Stories Of Women Research Articles

Telling Women's Stories: A Resource for College Mathematics Instructors

Telling Women's Stories: A Resource for College Mathematics Instructors

I loved him and he scared me: Migrant women, partner visas and domestic violence

This study considers the experience of migrant women engaging with the Australian Department of Immigration through the Family Violence Provisions (Migration Regulations, 1994). These provisions allow women applying for partner visas to remain in the country after separation, if they can prove they experienced domestic violence. Forty semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty migrant women from diverse backgrounds, focusing on their experiences of intimacy and violence and their emotions regarding the relationship. Using the Listening Guide methodology, data was analysed focusing on women's voices and the emotions concerning this subject. This paper considers Australian Immigration Law's requirement of a ‘genuine and continuing relationship’ and how it engages with women's emotions. The study argues that there is a distance between women's emotional responses to their relationships and immigration demands for proof and emotional consistency. The result is that women's emotions are dismissed by the same immigration system that has been historically shaped by emotions towards immigrants. The article ends by proposing that women's stories and emotions are valuable sources of information for visa processes and indicates countries where, in some cases, immigration laws already engage with women's emotions as reliable sources of information.

“Not My Proudest Moment”: Guilt, Regret, and the Coming-Out Narrative

This article draws on oral history interviews with twenty-six lesbian and bisexual women who came out within the context of heterosexual marriages between the 1970s and the early 2000s. Despite the extent to which the LGBTQ community emphasizes narratives of progress and triumph, feelings of shame, guilt, regret, and ambivalence figured significantly in these women's life stories, particularly with regard to their experiences of coming out. This article thus considers how oral history can provide queer narrators with an opportunity to share negative feelings that often remain unspoken within mainstream LGBTQ culture and politics.

Self-narration and agency as interactive achievements: A sociocultural and interactionist analysis of migrant women's stories in a language learning setting

Migration is commonly seen as disrupting individuals’ sense of continuity and agency. In current research on adult identity development, (self-)narratives are regarded as a means of making sense of self. We combined an interactional methodology with a sociocultural and dialogical perspective to examine collective identity processes at work during self-narration by immigrant women in a learning language setting. Data were gathered throughout an intervention designed to encourage participants to put their personal experiences of migration into words. Verbal interactions were analysed to identify 1) narrative discursive units, 2) agentic relationships in and on the narratives, and 3) processes of narrative co-construction. Results showed that self-narratives arose from dynamic interactions in which participants displayed discursive skills in negotiating status and instructions, supported the cognitive and affective work of narrating in a foreign language, and constructed agency that challenged the poor immigrant woman image. We discuss the contributions of our study in terms of methodology and interventions.

Out of Africa: Students' reflections on the personal and professional impact of volunteering

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (2009) states that student midwives should seek opportunities to develop their skills and knowledge base. In the summer of 2018, two student midwives from the University of Northampton independently researched and signed up to a 2-week overseas mission trip to Kenya, with the aim of immersing themselves in a different culture to gain new knowledge and develop transferable skills to embed into their practice in the UK. Charlotte Ames and Adelle Boughen also visited a number of projects around the region supporting girls and young women who have fled their homes to escape injustices such as underage marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and domestic abuse. Hearing the young women's stories of bravery, resilience and optimism have had a profound effect on both Charlotte and Adelle, providing them with a new understanding of the term ‘with woman’ and influencing their future practice.

