expectations structure women's freedom to explore partner and condom use choices.

Voices from a Room of One's Own

Contemporary critics who study women's literature often focus on the very act of speaking, or the possession of a voice. The speaker in a poem seems to lend the women of her time a voice to express their feelings and in so doing offers a female perspective on social and cultural aspects of life. Adopting ideas from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as well as Hélène Cixous's notion of “writing the body, ” this article explores how women poets find a private space in their own rooms for examining “liberated” selves. A new conception of body and space is presented in these lyric voices. In contrast, in the voices of many critics, we hear a glaring double standard that exposes the persistence of patriarchal inhibition of women's freedom of expression. This dialogic tension between the voices reveals women's predicaments and their strong protests against the status quo in contemporary China.

Preconception care in international settings.

Objectives: This literature review briefly describes international programs, policies, and activities related to preconception care and resulting pregnancy outcomes. Methods: Electronic databases were searched and findings supplemented with secondary references cited in the original articles as well as textbook chapters, declarations, reports, and recommendations. Results: Forty-two articles, book chapters, declarations, and other published materials were reviewed. Policies, programs, and recommendations related to preconceptional health promotion exist worldwide and comprise a readily identifiable component of historic and modern initiatives pertaining to women's health, reproductive freedom, and child survival. Conclusions: The integration of preconception care services within a larger maternal and child health continuum of care is well aligned with a prevention-based approach to enhancing global health.

The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930

The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930, by Laura E. Nym Mayhall (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2003; pp. xiii + 218. £30). Few topics in modern British history divide historians on ideological grounds as sharply as suffragette militancy. That will doubtless continue to be the case as long as the focus is on its more violent and spectacular activities and their effects in promoting or delaying votes for women. Yet much of the most interesting recent work in suffrage studies has aimed instead to help us understand the nature of the movement in its contemporary context—the many-stranded and overlapping manifestations of militant and constitutional suffrage activism, the formative influence of radical political traditions on their culture and practices. It is in this spirit that Laura Nym Mayhall has carried out her study of suffragette political theory. Her claim is, in fact, that the rationale of militancy for its Edwardian exponents can only be understood in the context of debates about citizenship that flourished in the era of parliamentary reform but more or less came to an end after 1918. The 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts drew women into these debates. Was citizenship a privileged status enjoyed by those with appropriate qualifications, or—as in the classical republican tradition that appealed to radicals—a civic duty? Either tradition could justify votes for women. In the South African War (1899–1902), for example, patriots dwelt on British women's potential for service to the Empire, while ‘pro-Boers’ asserted the duty to resist a war to which citizen taxpayers did not give their consent. It was, however, the classical republican stance that provided inspiration for suffrage militancy. Dora Montefiore's tax resistance protests of 1904–6 were foreshadowed by her refusal to pay income tax in war-time. As a form of civil disobedience this was by no means novel: there were historical precedents for withholding taxes, and contemporary parallels too, as in the campaign waged by nonconformists against the Education Act of 1902. In chapters on militant protests against parliamentary and judicial resistance to women's suffrage before 1912, Mayhall shows that suffragettes based their actions on a political theory that required resistance to tyranny and on carefully studied precedents, placing themselves squarely within the British radical tradition. They invoked the right to petition and post proclamations in defence of that right; to mount demonstrations, question ministers publicly, and intervene in elections in support of women's suffrage. The Tax Resistance League and the boycott of the 1911 census expressed the right to withhold consent from a government that denied women full citizenship. The Pankhursts' WSPU went a step further, arguing that constitutional progress in Britain—from Magna Carta to the nineteenth-century Reform Acts—had not come about without violence. But before 1912 even they treated the law courts with respect, using trials to mount reasoned vindications of the constitutional basis of militancy and expose the overt anti-suffragist bias of the judiciary. In these years there was much common ground between factions that adopted different tactics in pursuit of votes for women. The ‘essence of the Militant creed’, as Emmeline Pethick Lawrence put it, was simply ‘ceasing to approach politics as suppliants entreating favours’. Mayhall goes on to examine the two great causes of disruption within the movement in later years. The arson campaign of 1912–14 was a dreadful mistake, in the eyes of many militants as well as the ‘law-abiding’ suffragist majority, alienating sympathy just at the point when not only parliament but even the government seemed willing to concede votes for women. Equally distressing to some old allies was the Pankhursts' militaristic identification with the war effort from 1914; although there were suffragettes who found ways of keeping the radical tradition alive by work for the civil rights of women and others oppressed by the war-time regime. This is a timely and convincing book, drawing fruitfully on current research in political theory and suffrage history, including the author's own work on the Women's Freedom League. It is not wholly reliable on matters of fact—the terms of the first and second Reform Acts and the 1910 Conciliation Bill are not correctly given, and the term ‘women's organizations’ is applied to bodies with a mixed male and female membership (the Primrose League, the Church League for Women's Suffrage). But as an interpretation of suffrage militancy it opens up new and interesting perspectives.

