Private Lives Of Women Research Articles

Impact of COVID-19 on the private and professional lives of highly educated women working in global health in Europe-A qualitative study.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a deepening of existing inequalities and a rollback of achievements made in gender equality. Women in Global Health (WGH) is a global movement that aims to achieve gender equality in health and increase female leadership in global health. Here, the aim was to understand how the pandemic affects the private and professional lives of women working in global health in different European countries. Suggestions for future pandemic preparedness including how gender perspectives should be integrated into pandemic preparedness and how a women's network such as WGH helped them to overcome the impact of the pandemic were explored. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted in September 2020 with a sample size of nine highly educated women with a mean age of 42.1 years from the different WGH European chapters. The participants were informed of the study and were formally asked for their consent. The interviews were held in English via an online videoconference platform and lasted 20-25 min each. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Thematic analysis was conducted according to Mayring Qualitative Content Analysis using MAXQDA. The pandemic has both positive and negative effects on the professional and private lives of women. It led to an increased workload and stress as well as pressure to publish on COVID-19-related themes. Increased childcare and household responsibilities represented a double burden. The available space was limited if other family members were also working from home. Positive aspects included more time for family or partners and reduced travel. The participants report on perceived gender differences in the experience of the pandemic. International cooperation is considered to be a key factor for future pandemic preparedness. Being part of a women's network such as WGH was perceived as being very supportive in difficult situations during the pandemic. This study provides unique insights into the experiences of women working in global health in different European countries. The COVID-19 pandemic influences their professional and private lives. Perceived gender differences are reported and suggest the need for integrating gender perspectives in pandemic preparedness. Networks for women, such as WGH, can facilitate the exchange of information in crises and provide women with professional and personal support.

“Not the mother type”: Exploding the Myth of Maternal Devotion in Marghanita Laski's To Bed with Grand Music

Second World War propaganda targeted women in conflicting ways, expecting them to contribute to the war effort while also upholding an idealized view of motherhood as essential to women's identities. This essay examines a fictional challenge to the wartime myth of maternal devotion, Marghanita Laski's To Bed with Grand Music (1946), in dialogue with historical discourse and documents, to argue for the power of fiction to highlight and challenge expectations surrounding women's private lives in times of national crisis. Laski dissects her protagonist's conflicted motivations and exposes her manipulations of wartime propaganda for her own gain. This dissection reveals a central paradox at the core of women's wartime experience: whether it be through motherhood, marriage, or adultery, women remain trapped by men's assumptions and expectations. Laski's complex characterization develops a critique of wartime rhetoric by invoking sympathy for an anti-heroine who passes judgment on her society's limited choices and prophetically points toward a potentially freer future for women.

Female Solo Self-Employment in Germany: The Role of Transitions and Learning From a Life Course Perspective

Based on a qualitative analysis of 12 solo self-employed women’s work biographies, this article investigates the (re)structuring effects of solo self-employment on the professional and private lives of women in Germany in their mid- and late-career stages. While solo self-employment has been gaining significance in the German labour market in the last two decades, it is largely an underresearched subject from the perspective of female labour market participation. Our study shows that the transition to working solo self-employed constitutes a marked break in female work biographies with lasting restructuring effects on their life courses. Constituting a deviation from the female standard life course, this move can be understood as a coping strategy of biographical discontinuities, which translates into specific patterns against the background that women (still) assume most of the care and housework responsibilities. How the transition to solo self-employment is being prepared and managed and what role learning and risk management play in the transition process is the focus of our article. Our aim is to better understand the underlining rationalisation logics of female solo self-employment in terms of labour market participation, reconciling work and family life, and professional self-realisation. While in the German welfare system solo self-employed bear higher risks of precarity and financial old age insecurity, solo self-employment is functional as an individual strategy for action, giving women the opportunity to do justice to their (mid) life courses and intrinsic needs to pursue both professional work and freedom of choice when and how to work. This may act as a corrective for gender inequalities in the world of work, especially when it comes to working in a self-determined way.