УЧАСТЬ ЖІНОК УКРАЇНИ У ВІЙСЬКОВИХ ФОРМУВАННЯХ У ПЕРШІЙ СВІТОВІЙ ВІЙНІ: СУЧАСНА ІСТОРІОГРАФІЯ

The article is focuses on the study of the issues of participation of women of Ukraine in military formations in the First World War by modern Ukrainian historiography (1991-2016). Based on the topic, the author tried to solve the following research tasks: to identify which aspects of women's military history are within the interest of historians, to analyze the scale, character and level of research of the topic. The author found that the study of women's military history is gaining momentum. Historians are actively searching women's stories in the sources of those times; they are in the process of gathering information. They call military history “personal” because research on the subject is partially based on reports of the press about women volunteers and mainly on participants' personal documents, memoirs and letters. In the letters, women wrote about the way to the front, military life, a little about participation in battles, relations with soldiers; they also left information about each other. At the same time, each of the women had personal experience of war, own motives and results. Therefore, historians concluded that "this experience is quite difficult to summarize ". Modern researchers approach the study of women's stories not only in terms of heroism but trying to understand the causes and consequences of women's actions. The authors mention such main reasons as boredom of everyday life, escape from duties and national impulse. Inspired by the new fashionable views on life, the girls tried to escape from their everyday duties; they wanted to overcome social barriers and to prove that women were capable to cope with any work. The escape to the front was an attempt to change the way of life. Women who came to the front and participated in hostilities had to adapt quickly to difficult conditions and trials; they had to fight and to protect their own lives. The authors also analyze how society perceived the phenomenon of women in the war. Military commanders heroized their actions with the reason to raise the fighting spirit. However, the views of military men varied: the village guys welcomed and supported the girls; on the contrary, the men from the intelligent circle condemned women regarding them as competitors. Civil women believed that the girls had forgotten their traditional duty, they could have been more helpful in hospitals and doing charity. The author of the article also found that the participation of women in the military unit of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen was better studied. The researchers concluded that the Ukrainian women who lived in the Russian Empire supported the call in 1917 of the Provisional Government and Maria Bochkareva to form women's combat battalions. Women were motivated to go to the front by the same reasons as women in the ranks of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen: failures in love, the desire to escape from violence and humiliation in the family, domestic problems, the desire to avenge the dead relatives and loved ones. In big cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Poltava, the Ukrainian women willingly enrolled in the army. Anyway, the inclusion of women in the combat units of the army of the Russian Empire was found out fragmentary, there are almost no names and characteristics of the activity of the women's battalions. Only a few researchers pay attention to the messages in the then newspapers about escapes and the heroic deeds of girls in the war. These issues require the search of information and detailed study. The author came to the conclusion that most of the questions remain scientifically open requiring the search for information about women in the ranks of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the army of the Russian Empire for the generalization of information and creation of a coherent picture of the military service of women at the front of the First World War.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles* Paul D. Cannan, Steven Scherwatzk, Ian Sullivan, Steven Scherwatzky, Taylor Corse, J. T. Scanlan, Jacub Lipski, Jack Lynch, Alex Wetmore, Shane Herron, and James Ward BEHN Beebe, Ann. "'I Sent Over These Adventures': Women in The Female American and The Widow Ranter," WS, 45.7 (2016), 624–637. Ms. Beebe's discussion of the similarities between Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter (pub. 1690) and the anonymous The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767) largely serves to establish the growing importance of Behn's play and the continuing interest in finding a proper, literary home for the intriguing Female American. What it does not do is deliver on its promise to demonstrate a "compelling correspondence between Behn's female characters and Unca Eliza Winkfield." More rightly, it demonstrates how acts of thoughtful, detailed comparison between texts can generate correspondence even without evidence of direct lines of influence. Ms. Beebe concedes this latter point right away: "While the author of The Female American may not have read The Widow Ranter specifically, he or she is likely familiar with Restoration drama and Aphra Behn." Yet having acknowledged the greater likelihood of a familiarity with Restoration drama and with Aphra Behn by reputation (largely scandalous by 1767), she still organizes her argument around The Widow Ranter "serv[ing] as an inspiration for The Female American." This claim of direct inspiration rests on thin evidence throughout. A key point of comparison, for instance, is the novel's tragicomic plot and its generic hybridity, two features of Restoration drama in general. Discovering a quest for "voice" and "autonomy" for the female characters is likely enough for any text viewed through a feminist perspective. At the end of Ms. Beebe's argument, crossdressing emerges as a final example of what unites the characterization of these two works' eponymous heroines, The Widow Ranter and Unca Eliza—but crossdressing has long served as one of the most generic of subversive techniques for questioning patriarchal authority. Even Ms. Beebe's more interesting discussion of how each work employs humor to assert "woman's right to make her own financial and matrimonial decisions" suggests more differences than similarities, as Widow Ranter's "bawdy humor" contrasts with Unca Eliza's "sly humor." This essay makes a productive case for [End Page 1] the significance of colonial America as an imaginative context for women-centered narratives during the long eighteenth century. As Ms. Beebe notes, both "the novel and the play reference historical documents from colonial North America in order to authenticate and authorize the distinctly female stories at their centers," and each "imagines a feminist colonial utopia, however briefly, in which a woman's story is valued enough to be returned to England and shared with the public." These works may not share a direct relationship, but considering them together helps us to see how the contested, "unruly" spaces of an imagined new world can result in more fluid, hybrid, femalecentered narratives. ________ Evans, Mel. "Style and Chronology: A Stylometric Investigation of Aphra Behn's Dramatic Style and the Dating of The Young King," Lang&Lit, 27.2 (2018), 103–132. The Young King was staged in 1679 but not printed until early 1683 (entered, Michaelmas 1682). This alone attracts attention since Behn's plays were usually published within six months of production. Adding to the questions is Behn's dedication to Philaster; all of her other dedications were to identifiable persons. Further, Behn signs her dedication to Philaster not with initials or name, but with her spy name, Astrea. Finally, in her dedication, Behn raises still more questions by terming the play a "youthful sally of my Pen, this first Essay of my Infant-Poetry," adding that she waited to bring this play forward because she "feared reproach of being an American." Might The Young King have been written—or at least started—while she was in the New World in the early 1660s? Ms. Evans addresses this and related questions through stylometric analysis. Using databases of frequently used words, most frequent function words, and mid-frequency words (called zeta words), computers develop a signature "fingerprint," which differs from writer...