South African anti-trafficking legislation: A critique of control over women's freedom of movement and sexuality

abstract The South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) recently released a Discussion Paper and a Proposed Bill on Trafficking in Persons, which the public is currently commenting on. The Cape Town-based Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) is against human trafficking into the sex work industry and has adopted a protocol some time back that outlines the steps the organisation must take if staff members encounter situations of human trafficking. We believe that the tone of the Discussion Paper on Trafficking and Proposed Bill, as it stands, will impact negatively on sex workers, will not be of the utmost assistance to victims of human trafficking and that, more broadly, it is an attempt to control women's freedom of movement and sexuality. This perspective will discuss the SALRC anti-trafficking documents from a gender perspective, the role of the United States State Department and the abolition of sex work movement in current anti-trafficking global trends. It will discuss the likely impact on victims of trafficking if such legislation is enacted and the practical implications for women's freedom of movement and sexuality.

Nancy J. Hirschmann on the Social Construction of Women's Freedom

Nancy J. Hirschmann presents a feminist, social constructionist account of women's freedom. Friedman's discussion of Hirschmanns account deals with (1) some conceptual problems facing a thoroughgoing social constructionism; (2) three ways to modify social constructionism to avoid those problems; and (3) an assessment of Hirschmann's version of social constructionism in light of the previous discussion.

Women, Islam, and the New Iraq

ARTICLE 14 OF Iraq's new constitution, approved in a nationwide referendum held on October 15, states that Iraqis are equal before the law discrimination because of sex. Yet the constitution also states that no law can be passed that contradicts the established rulings of Islam. For this reason, the new document has been condemned by critics both inside and outside Iraq as a fundamental setback for a majority of Iraq's population-namely, its women. According to Isam al-Khafaji, an Iraqi scholar, the document could easily deprive women of their rights. Yanar Muhammad, a leading secular activist and the head of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, worries that the Islamic provision will turn the country into an Afghanistan under the Taliban, where oppression and discrimination of women is institutionalized. These criticisms are not without merit, and the ambiguity of the new constitution is a cause for concern. The centrality of Islamic law in the document, however, does not necessarily mean trouble for Iraqi women. In fact, sharia is open to a wide range of understanding, and across the Islamic world today, progressive Muslims are seeking to reinterpret its rules to accommodate a modern role for women. Iraq's constitution does not specify who will decide which version of Islam will prevail in the country's new legal system. But the battle has already begun. Victory by the progressives would have positive

Geographies of Muslim women: gender, religion, and space

C. Nagel, Introduction. S.J. Halvorson, Growing Up in Gilgit: Exploring the Nature of Girlhood in Northern Pakistan. N.G. Aaftaab, (Re)Defining Public Spaces through Developmental Education for Afghan Women. D.K. Davis, A Space of Her Own: Women, Work and Desire in an Afghan Nomad Community. S.H. Steinmann, Changing Identities and Changing Spaces in Village Landscapes of Settled Pastoralists in Eastern Morocco. R. Silvey, Transnational Islam: Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia. A. Freeman, Moral Geographies and Women's Freedom: Rethinking Freedom Discourse in the Moroccan Context. R. Mohammad, Negotiating Spaces of the Home, the Education System and the Labor Market: The Case of Young, Working-Class, British-Pakistani Muslim Women. A. Secor, Islamism, Democracy and the Political Production of the Headscarf Issue in Turkey. A.I. Samatar, Social Transformation and Islamic Reinterpretation in Northern Somalia: The Women's Mosque in Gabiley. M. Abisaab, Gendered Space in the Lebanese Women Tobacco Workers' Strike of 1970. M. Brosseau, L. Ayari, Writing Place and Gender in Novels by Tunisian Women Writers. G.W. Falah, The Visual Representation of Muslim/Arab Women in the Daily Newspapers in the United States.