Sexual harassment experiences and their consequences for the private lives of Chinese women

Sexual harassment is a global issue threatening individuals’ safety and rights, especially for women. Previous studies mainly focused on the negative impact of sexual harassment on women's health, work, and education. Using data from the Chinese Private Life Survey, this article examines the effect of sexual harassment in both physical and non-physical forms and probes the effect of the perpetrator's relationship to the victim on women's sexual behaviors, sexual and marital well-being, and desires for marriage and childbearing. The results indicate that both physical and non-physical sexual harassment lowered married or cohabitating women's sexual satisfaction and functioning. Sexual harassment by a family member/relative, an intimate partner or an acquaintance produced a larger negative effect on women's sexual well-being than that by others. Married women's marital satisfaction and stability were also undermined if they experienced sexual harassment. A family member/relative, an intimate partner and a stranger as the perpetrator had a larger effect on women's marital well-being than other perpetrators. For unmarried women, sexual harassment was not associated with the desire for marriage. However, those who were physically harassed by an acquaintance were unlikely to have a desire for childbearing. Comparing with non-physical sexual harassment, physical sexual harassment was found to have a larger negative impact on women's private lives.

Love in times of violence

Maya Goded’s photography and filmmaking career has been tackling issues surrounding sex work in Mexico for more than two decades. Her first feature-length documentary, Plaza de la soledad (2016), set in Mexico City’s La Merced, probes issues of violence, resilience and love, with the main protagonists, who are ageing sex workers, negotiating their precarious positions between traumatic past events and uncertain futures. This paper examines Goded’s representation of prostitution as one designed to challenge dominant narratives about sex work in Mexico by shedding light on the private lives of women against their stereotypical portrayals.

A Odisseia Segundo Penélope, por Margaret Atwood

Este artigo analisa a re-visão que Margaret Atwood faz da Odisseia em A odisseia de Penélope. Para tanto, partimos de Bakhtin (1993) para mapear a subversão operada pela versão de Penélope dos traços constitutivos do épico. Ao destronar Odisseu e dar voz, em primeira pessoa, à Penélope e às doze servas enforcadas no retono de Ulisses à Ítaca, Atwood rompe com a linguagem épica sagrada, desmistifica a lenda e atualiza o passado épico absoluto, oferecendo, no lugar da narrativa grandiosa, a experiência pessoal e privada da vida das mulheres. Analisamos também algumas das implicações da reescrita do mito homérico por uma escritora canadense contemporânea. Argumentamos que, ao matar Homero enquanto Autor, Atwood tanto inscreve sua obra no cânone quanto abre espaço para o reconhecimento de outras versões da história.

Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860-1914, by Maeve O’Riordan