Getting Married to a Suspected Bisexual Man: A Silent Mode of HIV transmission among Married Women in Indonesia

A married woman is susceptible to contract HIV from her husband if he practices unsafe sex, especially with other men. Unsafe sexual practice (heterosexual and homosexual sex) are the major factors of significant increase of HIV in Indonesia for the last decade. The aim of this study is to reveal one woman's story about living with HIV. She contracted from her husband after he was unsafe sex with men.

The Female Martyrs of Agrippa d'Aubigné's "Les feux"

This article explores a unique portrait of women within Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les tragiques: those who died for their faith. Exploring the testimonies of the female martyrs commemorated in Book 4 of this epic poem, we highlight several themes of d'Aubigné's work—political, theological, and humanistic. Ultimately, considering these women's stories against those of their male counterparts, we assess differences in the rhetoric, prominence, and eminence of the female victims of "Les feux."

Female Refugees in Rural Germany: A Local Aid Agency's Efforts to Build on Women's Experiences and Needs

Female Refugees in Rural GermanyA Local Aid Agency's Efforts to Build on Women's Experiences and Needs Ina C. Seethaler (bio) On a rainy December morning in 2015, I walked across a parking lot in Wertheim, a small rural town in southwest Germany. Stuffed animals and children's books in hand, I was about to meet Walter Hörnig, one of the chairpersons of a local refugee aid agency that I had contacted while visiting family during my winter break. Like many other Germans, I wanted to do more than donate money and, in addition, offer hands-on-help welcoming refugees in my native community. I expected to be asked to sort through donated clothes. Instead, I received the opportunity to meet refugee families, to challenge public assumptions about refugees, and to reflect on displacement from a feminist perspective. The idea behind Walter's and my house visits that morning was for me to introduce myself to refugee families so that, over the next weeks, I could offer to return to the apartments into which they had moved as part of a re-settlement program to take kids on excursions or help with everyday tasks that demanded the assistance of a fluent German speaker. We visited three families that day. Rarely have I been welcomed into a home this warmly. Everywhere we went, we were offered tea and snacks and people insisted that we stay for lunch. Already on that first day, many refugees generously shared some of their experiences with me in a mix of English and rudimentary German. What touched me especially were the women's stories—mostly ignored by mass media busy worrying about Muslim men changing German "culture." One account stood out due to its seeming impossibility: Maya was five months pregnant when she walked across Hungary in winter with her husband and toddler.1 She was determined to do everything to keep her children safe. Zainah was "luckier"; she, her husband, and their two small children made it to a reception camp in Turkey, where her husband left them to continue the dangerous journey on his own. He was successful and able to fly Zainah and the children to Germany after one year. [End Page 167] On later trips to Germany I visited with more families and attended conversation sessions over coffee, community summer festivals, and other events. I would hear many more of these kinds of experiences that speak to refugee women's willpower. Too often, humanitarian organizations still perceive refugees as passive recipients of their aid. In fact, as Jane Freedman elaborates, problems in trying to "help" refugee women and asylum seekers often arise from representations of them as without agency. Due to such misperceptions, some aid organizations will not ask refugee women for their input and fail to appreciate their power.2 Yet in my conversations with refugee women, it became clear that they do not see themselves merely as victims but also as resources and change-makers, which makes it essential to include their input and voices in the design and assessment of relief programs for displaced people. Their stories defy gender norms regarding agency, family protection, and political activism; their experiences challenge our understandings