The Joy of Work: Helen Gurley Brown, Gender, and Sexuality in the White-Collar Office

The Joy of Work: Helen Gurley Brown, Gender, and Sexuality in the White-Collar Office Julie Berebitsky Sewanee: University of the South Everywhere under the seemingly placid surface of business, there is the undercurrent of sex, upsetting, repelling, attracting individuals. . . . But the day's work must be done. . . . So, in most businesses, any outward manifestation of attraction between the sexes is frowned upon by the management, and the dynamite is kept in the cellar, so to speak. . . . [F]or the most part men and women learn to work side by side in business, sublimating their primary urges and becoming almost unconscious of each other's sex. Unless they can do this, their business careers are necessarily short-lived. . . . My observation is that it is much better for a girl to maintain a strictly impersonal relationship with the men where she works and make her conquests elsewhere. —Elizabeth Gregg MacGibbon, Manners in Business (1936) 1 Elizabeth MacGibbon's advice to women stated what was, for at least the first half of the twentieth century, the unquestioned and conventional wisdom about sex and the workplace: the two do not and should not mix. 2 Productivity suffered, profits declined, and women's jobs were lost and their lives often ruined when they put down their steno pads and picked up a romance with a man from their office. In the early 1960s, however, Helen Gurley Brown pronounced MacGibbon's advice so outdated and out of touch that she liked "to quote her so I can blast her." 3 Rejecting the "unwritten law" to "forget about sex when there's [End Page 89] work to be done," 4 Brown declared expressions of sexuality and romance in the office to be inevitable and productive, a force that could serve all interests, including those of bosses, female office workers, and the bottom line. "Managements who think romances lower the work output are right out of their skulls," Brown told readers of her 1962 best-seller, Sex and the Single Girl. "A girl in love with her boss will knock herself out seven days a week and wish there were more days. Tough on her but fabulous for business!" 5 Brown also dismissed MacGibbon's directive to "make yourself as inconspicuous as possible." Though office women had to tread a fine line between dressing sexily and being appropriately dressed ("raising temperatures without raising eyebrows"), Brown maintained that the days when management "preferred a little brown wren at every desk" were long gone. Office women's personal and professional lives would be well served by a tasteful display of their physical assets. 6 Finally, she encouraged pink-collar women to work hard on their careers by holding out the carrot of romantic perks. 7 "Think about it," Brown opined in the "pippy-poo" style for which she became famous. "Lunching with men is a chance to have dates in the daytime on the pretext of business; . . . business lunch dates with men are sex at high noon!" 8 As difficult as it is for many readers today to stomach Brown's concoction of sex and success, what so disturbed and excited readers in the mid-1960s was less her celebration of the sexy, sex-obsessed office worker than her vision of powerful women making their way in the white-collar world. This vision put forth a new understanding of the white-collar office that questioned its gendered hierarchies and the rationale underlying them. Brown directed women to seek professional advancement, and she tied women's sexual freedom and sexual opportunities directly to their place in the workforce. She also urged women to use gender and, to varying degrees, sexuality for their own gain. By sexualizing the office—or, more accurately, by acknowledging and exploiting the varied expressions of (hetero)sexuality that already existed there—Brown sought to help women circumvent workplace inequalities that kept them in a subordinate position. Her most radical insight...

Rebecca's revival: creating black Christianity in the Atlantic world

Rebecca's Revival is the remarkable story of a Caribbean woman--a slave turned evangelist--who helped inspire the rise of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. All but unknown today, Rebecca Protten left an enduring influence on African-American religion and society. Born in 1718, Protten had a childhood conversion experience, gained her freedom from bondage, and joined a group of German proselytizers from the Moravian Church. She embarked on an itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans of St. Thomas, a Danish sugar colony in the West Indies. Laboring in obscurity and weathering persecution from hostile planters, Protten and other black preachers created the earliest African Protestant congregation in the Americas. Protten's eventful life--the recruiting of converts, an interracial marriage, a trial on charges of blasphemy and inciting of slaves, travels to Germany and West Africa--placed her on the cusp of an emerging international Afro-Atlantic evangelicalism. Her career provides a unique lens on this prophetic movement that would soon sweep through the slave quarters of the Caribbean and North America, radically transforming African-American culture. Jon Sensbach has pieced together this forgotten life of a black visionary from German, Danish, and Dutch records, including letters in Protten's own hand, to create an astounding tale of one woman's freedom amidst the slave trade. Protten's life, with its evangelical efforts on three continents, reveals the dynamic relations of the Atlantic world and affords great insight into the ways black Christianity developed in the New World.