Reviewed by: Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914 by Maeve O'Riordan Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga (bio) Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914, by Maeve O'Riordan; pp. xv + 339. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018, £85.00, $120.00. Maeve O'Riordan's meticulously researched and well-written study, Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914, reflects the growing interest in the private and public lives of aristocratic women. In one of the first attempts to focus on women of the landed class, Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh's The Woman's Domain: Women and the English Country House (1990) argued that, even though the home traditionally is defined as the woman's domain, the research into country house living had for a long time been determinedly male-centric. When scholarship set its sights on the landlords, women were either forgotten entirely or assumed to be insignificant; in effect, the popular perception of aristocratic women veered between images of husband-hunters and passive, unhappy victims. Since then, the research into aristocratic women's private lives and their role in the public [End Page 346] and political spheres has grown significantly, redefining many popular misconceptions. Concurrently, the broadly defined category of the British aristocracy has been nuanced by studies of the elites in other parts of the British Isles. O'Riordan's study contributes to this process of nuancing by examining a largely unexplored theme of "the female half of the landed class" in Ireland during the second half of the Victorian era (19). The book spotlights the lives of women in twelve aristocratic families who had houses in Munster. Munster is "chosen as a microcosm of the island of Ireland" and claimed to represent best the "landowning families in the country" (5–6). The sample selected for the study is sufficiently broad to be considered representative and conveniently delineated to enable in-depth analysis. The study "purposely focuse[s] on surviving archival material" and offers a comprehensive analysis of personal records, letters, memoirs, scrap-books, wills, marriage settlements, account books, house inventories, and newspaper cuttings (19). The analysis is complemented by the discussion of artistic and creative works, literary and visual. The aim of the study is to give voice to these women and to examine how they "viewed and acted themselves" (5). While it is not meant as a "road map of social change in Ireland at the time," O'Riordan's book complements such studies by giving a good understanding of what it meant and how it felt to be an aristocratic woman in Ireland from the mid-nineteenth century until World War I (20). While earlier studies tended to concentrate on either the private or public lives of aristocratic women, O'Riordan tries to capture the whole complexity of women's experiences and activities, both in the house and in the wider world. This is a valuable perspective, and on reading the book one gets a fuller picture of the variety of women's roles and the life paths they navigated within the constraints of a patriarchal society. It considers the roles of mothers and wives but also the specific position of unmarried women in aristocratic homes. It gives good insight into the challenges faced by ambitious and artistically talented women and by political activists. The book consists of eight chapters and covers such diverse topics as courtship, marriage, family relations, women's roles in the continuation of family lines, access to education, individual tastes and talents, house management, financial and living arrangements, relations with tenants and servants, philanthropy, and activism. It convincingly argues that "women felt a close connection, and a strong sense of duty, to the house" (48) and "were essential to the continued dominance of a set of ideals which defined the class" (12). In effect, O'Riordan demonstrates that greater insight into the experiences of women is crucial for the understanding of the whole class and that re-gendering the country house is necessary to fully comprehend the functioning of the manorial order. The author explains why aristocratic women living in Munster were loyal predominantly to their class and families rather than to the national cause...

Surveilling lesbians: The Birds, Hitchcock’s narrative cinema and the criminalization of sexuality

This article analyses The Birds in order to distinguish a form of heteropatriarchy characterized by the development of surveillance practices. In the earlier films Vertigo and Rear Window, female characters were represented as intensely desirable, yet also disturbingly unattainable. This article is dissatisfied with the explanation that Hitchcock’s unattainable woman is an example of the 1960s developing lesbian subjectivity. Instead, I use The Birds to prove that Hitchcock’s representation of women has in mind the projects of arranging women for interrogation, eavesdropping on their conversations and intruding upon their intimate moments. Hitchcock’s voyeurism, construable as ambivalent in earlier films, manifests in The Birds as a surveillance practice that assumes access over the private lives of women: a heteropatriarchal strategy that keeps women’s bodies, if not accessible for men, punishable by them. By keeping tabs on the ways that women grow intimate with one another instead of with men, Hitchcock’s cinema moves from narrative to surveillance, blurring the distinction between cinematography and security footage.

Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe ed. by Simona Mitroiu

Reviewed by: Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe ed. by Simona Mitroiu Tomas Balkelis (bio) Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe Simona Mitroiu, editor Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xvi + 272 pp. ISBN 978-3319968322, $109.99 hardcover. This thematic edited collection features contributions by seventeen women authors from different countries, most of them with personal backgrounds in Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Simona Mitroiu, known for her earlier research on memory and life writing, it presents a welcome addition to the growing fields of life writing, memory studies, and population displacement. What makes this volume special is that it focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, which is still underrepresented in the three fields mentioned above. It may be compared to similar scholarship by Vieda Skultans, Simeon Vilensky, Veronica Shapovalov, Tiina Kirss, Dalia Leinarte, Gabriele Ripple et al., Violeta Davoliūtė et al., and others that have focused on various cases of population displacement in Eastern Europe through the lens of life writing. For the contributors to the volume, Central and Eastern Europe is a political rather than a geographic designation and encompasses the space of Europe dominated by communist regimes. This space is broadly understood as postsocialist and postcolonial. However, as often happens with volumes carrying such broad geographic titles, only some Eastern European countries (mostly southeastern) are covered. The volume's thematic focus is on the role of women's narratives of displacement and their place in public memories. In their explorations of the life writing of different women, the authors are asking how these women dealt with the traumatic memory of WWII; how their memories were transmitted on individual and collective levels; and why they occupy such a marginal place in the collective memories of Central and Eastern European countries. These are broad questions that tie together a history of population displacement and women's and memory studies. The contributors should be applauded for their ambition to cross the disciplinary boundaries of these academic fields. The focus here will be on the chapters that, in my view, offer new methodological insights on how to study women's displacement in general. The key concept that reverberates throughout all the chapters is postmemory. [End Page 912] As defined by Marianne Hirsch, postmemory "describes the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that 'they remember' only as the narratives or images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful … as to constitute memories of their own right" (16). Throughout the volume the authors put Hirsch's theory of postmemory into practice, and indeed, they do it quite consistently and creatively. Mitroiu's introduction sets a firm theoretical agenda for the whole volume by placing an emphasis on offering a comprehensive perspective on women's untold stories of displacement and the mechanisms of their memory mediation. It sets up a historical context of post-totalitarian Central and Eastern European societies, where socialist regimes heavily interfered in the private lives of women and their families. The introduction also provides a brief and useful overview of major population displacements in Central and Eastern Europe, though it contains some stylistic and factual oddities, such as the "massacre of … Balkans" and "the German expulsion" that happened in "almost all of Europe" (14). The eleven chapters are divided into three thematic sections: on generations and narratives of postmemory, sites of postmemory and history, and postmemory. This division is useful because it helps to shift readers' attention from generational to spatial and temporal aspects of postmemory's transmission. In essence, the book offers three key arguments: postmemory is important because it creates identities; it is transmitted in various ways and uses diverse textual resources in cultural space; and postmemory is always gendered. The last point is especially significant because it addresses a theme barely examined in the academic literature—not only the physical displacement of Central and Eastern European women, but also the displacement of their traumatic memories from socialist and postsocialist societies. In Chapter 3, Sasha Colby makes the point that Hirsch's theory of postmemory...

Male feminism: men's participation in women's emancipation movements and debates. Case studies from Belgium and France (1967–1984)

This article investigates the political militancy of men for women's rights in Belgium and France from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. First, it discusses various perceptions of male feminism by female feminists: some insisted on the need for female autonomy and others on the necessity of male support to transform gender relations. Second, it distinguishes three different forms of male activism: participation in mixed-sex feminist groups; collaboration with feminist movements as coalition partner; and establishing feminist-inspired ‘men's groups’ to analyse masculine identities. Finally, it explores men's motivations to advocate women's rights (supporting reforms for the emancipation of women without questioning the position of men; analysing structural dimensions of women's oppression within wider political projects; criticism of traditional sexist masculinity models; and heterosexuality, emotions and personal concern for individual women's private lives). This article demonstrates that a small minority of men fought actively for women's emancipation, within and alongside feminist movements, under the conditions laid down by female feminists. However, their motivations were very diverse regarding the relationships among women's rights, social justice and the construction of masculine identities. The ambiguous relationships between female and male feminism, resulting from men's diverse positions towards the women's movement, will also be explained.

The pervasiveness of heterosexuality in contemporary relationships: Implications for domestic democracy

Synopsis This paper makes an empirical contribution to theories and explanations relating to heterosexuality and gendered power relations. It emerges from a study which considered how second wave feminism and the introduction of social policies have made a difference to women's lives. The paper draws upon the data from the interviews of the earlier study to focus on women's understandings and experiences of gender (in)equality viewed through the lens of pseudo mutuality, a psychological concept adapted here to consider gendered power relations. In so doing, the paper challenges the explanations given by the women in the study which suggest that their relationships are not unequal . Findings dispel assumptions of a uni-directional relationship between social change and personal life; (masculine) heterosexuality has been much harder to disrupt in women's private lives, within their intimate heterosexual relationships.