of war and are hard to deal with on an emotional level; they demand accountability on the part of politicians, the media, and non-government organizations. And yet they often remain invisible due to their gender, economic status, citizenship status, and religious background. Because of their identities, refugee women in Germany live with varying and interrelated patterns and configurations of oppression. As their experiences are shaped by sexism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, an intersectional look at how they deal with displacement outside of refugee camps is indispensable. The social construction of gender causes differently gendered groups to experience displacement in diverse ways. Yet only in the past two decades has gender finally become a stronger focus in efforts to analyze forced migration and support those affected by it. But as Jane Freedman, Zeynep Kivilcim, and Nurcan Özgür Baklacioğlu elaborate, "while the UNHCR and other international organizations and NGOs have adopted gender mainstreaming as a policy commitment, in practice gender issues are...

<em>Little Women</em>, Made Small

Little Women, Made Small Laura M. Stevens I've never been a huge fan of Alcott. Looking back, I blame the children's version of Little Women that I read when I was nine. Yes, it was a children's version—gratuitous though that sounds—of a novel famously published for girls. The Little Women that I first read was part of a series of "Illustrated Classic Editions" published in the late 1970s by Moby Books.2 Printed on cheap pulp pages of four by five and a quarter inches—neatly sized for a child's hand—with brightly colored cover illustrations, these paperbacks epitomized accessibility and ease in their form, price, and content. They were about 250 pages long, with a simple, expressive, black-and-white illustration facing every page of text. Modestly priced—my copy of Little Women bears a cover price of $2.50—they could be found in grocery stores. A few were even included in McDonald's Happy Meals, which seems fitting: in their simplifying and sweetening of long, old stories weighed down by that hefty term, "classics," they were the literary equivalent of kid-friendly fast food, steaks and potatoes turned into burgers and fries. I loved the Moby Books as both stories and objects. They litter my memories of early reading, fitting somewhere between Nancy Drew mysteries and the problem novels of Paul Zindel, S. E. Hinton, and Judy Blume. For so many literary scenes—Queequeg's coffin, Tom Sawyer's fence—the image sealed in my mind is the picture I pored over in these books. Having been given charge of the children's section of the used bookstore my mother opened when I was nine, I granted these volumes their own shelf, where I lovingly arranged and rearranged them, sometimes stacking them like the toy blocks I was sure I had outgrown. Here's the rub, though: while I loved the Moby Books, I did not like the Moby version of Little Women. It was boring. It is easy now to see why: the abridgments worked beautifully for novels featuring adventure. One could cut out more discursive sections, like Crusoe's religious agonies or Ishmael's musings on whiteness, and end up with a nice, crisp narrative about surviving on an island or hunting a whale. Little Women's story is about emotions, relationships, maturation, desire. Such a story's impact on the reader inheres in its verbal texture. In the Moby version, gone is the tense complexity of Amy's and Jo's [End Page 95] reciprocal rage. Amy feels left out, she burns Jo's book, Jo shakes her, Amy falls through the ice, and Jo feels bad. Who cares? my younger self asked, before I turned to more exciting fare like The Three Musketeers. Gone is this chapter's sensitive portrayal of female fury, including Marmee's confession of her daily anger. Gone is the dense tangle of feelings that bind siblings together. Gone is Alcott's story. Finding the unabridged Little Women later in life felt like uncovering a scandal. How had this story been taken from me? The answer is that condensing it erased its pleasures. How does women's writing disappear, how is it dismissed? If Alcott provides any example, perhaps problems first arise when a woman's writing is made too small. [End Page 96] Laura M. Stevens University of Tulsa Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