The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975 (review)

Reviewed by: The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975 Jennifer Tucker Hera Cook . The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiv + 412 pp. Ill. $55.00, £35.00 (0-19-92539-4). This book is a fresh, important reexamination of contraception use in England, and of the impact of oral contraception in changing twentieth-century sexual behavior and attitudes. Hera Cook's thesis is that oral contraceptives, first developed in the 1960s, revolutionized sexual behaviors and practices for women of all classes in England. Drawing on an impressive range of sex manuals, sex surveys, parliamentary papers, newspapers, women's magazines, and demographic data, Cook seeks to show that, by removing the fear of pregnancy and its attendant economic and social risks, the advent of reliable, accessible, safe contraception culminated in widening sexual choices and lifestyles for women that were unacceptable before the late 1960s. She highlights the importance of the pill as a liberating force in sexual practice for women, ultimately concluding that it was the driving force behind the "transformation in sexual mores" (p. 7), including the liberalization of the sexual double standard and of social attitudes to homosexuality, divorce, unmarried couples, sexually active teenagers, and stepchildren (p. 339). While not denying that there have been negative consequences of birth control (e.g. population control, medical side effects, and rising male pressure on women to bear the sole responsibility for preventing pregnancy), Cook [End Page 842] generally downplays their significance, criticizing previous chroniclers of the birth control movement for laying what she considers to be too much stress on the connection of the movement with population control and racism. Her book does not consider the topic of race, and readers interested in the movement's impact on black women's procreative freedom in England will need to consult additional works. Although some of her central conclusions about the liberating social impacts of oral contraception for women, gays, and lesbians are overblown, The Long Sexual Revolution offers important new findings and hypotheses and reflects impressive research into the many different aspects of society that shape, regulate, and alter sexual behavior and norms. Cook calls into question some cherished ideas, such as the efficacy of nineteenth-century methods of birth control. She shows that unmarried pregnancy was a great social and economic risk for women in the rising absence of societal restraints on men during industrialization. In contrast to the picture of sexually knowledgeable and experienced people presented in other recent historical works, Cook finds that the period up through the early 1960s was, by and large, one of continuing limits on sexual expression and diminishment of sexual pleasure, due to widespread sexual ignorance and the lack of safe and effective contraception options. She calls important attention to working- and middle-class men's experiences with birth control. Her criticism of the idea of sexual practice as timeless is adroit and on the mark, and future work on the history of contraception must take her argument on this point into consideration. The book's depiction of contraception technology as the major driving force behind the liberalization of sexual behaviors and attitudes in England, especially those toward unmarried women, while suggestive, is far from conclusive, and readers will want to consult other works for a more complete understanding of the wider social, economic, and cultural forces that have operated to change (as well as to preserve) traditional sexual behavior and attitudes. Some of Cook's generalizations stand out as too broad, and these warrant further scrutiny; other topics (such as the history of contraceptive safety and effectiveness) require deeper analysis. More discussion of the methodologies used to draw conclusions from sex surveys and manuals would be helpful, while Cook's extensive criticism of others' scholarship in the main body of her text disrupts the narrative at many points. However, this does not diminish the importance of the book, which provides a fascinating and detailed look at the history of English sexuality as it was altered by pregnancy fears and changing contraception options. The Long Sexual Revolution serves as an important reminder of the risks and fears that sexual activity...