Pregnancy, Medicaid, State Regulation, and Legal Subjection

For 18 months in 2007 and 2008, the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the obstetrics clinic of a large, public hospital in Manhattan, New York. The large majority of patients who receive their prenatal care from this obstetrics clinic rely on the Medicaid-funded Prenatal Care Assistance Program to cover their medical expenses. As a condition of receipt of this aid, women are required to meet with a battery of professionals—namely social workers, health educators, nutritionists and financial officers—who are legally obliged to inquire into areas of women's lives that exceed the realm of the medical. The author finds that, in demanding patients to meet with a constellation of officials who inquire into women's personal lives, Medicaid mandates intrusion into women's private lives, and it produces pregnancy as an opportunity for state supervision, management, and regulation of poor, otherwise uninsured women. Thus, Medicaid may be understood as an occasion for the initiation of poor women into the state regulatory apparatus and a circumstance for creating disempowered legal subjects of poor women.

Bárbara O. Reyes . Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias . Austin : University of Texas Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 231. $50.00.

This book examines how the colonizing mission system in Alta and Baja California shaped the lives of early indigenous and Spanish-speaking peoples by focusing on the experiences of three women: Bárbara Gandiaga, Eulalia Callis, and Eulalia Pérez. While scholars have explored issues of gender, conquest, and power in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century California and have examined the lives of Callis and Pérez in particular, Bárbara O. Reyes's centering of women's relationships to the mission project (as she refers to it) brings their importance in reproducing the social and racial hierarchies of power and the conquest and colonization of the region to the fore. In analyzing women's unequal relationships to the mission system, Reyes demonstrates that women's private lives were decidedly public and that private and public zones on the frontier overlapped, were dependent, and constantly changed. This study shows that women's ability to circumvent the colonial order depended upon their status. While Eulalia Callis, an elite Spanish woman, publicly challenged her Spanish spouse's honor and was reprimanded for doing so, the Native woman Bárbara Gandiaga's accusation of the murder of two Spanish priests resulted in much harsher consequences: death by gunshot. Instances such as these, Reyes argues, points to a California socio-racial order in which Native women experienced coercion and violence, mestizas (racially mixed, Spanish-Indian women) exercised some mobility, especially if they worked for the mission project, and Spanish elite women had access to comforts denied to their lesser female peers, although they still had to follow Spanish codes of virtue and honor, which were oppressive to women.

Death-Defying Testimony: Women's Private Lives and the Politics of Public Documents

Death-Defying Testimony:Women's Private Lives and the Politics of Public Documents Lois Brown Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins succeeded as a playwright, acclaimed vocalist, enterprising journalist, feisty public intellectual, ambitious activist, eloquent patriot, and stalwart club woman from the 1870s through 1915.1 A fifth-generation New Englander born in 1859 in Portland, Maine, Hopkins was the only child of Sarah Allen Northup of Boston and Benjamin Northup of Providence, a couple whose marriage united powerful political and religious dynasties and blended tumultuous histories of freedom and enslavement. Hopkins's writing life began with an award-winning school essay on the evils of intemperance and ended with the most economical of writing occupations at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a stenographer. Her writing life and the lives she documents shape my approach to private writing and biography. In writing Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, I was compelled to document and assess the public and private lives she generated, sustained, and revised. I had time and reason to grapple with the archival and intellectual issues that emerge as a result of scholarly biography projects. We know projects like these often proceed as extended—sometimes seemingly never-ending—considerations of the politics of private writing, biography, and the archive. A Sojourner in the Archive As a literary historian, I have been a sojourner in the archive—one whose research plans do not always first yield the foundational organizing details of birth date, parentage, marriage, occupation, and church affiliations. I am in search of lives developed in the shadow of imagined democracy or sustained despite involuntary proximity to the blistering core of an America that accommodated and perpetuated enslavement. The free-born, self-emancipated, or enslaved individuals I encounter in the archives negotiated peculiar, highly racialized, and deeply sexualized institutions that co-opted their labor, bodies, identities, relationships, offspring, and [End Page 130] communities. Nineteenth-century people of color contended with racial and social realities and hierarchies that depended on and were strengthened by wholly permeable and vulnerable spheres—so much so that racialized notions of the private frequently are critiques of a volatile public sphere and of bodies that were always already available for public consumption. Biography projects about these individuals become considerations of the pursuits, acquisitions, fictions, and shifting valuations of privacy. This is a rigorous dance indeed, for biographer and subject alike, and there are breathless and breathtaking stakes at hand. As an earnest graduate student in the early 1990s, I went to Fisk University to see the Pauline Hopkins Papers. The very first question the archivist put to me was rhetorical at best: "You're here for a week? I don't know why you think you need all that time. It's only one box." Yet what was in the box, and the other items that emerged over the course of that week as I proved myself an earnest and worthy scholar-in-training, revealed two questions: First, what must we do in the face of sparse and provocative private writing when it has no linear foot breadth or documented provenance and raises more questions than it answers? Second, how do we grapple with the seeming silences—these rhetorical ruptures and biographical caesuras—that all too often define the early African American canon and history? I ask these questions even as I assert that our expectations of racialized private writing cannot be modest or anchored in disappointment and loss. We must have a practice of intellectual and archival optimism, and certainly the invaluable archival recovery and insistent intellectual work of many scholars—Carla Peterson, Frances Foster, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Gabrielle Foreman, Jeanne Pfaelzer, Karen Kilcup, Sharon Harris, and others—explains why. My decades-plus project on Hopkins and her world disciplined me and even rode me ragged at times as I embarked on wide-ranging physical and intellectual journeys, trekked to obscure and well-known archives, ventured into graveyards, stepped into municipal storage spaces, took up residence in countless airless microfilm rooms, and made forced, voluntary, and serendipitous marches across acres of library stacks. I muttered as much as I walked. Sometimes I cursed the fact that anything about Negroes was relegated...