Little Women , Made Small

Little Women, Made Small Laura M. Stevens I've never been a huge fan of Alcott. Looking back, I blame the children's version of Little Women that I read when I was nine. Yes, it was a children's version—gratuitous though that sounds—of a novel famously published for girls. The Little Women that I first read was part of a series of "Illustrated Classic Editions" published in the late 1970s by Moby Books.2 Printed on cheap pulp pages of four by five and a quarter inches—neatly sized for a child's hand—with brightly colored cover illustrations, these paperbacks epitomized accessibility and ease in their form, price, and content. They were about 250 pages long, with a simple, expressive, black-and-white illustration facing every page of text. Modestly priced—my copy of Little Women bears a cover price of $2.50—they could be found in grocery stores. A few were even included in McDonald's Happy Meals, which seems fitting: in their simplifying and sweetening of long, old stories weighed down by that hefty term, "classics," they were the literary equivalent of kid-friendly fast food, steaks and potatoes turned into burgers and fries. I loved the Moby Books as both stories and objects. They litter my memories of early reading, fitting somewhere between Nancy Drew mysteries and the problem novels of Paul Zindel, S. E. Hinton, and Judy Blume. For so many literary scenes—Queequeg's coffin, Tom Sawyer's fence—the image sealed in my mind is the picture I pored over in these books. Having been given charge of the children's section of the used bookstore my mother opened when I was nine, I granted these volumes their own shelf, where I lovingly arranged and rearranged them, sometimes stacking them like the toy blocks I was sure I had outgrown. Here's the rub, though: while I loved the Moby Books, I did not like the Moby version of Little Women. It was boring. It is easy now to see why: the abridgments worked beautifully for novels featuring adventure. One could cut out more discursive sections, like Crusoe's religious agonies or Ishmael's musings on whiteness, and end up with a nice, crisp narrative about surviving on an island or hunting a whale. Little Women's story is about emotions, relationships, maturation, desire. Such a story's impact on the reader inheres in its verbal texture. In the Moby version, gone is the tense complexity of Amy's and Jo's [End Page 95] reciprocal rage. Amy feels left out, she burns Jo's book, Jo shakes her, Amy falls through the ice, and Jo feels bad. Who cares? my younger self asked, before I turned to more exciting fare like The Three Musketeers. Gone is this chapter's sensitive portrayal of female fury, including Marmee's confession of her daily anger. Gone is the dense tangle of feelings that bind siblings together. Gone is Alcott's story. Finding the unabridged Little Women later in life felt like uncovering a scandal. How had this story been taken from me? The answer is that condensing it erased its pleasures. How does women's writing disappear, how is it dismissed? If Alcott provides any example, perhaps problems first arise when a woman's writing is made too small. [End Page 96] Laura M. Stevens University of Tulsa Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

Single Mothers in Contemporary Japan: Motherhood, Class, and Repro ductive Practice by Aya Ezawa