Ancient Israel and Ancient Greece: Religion, Politics, and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Ancient Israel and Ancient Greece: Religion, Politics, and Culture Brian J. Shaw Ancient Israel and Ancient Greece: Religion, Politics, and Culture, by John Pairman Brown. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003. 228 pp. $22.00. Assembled unchanged, save for the deletion of foreign fonts, from essays contained in Brown's three-volume work, Israel and Hellas, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 231, 276, 299 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995, 2000, 2001), this compact, erudite, and accessible book seeks to document some remarkable convergences of ancient Greek and Hebrew society and culture. Explicitly diverging from writers like Tertullian and Auerbach, who emphasize the undeniable contrasts between Greek society, religion, and literature, Brown argues that the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, if not siblings, are "cousins" who undertook a "joint breakout from ancient Near Eastern absolutism," an event that allowed each to develop "its own version of newly emergent freedom" (p. 1). Meticulously drawing attention to their shared vocabularies, metaphors, and idioms, Brown traces the development of Hebrews and Greeks into novel societies characterized by the "invention of the book" (p. 204), the "discovery of justice" (p. 202), a "new individualism" (p. 212) and an "efflorescence of humanism "precipitated by "confidence in the future" (p. 201). In ways too often neglected by classical and biblical scholars, and occurring centuries before their union in the Septuagint and New Testament, Brown argues, each people's society and culture already betrays the other's impress. As to the channels through which this mutual influence took place, Brown gestures towards sea and land trade by the Phoenicians and others, wars among their allies and adversaries, and contacts forged by occasional travelers, artisans, and exiles. But rather than searching (perhaps vainly) for specific evidence of such contacts and exchanges, Brown prefers to mine Greek and Hebrew texts for instances of shared thematic concerns, words and phrases, metaphors, genres, proverbs, and figures of speech. By doing so he claims to find striking and unexpected similarities between the two societies across a wide range of institutions and practices, including trade and warfare, civic formations (especially divine kingship), prophecy, appropriations of foreign religious cults, the status of women and slaves, and the exploitation of nature. [End Page 187] One of the book's six chapters, for instance, explores "The Shifting Roles of Women." Ironically, Brown argues, in both early Hellas and Israel women possessed considerable power and privileges, but eventually the necessity of maintaining political and military independence against foreign powers "reduced women's freedom of action, and sharply divided them into categories: insider and outsider, housewife and harlot" (p. 120). To support this claim, given the fact that neither people in its early period left a permanent record of women's power and independence, Brown looks for hints about their status in texts like Judges, 1 Samuel, Joshua, Aristotle's Politics, and Plato's Republic. But here as in other instances, not only the considerable promise, but the liabilities of Brown's reliance upon inventorying the thematic and semantic similarities in Greek and Hebrew texts, appear. For to substantiate his strong claims not simply for resemblances between the cultures and institutions of these two peoples but for their actual kinship as "cousins . . . in touch only at one or more removes" (p. 1), Brown relies almost exclusively upon locating common words, metaphors, and thematic concerns in their literary products. He offers little in the way of sustained textual analysis, close investigation of the particular historical and social contexts in which these texts appear, or fulsome engagement with other scholars' work. Consequently, while Brown indeed discovers some striking and unexpected resemblances of vocabulary and thematic concerns in texts authored over the course of many centuries by members of these two distinct and expansive language communities, it remains nonetheless unclear how this resemblance alone warrants his attributing to them either a causal relation or a common origin. Why, for instance, ought one to embrace Brown's suggestion that the practice in some synagogues of worshippers' thanking God that they were not born a "goy, a slave, a woman . . . may follow Aristotle (Pol.1.1.5), who recognizes the same three classes of inferiors—barbarians, women, and slaves" (p. 205)? To...

Human rights abuses and concerns about women's health and human rights in southern Iraq.