Chinese Immigrant Women Workers' Mediated Negotiations With Constraints On Their Cultural Identities

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study examines the cultural identities of Chinese immigrant women workers in American society, that is, how the women negotiate with white supremacist cultural values that seek to interpellate them through their everyday use of media. I argue that through certain Chinese ethnic newspapers' cultural discourses, white supremacist cultural values penetrate the women's private lives and regulate their daily matters as minute as the color of their socks. Yet, the women's responses to these mediated discourses reveal that mainstream cultural values are only part of a more complex cultural quandary, which results from a number of constraints facing the women everyday: material difficulty, racial-cultural marginalization, and ethnic patriarchal control. In our group and individual interviews, my participants critically interpreted and negotiated with this cultural quandary. Their negotiation has great value, since it attests to their heightened cultural consciousness. From another perspective, however, their heightened consciousness has yet to develop into a strategic bicultural or multicultural identity, the “mestiza identity” in Anzaldua's words, as a result of the financial, racial, patriarchal, cultural, and psychological constraints in their lives. This situation leads us to reflect more on how we can help to lift these constraints, so that these women can strategically incorporate both Chinese and American cultural practices to improve their quality of life.

Imigrantki w społeczeństwach Zachodu. Emancypacja i integracja

Gender plays a central role in the decision to migrate and the composition of the migration flows. Emigration is the process experienced differently by women and men. The experience of immigration profoundly impacts on the public and private lives of women – their participation in the labour force, their religiousness, their marital roles and satisfaction, and their autonomy and self-esteem. One of the possible effects of migration is the emancipation of women. There is a direct connection between emancipation and integration. In contrast to integrated western societies emancipated immigrant women, immigrants from traditional cultures are not interested in the integration. They risk not only the loss of cultural identity, but also their own identity.