Reviewed by: Single Mothers in Contemporary Japan: Motherhood, Class, and Repro ductive Practice by Aya Ezawa Yoko Yamamoto (bio) Single Mothers in Contemporary Japan: Motherhood, Class, and Repro ductive Practice. By Aya Ezawa. Lexington Books, Lanham MD, 2016. xxvi, 127 pages. $84.00, cloth; $78.50, E-book. Mothers have been one of the central topics in studies on Japanese families and education. Since the 1970s, middle-class to upper-middle-class Japanese mothers, in their role as "professional housewives," have enjoyed a reputation as a critical agent contributing to family members' well-being and children's healthy and successful development. Over the last few decades, more studies have demonstrated diverse forms of motherhood and mothering, especially by examining working-class mothers whose major responsibilities include contributing to family finances. Nevertheless, studies on Japanese mothers in poverty as well as those outside marital status are still scarce, particularly in English-language literature. The rate of single mothers is relatively low in Japan. However, about 60 per cent of single mothers in Japan live in poverty (p. xii), which is significantly higher than the proportion in other developed nations, even though the majority of them work. Thus, studies on single mothers offer insights into persisting gender hierarchies and inequality that lead to structural and psychological barriers to women in Japan. In Single Mothers in Contemporary Japan: Motherhood, Class, and Reproductive Practice, Aya Ezawa skillfully depicts the "gendered meanings of social class" (p. xii) through her analyses of single mothers' life trajectories, experiences, and perspectives as mothers and working women. Ezawa delves into the variations and diversities among single mothers, especially across generations and social classes, in addition to commonalities in their experiences related to mothering. Her research method focuses on qualitative analyses of life-history interviews with 59 single mothers with preschool-aged children in Tokyo that were collected from 1998 to 2000. In 2004 and 2005, she conducted follow-up interviews with some of the original women and additional mothers with older children. Her research also included ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation at events and meetings providing support for single mothers. She intentionally recruited single mothers who were born in different generations, ranging from the 1950s to the 1970s. In so doing, she was able to capture shifting ideals of family and motherhood in a rapidly changing social and economic environment that powerfully shaped Japanese women's construction of aspirations and life decisions. [End Page 182] Unlike earlier periods when marriage was viewed in relation to patriarchy and women's subordination, during Japan's economic growth period marriage and family consisting of a salaryman husband and a stay-at-home wife and mother became a symbol of a happy life and the norm of the middle class. Around this time, many people, including women, started to perceive stay-at-home mothers as a symbol of status and achievement for women. Ezawa argues that the challenges faced by single mothers came not only from economic conditions and practical issues such as time management and living conditions but also from negotiations of maternal identities and roles. Single mothers, most of whom worked at low-paying jobs, struggled to provide what, in their minds, ideal and happy families had, such as financial stability (provided by a father) and cultural capital (fostered at home). The book consists of five chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion. After describing the overview of this study and the research method in the introduction, chapter 1 provides careful literature reviews on shifts in family systems during the postwar era and on women's life courses, along with the development of professional housewife ideals. This section also describes social policy, economic status, and employment opportunities for single mothers. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on women's life stories based on analysis of the interviews, including their childhood experiences and socialization processes in the prebubble and bubble generations, respectively. Chapters 4 and 5 move on to elaborate women's experiences, views, and attitudes toward childrearing and negotiations of identities as single mothers. These chapters also highlight the challenges facing single mothers, such as structural discrimination and work-life balance. Sometimes, I found it difficult to keep track of some...

German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust: Complicity and Gender in the Second World War by Elisabeth Krimmer