Although human rights abuses have been reported in Iraq, the full scope of these abuses has not been well documented. To assess the prevalence of human rights abuses since 1991 in southern Iraq, along with attitudes about women's health and human rights and women's rights and roles in society, to inform reconstruction and humanitarian assistance efforts in Iraq. Cross-sectional, randomized survey of Iraqi men and women conducted in July 2003 using structured questionnaires. Three major cities in 3 of the 9 governorates in southern Iraq. A total of 1991 respondents representing 16 520 household members. Respondent demographics, information on human rights abuses that occurred among household members since 1991, women's health and human rights, opinions regarding women's rights and roles in society, and conditions for community health and development. Respondents were a mean age of 38 years and were mostly of Arab ethnicity (99.7% [1976/1982]) and Muslim Shi'a (96.7% [1906/1971]). Overall, 47% of those interviewed reported 1 or more of the following abuses among themselves and household members since 1991: torture, killings, disappearance, forced conscription, beating, gunshot wounds, kidnappings, being held hostage, and ear amputation, among others. Seventy percent of abuses (408/586) were reputed to have occurred in homes. Baath party regime-affiliated groups were identified most often (95% [449/475]) as the perpetrators of the abuses; 53% of the abuses occurred between 1991 and 1993, following the Shi'a uprising, and another 30% between 2000 and the first 6 months of 2003. While the majority of men and women expressed support for women's equal opportunities for education, freedom of expression, access to health care, equality in deciding marriage and the number and spacing of children, and participation in community development decisions, there was less support among both men and women for women's freedom of movement, association with people of their choosing, and rights to refuse sex. Half of women and men (54% and 50%, respectively) reported agreeing that a man has the right to beat his wife if she disobeys. Fifty-three percent of respondents reported that there were reasons to restrict educational opportunities for women at the present time and 50% reported that there were reasons to restrict work opportunities for women at the present time. Nearly half of participating households in 3 southern cities in Iraq reported human rights abuses among household members between 1991 and 2003. The households surveyed supported a government that will protect and promote human rights, including the rights of women. However, currently, neither men nor women appear to support a full range of women's human rights.

Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, and: Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty (review)

Reviewed by: Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, and: Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty Lily Xiao Hong Lee (bio) Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, editors. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003. xiii, 337 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-520-23105-8. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-520-23138-4. Robin R. Wang , editor. Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2003. xiv, 449 pp. Hardcover $49.00, ISBN 0-87220-652-1. Paperback $18.95, ISBN 0-87220-651-3. The two books reviewed here are important additions to gender studies relating to Asia, and particularly to China. They both serve to broaden understanding of the identity of women and their life experiences in premodern times, the first book geographically and the second ideologically. Women and Confucian Cultures is a collection of essays investigating the impact of Confucianism on the women of premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture is an edited volume of writings relating to gender from different schools of thought and genres in premodern China. Women and Confucian Cultures is in three parts: part 1, "Scripts of Male Dominance," contains four essays; part 2, "Propagating Confucian Virtues," contains three essays; part 3, "Female Education in Practice," and part 4, "Corporeal and Textual Expressions of Female Subjectivity," contain two essays each. Four of the eleven essays are on Japan, three are on Korea, and four are on China. By comparing the impact of Confucianism in these three countries, Women and Confucian Cultures enables us to see the impact of a group of homogeneous ideas within a developing school in three different cultures, producing different results. Although Confucianism, and especially Neo-Confucianism, signaled in all three countries a general reduction in women's rights and freedom, the studies show that each country has had a different "window of relaxation." In Japan, the introduction of classical Confucian rituals and laws meant the end of women's opportunity to rule the country, yet the last female tennô was able to appropriate the Confucian virtue of filiality to hold on to her rule for many more years (Joan Piggott, "The Last Classical Female Sovereign: Kôken-Shôtoku Tennô"). Hiroko Sekiguchi, in her essay, shows that certain characteristics of Japanese society prevented the patrilineal and patriarchal family model imported from the Tang from being put into practice completely, especially in the initial stages and arguably even after that (Hiroko Sekiguchi, "The Patriarchal [End Page 15] Family Paradigm in Eighth-Century Japan"). The promotion of female virtues through didactic texts for women in the Tokugawa period increased the opportunity for women to gain an education. Whether it was because the separation of the sexes was less rigorously enforced in Japan or because there was less of an emphasis in Japan on chastity, Tokugawa women had the advantage over their Korean and Chinese sisters of being able to travel to far-off places to further their education and also to go into teaching and school administration toward the end of the Tokugawa period (Martha C. Tocco, "Norms and Texts for Women's Education in Tokugawa Japan"). In China, music was assigned to female entertainers, and, despite the humiliation of being exploited for their beauty and talent, this gave them the opportunity to learn and develop musical skills. This allowed some of them to rise above the level of entertainer to become serious musicians (Joseph S. C. Lam, "The Presence and Absence of Female Musicians and Music in China"). The rise of Daoism to prominence in China also shaped the lives of women in a different way, creating variations on the generally Confucian theme (Suzanne E. Cahill, "Discipline and Transformation: Body and Practice in the Lives of Daoist Holy Women of Tang China"). Korean historian Kim Pusik's biographies of exemplary women in his Samguk sagi bring to light a flexible view of filiality and loyalty whereby part...