In Search of an Audience: Madame Ancelot's Theatre for Women

From 1835 to 1844, twenty-one plays written by Virginie Ancelotwereperformed in Paris theatres. A feat for any playwright of the time, this achievement is all the more remarkable when considering the limitations placed upon women writers in nineteenth century France. Theatre, of all literary genres, was arguably the least acceptable area of endeavour for women writers. Despite the success of Madame Ancelot's plays, current literary criticism has forgotten her unique works. Like many of her contemporaries, Ancelot's works have been set aside in order to focus on her reputation as a salonniere who lent her support to the most prominent male authors of the time.! Ancelot's contribution to literature extends beyond her assistance to well-known male writers. Her plays merit rediscovery as examples of what it meant to be a middle or upper class woman in nineteenth century France. By examining the portrayals of women's private lives and the influence of patriarchy on their happiness contained within four of Ancelot's most successful plays, the modem reader gains insight into the private sphere of her time. Before examining the details ofthese plays, it is important to consider why these works are ignored by contemporary scholarship. Like other women playwrights of nineteenth century France, Ancelot faced significant obstacles in staging her works. Alison Finch argues convincingly that the situation of women dramatists, already bleak in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, actually worsened during the first half of the nineteenth century.2 While the late eighteenth century witnessed a handful of successful women theatre managers such as Mlles Montanier and Raucourt, in 1824 women were banned from holding such posts. Although a very few women did indeed sit on the Comedie Franqaise reading committee which selected plays for production in the early part of the century, in 1853 they were forbidden to continue to do so. Furthermore, as Finch explains, the vagueness of what French drama was meant to be, 'verse or prose? Neoclassical, Shakespearean or modem,' (Finch, 62) represented a further obstacle for women writers who sought recognition in the genre. The majority of plays written by women at the time were done so in collaboration with men. When women writers produced plays on their own, they generally authored one-act plays and rarely produced full five-act plays deemed worthy of acknowledgement by the literary establishment. Short, and more importantly, light-hearted plays were considered more suitable for women dramatists than tragedies.

Institutionalization of Gender Inequality in Nigeria: Implications for the Advancement of Women

This paper highlights the institutionalization of gender inequality in Nigerian society and affirms that there is a thin divide between the public and private lives of women in Nigeria, especially in rural areas. It draws attention to the emergence of non-traditional female-headed families. The new trend in defining the household shows that it is a dynamic social unit that is not necessarily built around men. This new flexibility in defining the household helps to envision women, not as persons who work merely to supplement household income, but as persons who engage in economic ventures because they have personal needs and aspirations. The main barriers to the advancement of women in public life are low level of employment of women in the formal labor sector, low literacy rates, gender stereotypes with regard to employment opportunities and promotions, and cultural practices such as patriarchy and early marriage that limit women's access to and control over resources. In their private lives women somehow manage to provide the necessary resources to maintain themselves and their children with or without financial assistance from spouses, although with increased difficulty. The feminization of poverty concept is applicable in view of the high level of poverty among women. In order to remedy the situation for women in Nigeria, and to enhance the lives of the populace in general, proposals are put forth that it is hoped will be embraced by government leaders, employers, families and individuals.

Shaking the Spheres: Public and Private Lives of Women

While part one presents the cultural anxiety caused by women's perceived performances in the public sphere, the essays in part two, "Consuming Arts," address representations of women in art (Grant; Eger) and reconstructions of femininity in relation to the marketplace. In a compelling study of the slavery debates, Kate Davies explores feminine sympathy for the abolition movement through Wedgwood's cameo pin and sentimental, anti-slavery poetry until abolition became tainted with "the luxury of feeling" (142). The "purely human" had to dissociate itself from the marketplace through the "self-sacrificing act of generosity" in ladies's abstention from sugar at the tea-table (144).

Understanding how globalisation and restructuring affect women’s lives: implications for comparative policy analysis

Globalisation and neo–liberal restructuring have transformed social policy and social services in many countries over the past two decades. Among the various impacts on different societies, one commonality is that many of the costs of restructuring are being picked up by women. In the last decade, feminist scholars have developed a critique of the effects of restructuring on the public and private lives of women, effects which are conspicuously absent from many discussions of restructuring. This article presents several conceptual ingredients for a framework that can facilitate a comparative understanding of restructuring and its effects on women at both global and local levels. Canada and China are used to illustrate the utility of such an approach to comparative policy analysis. The article contributes to a growing body of feminist literature on changing regimes of citizenship. It adds to the scholarship on comparative policy analysis by developing a research approach that is grounded in the experiences of women and is attentive to global and local politics. We argue that understanding just how restructuring affects different groups of women is essential for developing analyses that can cross national boundaries and challenge policies that reproduce conditions that oppress women.