Reviewed by: German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust: Complicity and Gender in the Second World War by Elisabeth Krimmer Christine Nugent (bio) German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust: Complicity and Gender in the Second World War Elisabeth Krimmer Cambridge UP, 2018, v + 288 pp. ISBN 978-1108472821, $105.00 hardcover. In the vast and still growing literature on National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, women's war stories have until recently been underrepresented or altogether absent. Women have been virtually invisible in their active participation and implication in war and genocide, but also as sufferers of crimes committed against them, in their roles as rape victims, refugees or expellees, and camp inmates. Elisabeth Krimmer argues that a full understanding of modern war, of suffering and perpetration, but also of the complicity of bystanders, is impossible without the inclusion of women's war experiences. German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust contributes significantly to filling this gap by examining a large body of women's life writing, including diaries, memoirs, "docunovels," and autobiographically inspired novels mostly by non-Jewish German women bystanders. According to Krimmer, Professor of German at UC Davis, these texts reveal complicity with the National Socialist regime, even if their authors also suffered through the war. That complicity manifests itself through ruptured narratives, conceptual and visual blind spots, and silences. Common features are omissions, denial, inconsistencies, internal contradictions, non sequiturs, the inability to form a coherent narrative of the self or integrate disparate facts into the dominant storyline, and a failing sense of reality. Krimmer coins the term "grammar of complicity" as shorthand for these narrative features (3, 239). Just as grammatical conventions allow communication through language, the [End Page 903] grammar of complicity exposes why and how women became complicit with the Nazi regime and kept it alive through various forms of passive support (12). The corpus of analyzed texts is more diverse than comparable studies and includes narratives by German army auxiliaries, military nurses, refugees, and rape victims. Notably, Krimmer also includes three texts by men: Red Army soldier Wladimir Gelfand's diary, a poem by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Lev Kopelev's memoir, which all deal with representations of rape. Their inclusion addresses the dilemma of stories of war-time rape: if the victim's suffering is omitted or downplayed, the stories perpetuate the silence and trauma associated with the crime of rape; if the issue of complicity inherent in the stories is neglected, they erase the historical context in which the rape occurred in the first place and do injustice to the victims of National Socialism (20, 117). The inclusion of writings by Jewish German women also distinguishes this work from others that focus exclusively on members of the perpetrator society or on victims' voices. While Krimmer exposes structures of complicity in the writings of non-Jewish German women, she includes texts by women designated as "Other" and excluded from Hitler's so-called community of the people (Volksgemeinschaft) to allow a view from the outside in. Yet Krimmer is careful to note that she does not argue for a national community of all victims of Nazism that includes both non-persecuted and persecuted Germans (17). The book is organized in five chapters, each beginning with a discussion of the relevant historical context and discursive framework, and followed by interpretation of select works. Iconic texts such as Ilse Schmidt's Die Mitläuferin: Erinnerungen einer Wehrmachtsangehörigen, Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, and Ruth Klüger's weiter leben are included alongside largely unknown narratives such as Hildegard Gartmann's Blitzmädchen, Gabi Köpp's Why Was I a Girl? The Trauma of a Flight 1945, and Erika Morgenstern's Surviving Was More Difficult Than Dying. Each of the first four chapters is devoted to one distinct element of the grammar of complicity: narrative ruptures, conceptual and visual blind spots, silences, and parallel stories, all of which Krimmer suggests may be understood, in the words of Gabriele Schwab, as "defensive reactions against the knowledge of belonging to a nation of perpetrators" (qtd. in Krimmer 18; Schwab 95). The fifth chapter presents a view of non-Jewish German...

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...

Exhibition Research and Findings: The Rare Privilege of Medicine

On 8 March 2018, the Geoffrey Kaye Museum of Anaesthetic History launched its latest exhibition in an online format, The Rare Privilege of Medicine: Women Anaesthetists in Australia and New Zealand. The launch was deliberately timed to coincide with International Women's Day which carried the theme of “Press for Progress.” These women's stories reveal them to have been champions for progress, as well as having the potential to be inspirational beacons of progress for the future, thereby fitting easily into the theme.This article highlights the stories of Dr. Janet Greig and Dr. Lily Jörgensen, two women featured within the exhibition. Other women are also represented, as their stories provide some degree of context to the two featured women, even though there is no evidence to suggest that they did significant work in anesthesia practice. However, this article should not be considered biographical in nature. Instead, it operates within a distinct theoretical perspective, examining the way in which historians research and interpret the past. It also considers the exhibition research, and the exhibition itself, to be a launch point for more nuanced work in this area.

The Impact of Stuttering on Development of Self-Identity, Relationships, and Quality of Life in Women Who Stutter.

The experiences of women who stutter have been underresearched. Clinicians have little guidance from the research literature on issues specific to women who stutter and are likely to have less clinical contact with this group than with men who stutter because of the higher prevalence of stuttering in men. This study explored the experiences of a small group of women who stutter with a particular focus on what the main current issues are and how gender may have influenced experiences with stuttering. This qualitative study involved recruitment of 9 women who stutter (aged 35-80 years) through a support network of people who stutter in Western Australia. All the women had received some form of speech therapy for stuttering, and they came from diverse cultural backgrounds. Individual, semistructured interviews were conducted, recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Data were managed with NVivo 10, and thematic analysis was used to identify recurring themes across the data. Data were coded independently by the researchers and refined through group discussion. Participants also completed the Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering. A core theme of "gendered sense of self in society" emerged from the data. This related to 3 broad themes: perceptions of self that were primarily negative, the impact of stuttering on relationships and social connection with others (relationships with family, peers, colleagues, and intimate partners), and the management of stuttering (internal coping, motivations, and experiences with external support). Stuttering has a pervasive impact on all aspects of women's lives and affects how they view themselves, their relationships, their career potential, and their perceptions of how others view them in society. The women interviewed in this study often had negative self-perceptions and felt that their quality of life had been impacted by their stuttering. However, the women's stories and experiences of stuttering were shaped by a broader context of perceived sociocultural expectations of females in society. Strong verbal communication was highlighted as a crucial factor in developing identity and forming relationships. This study highlights the need to be aware of the experiences of, and issues facing, women who stutter for clinicians to be more equipped, focused, and successful in their stuttering interventions for women.

Coverage of Abortion in Select U.S. Newspapers.

News coverage can shape public understanding of policy issues in important ways. In the last decade, many new state-level abortion restrictions have been passed, often based on claims about the safety of abortion care, yet little is known about recent news coverage of abortion. This study analyzes a sample of news on abortion in the United States and explores the implications for reproductive health policymakers, practitioners, and advocates. We analyzed a sample of news and opinion articles containing the term "abortion" published in three major U.S. newspaper sources in 2013 and 2016. The total sample was 783 unique pieces. We coded for story topics, references to fetal personhood, women's stories, and basic abortion facts. Three trained coders conducted the coding, with intercoder reliability rates ranging from 0.777 to 1.0. Most of the time abortion appears in the news, it is merely mentioned, rather than discussed substantively. Abortion is covered as a political issue more than a health issue. The personal experiences of people who get abortions are present in only 4% of the sample, and language personifying the fetus appears more often than women's abortion stories. State abortion restrictions are newsworthy, yet basic facts on the commonality and safety of abortion are virtually absent. This study suggests that the news does not support public understanding of abortion as a common, safe part of reproductive health care. Such framing may undermine public support for policies that protect access to this common health care service.

Néonaticides multiples ou en série : quelles spécificités ?

IntroductionNeonaticide cases are scarce in industrial countries and even more so the repetition of such an option during a woman's delivery stories. This phenomenon is fascinating and fuels unprecedented media campaigns of some cases when a woman is prosecuted for the murder of several of her children. MethodA press review for the years 1989–2017 allowed collecting more than 2400 articles concerning 393 suspected neonaticides perpetrated during the 1990–2015 period among which 74 (+2 attempts) were multiple or serial, the 25+2 mothers having killed or left to die two to eight newborns. ResultsThese women were on average older (32.9 versus 27) compared to those having killed only one newborn because they had in many cases yet other living children. Their ages at the first pregnancies or at the first neonaticides allowed to relativize this data (respectively 23.2 and 28.9). They were more often partnered or married and had a complicated link to their body willing to become pregnant but not to have children. Only one mother was considered as having experienced a denial of pregnancy, the others having confessed that they recognized at least one of their pregnancies. The concerned children were not included in a parental project, because the mothers or their partners had already decided beforehand against having children or having more than a number of children. Except in one case, the psychiatric assessments concluded that there was no abolition of the discernment, but for some of the mothers a diminished mental capacity. The court decisions concerning these mothers reflected the consideration of recidivism, even if not in a legal sense, as they were condemned to heavier sentences than the mothers having killed only one child (10.48 years in prison versus 5.8). ConclusionThis analysis highlights the characteristics of women having killed two or more of their neonates and shows the challenge for the courts in understanding the situations having conducted the mothers to multiply such acts.

Marguerite d’Auge, Renée Burlamacchi, and Jeanne du Laurens : Sin and Salvation in Early Modern France: Three Women’s Stories. Colette Winn, ed. Nicholas Van Handel, trans.

<i>Marguerite d’Auge, Renée Burlamacchi, and Jeanne du Laurens : Sin and Salvation in Early Modern France: Three Women’s Stories</i>. Colette Winn, ed. Nicholas Van Handel, trans.